(Arthur Bradley, Paul Fletcher) The Politics To Co

The Politics to Come
Continuum Studies in Religion and Political Culture

Series Editors: Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl, The University of
Manchester, UK
Titles in this series look specifically at the relationship between religion and
political culture – attitudes towards government and lifestyle, intrinsically
informed and confronted by religion – taking into account a broad range of
religious perspectives.
The New Visibility of Religion, Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl

A Grammar of the Common Good, Patrick Riordan
Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope, Stephen Skrimshire
Power, Modernity and the Messianic
Edited by
Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, 2010
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recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-184-706-315-1 (Hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The politics to come : power, modernity, and the Messianic/edited by
Paul Fetcher and Arthur Bradley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-315-1 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-84706-315-2 (hardcover)
1. Religion and politics. 2. Messiah. 3. Philosophy, Modern.
4. Political science--Philosophy. I. Fletcher, Paul. II. Bradley, Arthur.
III. Title.
BL65.P7P6425 2010
201’.72–dc22 2009028168
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
For May
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction: The Politics to Come: A History of Futurity 1

Part One: Promises

Chapter 1: The Messianic Now: A Secular Response 15
Richard Beardsworth
Chapter 2: Politics without the Messianic or a ‘Messianic without
Messianism’?: A Response to Richard Beardsworth 26
Adam Thurschwell
Chapter 3: A Brief Response to Adam Thurschwell’s ‘Politics without
the Messianic or a “Messianic without Messianism”?’ 36
Richard Beardsworth
Part Two: Genealogies

Chapter 4: Messianic Deposition: Representation and
the Flight of the Gods 47
Laurence Paul Hemming
Chapter 5: Towards Perpetual Revolution: Kant on Freedom and Authority 57
Paul Fletcher
Chapter 6: Hegel’s Messianic Reasoning and its Theological Politics 78
Graham Ward
Chapter 7: Before the Anti-Christ is Revealed: On the Katechontic
Structure of Messianic Time 98
Michael Hoelzl
Chapter 8: The Weakness of Our ‘Messianic Power’: Kristeva on Sacrifice 111
Pamela Sue Anderson
Part Three: Futures

Chapter 9: The Holocaust and the Messianic 131
Robert Eaglestone
viii Contents
Chapter 10: Economies of Promise: On Caesar and Christ 141

Philip Goodchild
Chapter 11: ‘Something Unique is Afoot in Europe’:
Derrida Reading Kant 161
Joanna Hodge
Chapter 12: The Theocracy to Come: Deconstruction,
Autoimmunity, Islam 174
Arthur Bradley
Chapter 13: Violences of the Messianic 191
Michael Dillon
Bibliography 208
Index 221
Acknowledgements
This collection of essays emerges out of an international symposium, The

Messianic Now: Politics, Religion and Culture, which was held at Lancaster Univer-
sity in July 2007. I am very grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at
Lancaster University and to the Journal of Cultural Research (Taylor & Francis),
without whose support the event could never have taken place, and to all the
participants (many of whom are represented herein) for making it such a
memorable and inspiring occasion.
I would also like to thank the group of friends who helped and supported
Paul and me throughout this whole process: Mick Dillon, Simon Bainbridge,
Fred Botting, Bogdan Costea, Andy Dawson, Mike Greaney, Paolo Palladino,
Lindsey Moore, Jonathan Mumby, Richard Rushton, Andy Tate and Scott
Wilson. Particular thanks go to Mick, whose idea it was in the first place, and
who saw it all the way through to the end in very sad circumstances. My grati-
tude also goes to Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl, who edit the Religion and
Politics series, for commissioning the volume; to Tom Crick at Continuum for
his patience and understanding through its difficult gestation, and, particu-
larly, to Tom Grimwood and Abir Hamdar who provided invaluable editorial
assistance. Finally, Paul and I could not have begun this project without the
love and support of our partners, Abir Hamdar and Deborah Sutton, and my
deepest gratitude goes to them.
In July 2008, when this volume was being prepared, my friend and co-editor
Paul Fletcher died suddenly and very prematurely. He left behind his partner
Debs and his baby daughter May. It is with both sorrow and pride, then, that I
am able to present his final work to the reader. As everyone connected with the
current volume can testify, Paul was a brilliant scholar, an inspirational teacher
and collaborator and a wonderful friend. We miss him very much. This book – a
collection of essays about the possibility of a better future – is dedicated with
love to Paul and Debs’ daughter, May Naz Fletcher.
Arthur Bradley
9 June 2009
Notes on Contributors
Pamela Sue Anderson is Reader in Philosophy of Religion, University of Oxford,

and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. She has
published Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will (1993); A Feminist Philosophy of
Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (1998); Feminist Philosophy of
Religion: Critical Readings (co-edited with Beverley Clack) (2004), and edited
New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Contestations and Transcendence Incar-
nate (2009). She has also published articles on the philosophy of Kant, Ricoeur,
Irigaray and Le Doeuff and is currently working on ‘Goodness (God) and
Gender: A Thoughtful Love of Life’.
Richard Beardsworth is Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the
Research Institute in the Division of International Politics, Economics and Pub-
lic Policy, the American University of Paris. He works in the domains of interna-
tional political theory and international public policy, examining links between
political philosophy and world politics and between the latter and policy forma-
tion at the global level. Previous interests lay in the political dimension of criti-
cal philosophy with focus on the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Beardsworth was founder and general editor of the journal Tekhnema: Journal of
Philosophy and Technology from 1993–2001. His books include Derrida and the
Political (1996) and Nietzsche (1997). He is presently finishing a book on the
political philosophy of Cosmopolitanism and International Relations theory.
Arthur Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies at Lancaster
University. He is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy
(2004); Derrida’s Of Grammatology: A Philosophical Guide (2008) and has co-
edited (with Paul Fletcher) a special double issue of The Journal of Cultural
Research entitled The Messianic Now (Volume 13: 3–4, 2009). He has recently
published (with Andrew Tate) a monograph entitled The New Atheist Novel:
Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (2010).
Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at Lancaster University. Widely published
in international political theory, his latest books include Foucault on Security
Politics and War (2007 co-edited by Andrew Neal) and The Liberal Way of War
(2009, co-authored with Julian Reid). He is currently finishing two manuscripts:
‘Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: A Biopolitical Analytics of Finitude’
and ‘Deconstructing International Politics’. He is also co-editor of The Journal
for Cultural Research.
Notes on Contributors xi
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at

Royal Holloway, University of London, and Director of the Holocaust Research
Centre there. He is the author of four books including Ethical Criticism (1997),
Doing English (3rd edn. 2009) and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004) and
the editor or co-editor of four books including Derrida’s Legacies (2007) and
J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (2009). He has published articles on many
contemporary philosophers and writers and on a range of issues in philosophy,
literary theory and historiography. His work has been translated into five
languages. He is the Series Editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers.
Paul Fletcher (1965–2008) was Lecturer in Religious Studies at Lancaster Uni-
versity. He is the author of Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology
(2009) and co-editor (with Arthur Bradley) of a special double issue of The
Journal of Cultural Research entitled The Messianic Now (Volume 13: 3–4, 2009).
Philip Goodchild is Professor of Religion and Philosophy in the Department of
Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. He is the
author of Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (1996); Deleuze and Guattari:
An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (1996); Capitalism and Religion: The Price of
Piety (2002) and Theology of Money (2007; 2009). He is also co-editor of the New
Slant Book Series on Religion, Politics and Ontology with Duke University
Press.
Laurence Paul Hemming is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced
Studies, Lancaster University, having been formerly Dean of Research for one
of the smaller colleges of London University. He is the author of Heidegger’s
Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (2002) and Postmodernity’s Transcending:
Devaluing God (2005). He has published widely on the intersection between the
theological and philosophical, and on the work of Martin Heidegger.
Joanna Hodge works on transcendental philosophy, its past and its future. She
has published monographs on the work of Martin Heidegger – Heidegger and
Ethics (1995) – and on Jacques Derrida, Derrida on Time (2007). Since 2000, she
has been Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her
current major project is a Small History of Affectivity which explores Kant,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Levinas and Derrida.
Michael Hoelzl is Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at the University of
Manchester. His areas of interest are continental philosophy, philosophy of
right and theological anthropology. His recent publications include The New
Visibility of Religion (2008) and an annotated translation of Carl Schmitt’s
Political Theology II (2008).
Adam Thurschwell is currently General Counsel for the Office of Military
Commissions – Defense in the United States Department of Defense, where he
assists in the defense of individuals charged in military commissions at the
Guantanamo Bay Navy Base. Prior to that, he was a Visiting Professor of Law at
xii Notes on Contributors
Georgetown University Law Center and American University – Washington

College of Law, and an Associate Professor of Law at Cleveland State University –
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. While teaching, he has also represented
defendants and consulted in numerous capital prosecutions, including the
defense of Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City Bombing case. He writes in the
areas of continental philosophy, capital punishment, and law and literature.
Graham Ward is Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics in the Depart-
ment of Religion and Theology at the University of Manchester. He is the
author of many books on theology, philosophy of religion and continental
philosophy including: Cities of God (2000); True Religion (2003); Christ and
Culture (2005) and, most recently, The Politics of Discipleship (2008).
Introduction
The Politics to Come:

A History of Futurity
Lancaster University
Today everything is theology, except what the theologians declare to be such.

– Carl Schmitt1
In his enigmatic fragment on the advent of the messiah, Franz Kafka forcefully
reminds us of the paradox that is messianic time. It is a time that seems incon-
gruent when considered from the perspective of our accumulated time of
sequential transience, the time in which the measure of things is enveloped
within the very possibility of arranging past, present and future. For Kafka,
‘The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only
on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very
last.’2 The messianic event thus seems to possess a quality that cannot be cap-
tured in the received categories and idioms of philosophical, theological and
socio-political discourses. This event instead confronts us with a paradox in
both the ordinary and the technical sense of that term: a tenet that questions
the doxa or received opinion. If we know that the messiah is coming, in other
words, we cannot know when, where, how and why he will come: the messianic
advent confounds every horizon of expectation we may have. Such may be why
Kafka thinks that – even on the very day of his arrival – the messiah remains
somehow ‘to come’.
It is revealing that we can also find something of Kafka’s wary messianism –
in which any claims to the empirical manifestation of the phenomenon must
be approached with utmost suspicion – in the entry entitled ‘Messiah’ in
Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique. As is well known, Voltaire uses the bulk of
this piece to present an uncompromising analysis of the historical demise of
‘false’ messiahs and messianic movements: the messiah who actually shows up
is, once again, no messiah at all. To Voltaire’s withering gaze, it was Sabbatai
Zevi who made the most remarkable contribution to this rather exclusive call-
ing or occupation: he so ‘discredited the profession of false messiah that Zevi
is the last to have appeared’.3 The movement of Sabbatianism began just prior
to the 1650s4 and was, as a consequence, contemporaneous with the explosion
2 The Politics to Come
of popular millenarian expectation in England.5 This radical, early-modern

messianic explosion marked (as Voltaire recognizes) the climax and subse-
quent demise of messianic expectation as a political project, in Europe at least.
If modernity no longer seemed to have any need of a messiah, though, the
same was not necessarily true for messianic time. In a very real sense, we might
argue that the translation of the messianic imperatives of Judaism and
Christianity into the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth century – bridged
by the publication of the first edition of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique in
1764 – was dependent on an innovative and singularly modern species of its
genus eschatology.
According to Jacob Taubes, the origin of this new form of secular eschatology
can be found in the transfiguration of the Joachimite arrangement of the trini-
tarian doctrine as a temporal phenomenon into the ‘philosophical chiliasm’ evi-
dent in Lessing’s ‘The Education of the Human Race’.6 It is this philosophical
transformation of theological doctrine – together with Hegel’s historicization
of the Absolute – which, Taubes argues, gives birth to the secularized messian-
isms of modernity: Marxism is only the most obvious offspring of that futural
dynamic in which the ‘“intellectual Kingdom” (ecclesia spiritualis)’ would be
realized on earth (Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 86). To be sure, modernity
famously expels Judaeo-Christian messianism to the margins of thought – by
variously labelling it dogma, superstition, fantaticism, false consciousness or
ressentiment – but it does so precisely by taking as its own the political and tempo-
ral dynamism of eschatology. On the one hand, modernity secularizes eschato-
logy: the time of the end is naturalized into little more than a historical process
of completion or fulfilment which culminates in, say, the Communist state or,
today, neo-liberal, post-ideological modernity. On the other, modernity sacral-
izes historical power: specific manifestations of temporal power – the proletariat
or the free market – acquire divine sanction as the agent or telos of that histo-
rical process. In the end, the modern saeculum or age itself becomes deified: it
is the end of time realized within time, here, now.7
However, this raises the critical question of what precisely defines our own
messianic moment, and this increasingly urgent task is what lies behind the
current volume. It is something of a cliché, but nonetheless true, that the fun-
damental difference between the symbolic structures of the majority of the
world’s major religious traditions and a democratic order concerns the sanc-
tion of authority. Accordingly, the vast bulk of public discourses regarding the
relationship between religion and politics – regardless of whether they are reli-
gious, political, legal or academic – are characterized by a range of concerns
that acquire their legitimacy from the discourse of liberal modernity. For secu-
lar critics of religious militancy (especially when such militancy is Islamic), this
legitimization takes the form of a robust defence of the values, freedoms and
rights of liberal democratic institutions. Just as secularism understands itself as
a bulwark against the erosion of liberal democracy, so advocates of cultural
and religious pluralism are equally inclined to stress the importance and
Introduction: The Politics to Come 3
significance of those same values, freedoms and rights in the constitution and
sustenance of a truly poly-cultural and multi-faith society – whether local or
global. If the actors change, and the contexts vary, the central presupposition
always remains the same: it is only upon the ground established by liberal modernity
that any resolution to the problem of contemporary religious expression can be produced
or secured. In the light of the messianic trajectory we have just been sketching,
however, it quickly becomes clear that this political consensus contains a singu-
lar blind spot: the metaphysical nature of the presuppositions that inform the
immanent ordering of liberalism itself go unquestioned.
To our eyes, The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic represents an
attempt to set in motion just this urgent historical, political and philosophical
interrogation of the theologico-political condition of liberal modernity. It seeks
to build upon, and feed back into, a contemporary movement in radical political
philosophy which seeks to found an emancipatory politics – a ‘Politics to Come’
no less – on the possibilities afforded by messianic time. As we have already
begun to see, there is nothing remotely new about philosophers appealing,
whether positively or negatively, to the messianic as a political resource: Voltaire,
Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Scholem, Rosenzweig,
Cohen, Levinas and Taubes are only the most obvious names that belong to this
long and distinguished history. Yet, at the same time, it is possible to detect what,
with apologies to Kant, we might call a newly arisen ‘messianic tone’ within con-
temporary thought.8 For Jacques Derrida, to take only the most prominent
recent example, it is clear that the messianic represents the last – and perhaps
even the best – means of keeping open a relation to an absolute, unforeseeable
future in the face of every political, theological or economic attempt to foreclose
upon that future: what he calls a ‘messianism without messianism’ becomes the
best way of articulating ‘the “yes” to the arrivante(e), the “come” to the future that
cannot be anticipated’.9 If Derrida’s own messianic turn arguably raises as many
questions as it answers – can we even speak of a messianic without a messiah? –
what is clear is that this affirmation of an absolute future in no way represents a
simple rejection of the present: deconstruction’s messianic turn was, on the con-
trary, a splendidly untimely intervention at the very time and place – post-1989
Europe – of neo-liberal modernity’s apparent triumph as the best of all possible
worlds. Such an affirmation of absolute futurity – whose only relation to the pres-
ent is one of absolute interruption – exposes the historical contingency of every
form of political or philosophical organization by insisting, with Kafka, that we
have not yet arrived at the very last day. In this sense, Derrida’s own wary messi-
anism might best be seen as an absolutely timely, current and ongoing critique
of neo-liberal modernity’s presumption to sacralize itself.
In many ways, Derrida’s deconstruction remains the single most influential
contemporary philosophy of the messianic – and it is certainly the one with
which the vast majority of contributors to this collection feel obliged to engage –
but the ‘messianic turn’ has arguably only intensified in the years since Specters of
Marx. To be sure, Giorgio Agamben is the next indispensable point of reference
here: Agamben sees messianic time as a means of criticizing the sovereign

order – which reaches its apotheosis in the normalization of the state of excep-
tion and the politicization of bare life – in the name of a people or community
‘to come’ whose belonging-together presupposes no common identity, still less
a molecular or biological substance, so much as a shared – if always singular –
potentiality.10 However, it is also striking that the messianic has sparked the inter-
est of a group of thinkers who are deeply antagonistic not simply to ‘religion’ or
‘theology’ per se but to the phenomenological tradition in which it is still invari-
ably received. It is not, of course, that Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and their follow-
ers embrace the ‘messianic turn’ within contemporary thought – quite the contrary
– but rather that their critique of the prevailing conditions of contemporary
thought still feels it necessary to take the form of a counter-reading of the messi-
anic tradition: we can only resist messianism by affirming its radical – even per-
verse – core.11 According to Badiou, the problem with Levinas, Derrida and their
phenomenological successors is that the messianic other to which they appeal is
either too ‘other’ or never quite ‘other’ enough: the ethical is either inflated
into a quasi-theological piety – the absolute alterity of the Judaeo-Christian God
– or collapses into a flaccid liberal toleration of difference, individuality and so
on.12 For Badiou, what enables us to critique this phenomenological species of
messianism is not simply the mathematical ontology of Being and Event, though,
but a new reading of Pauline messianism itself: Paul’s subjective fidelity to the
event of Christ’s resurrection becomes the basis – not for yet another affirmation
of absolute alterity – but for a new universal truth that collapses the difference
between Judaic Law and Greek Logos.13 Just as Badiou counters Levinas’s messi-
anic alterity with a messianic universality, so Slavoj Žižek seeks to resist Derrida’s
messianic futurity by celebrating the revolutionary urgency of Pauline messia-
nism. If Žižek is disdainful of what he sees as the vacuous piety of Derrida’s
appeals to an empty, infinitely deferred messianic arrival, his critique takes the
form of a renewed insistence upon the unconditional urgency of the messianic
moment. In Žižek’s account, what defines Pauline messianism is that the
expected messiah has already arrived – we are already redeemed – even if the full
implications of that redemption have not yet unfolded.
What does it mean, then, to speak of ‘a Politics to Come’ today? Where does it
come from? And why has it emerged now? Is it – to be crude – a step backwards
into premodern theological dogma? Is it – equally crudely – the final nail in
the coffin of an exhausted Enlightenment utopianism or communism? Or
could this wary messianism – which despite every attempt to assimilate it still
remains somehow stubbornly irreducible to the sovereign order of neo-liberal
modernity – perhaps represent a way of thinking the theologico-political
condition of modernity otherwise? In The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the
Messianic, an international and multidisciplinary set of contributors – includ-

ing philosophers, theologians, political theorists, literary and cultural critics –
come together to put the political promise of the messianic to the test.
First, The Politics to Come seeks to clear the ground for debate by determining
precisely what is at stake – historically, conceptually and politically – in the ques-
tion of the messianic. What – if anything – does the messianic promise? To start
with, Richard Beardsworth offers a trenchant critique of the promise of the mes-
sianic via a reading of Jacques Derrida’s ‘messianism without messianism’.
According to Beardsworth, Derrida’s messianism – and by extension, perhaps,
the messianic turn within contemporary French thought more generally – risks
prematurely foreclosing upon the very possibility of an absolute future it seeks
to open up. If Beardsworth certainly acknowledges the force of Derrida’s attempt
to articulate a point of radical alterity as the condition of (im-)possibility of all
political formation, he questions the decision to think this alterity messianically:
Derrida’s ‘messianism without messianism’ remains too formal in structure, too
complicit with an idealist logic of identity and ultimately too remote from histor-
ical actuality to constitute an effective political intervention against either neo-
liberal capitalism or religious fundamentalism. For Beardsworth, Derrida’s
messianic Politics to Come remain stuck within the theologico-political determi-
nations they seek to contest: what is required are not yet more messianisms but
new forms of rational thinking that are capable of transforming, rather than
merely recapitulating, the sovereign political order.
Adam Thurschwell offers an equally powerful defence of the political possi-
bilities afforded by the messianic turn in his critique of Beardsworth. It is not
that he contests Beardsworth’s basic description of Derrida’s ‘messianism with-
out messianism’ – formal, historically abstract and entirely devoid of political
content – but he remains much more sanguine about the positive political pos-
sibilities this (empty) space affords us. For Thurschwell, what ‘the messianic’
names is the absolute and infinite ethical injunction to do justice to the other
that exceeds every normative ethical or political decision or calculus. If this eth-
ical demand inspires every politics to thought and action in the first place, it
does not licence and cannot be represented by, any juridical, economic or poli-
tical form of sovereignty. Such, then, would appear to be the critical difference
between Beardsworth and Thurschwell and, more generally, between two
versions of the Politics to Come: the former sees the messianic as shutting down
the possibility of effective political engagement in the actual whereas the latter
sees the messianic as the space where the political, endlessly, begins (again). In
this exchange – between theologico-philosophical form and material content;
between political determinacy and indeterminacy; between the rival and com-
peting demands of tradition, actuality and futurity – we begin to see a debate
taking shape which is picked up, in different ways and in different contexts, by
the rest of the contributors to the collection.
Secondly, the collection offers what we might call a genealogy of the Politics to
Come that traces its emergence through a series of defining moments in the
theologico-political formation of liberal secular modernity. What are the histor-

ical and conceptual roots of the politics of radical futurity? How does the prom-
ise (and threat) of a redemptive divine violence haunt the liberal secular
imaginary from Kant to Schmitt? To open this section, Laurence Paul Hemming
goes back to the very beginning of western philosophy to uncover a tension
between two different possibilities of the ‘to come’, two competing forms of the
future that will dominate philosophy’s own future. On the one side, there is the
appeal to the messianic and, with it, the vision of an absolute future casting its
apocalyptic shadow over present time. On the other, though, there is technical
foresight, anticipation or representation and the quite different image of the
present absorbing all futurity into itself. For Hemming, the planetary domina-
tion of technology over the last 200 years – and the total sovereignty of the think-
ing, willing, representing subject it carries with it – ultimately abolishes the place
of the messianic: whatever is to come has, for the modern subject, always in some
sense happened already. If postmodernity apparently heralds the death of the
subject, the end of ontotheology or the closure of metaphysics, Hemming argues
that at a deep level it remains complicit with the reduction of Being to presence
that underwrites western thought: Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativ-
ity (where gender identity is the citation of an absent real) continues to appeal,
however pejoratively, to a stable ideal type and archetype of male heterosexual
identity in order to ground itself. In closing, Hemming turns to Heidegger’s
famous concept of ‘the last God’ to raise the fragile possibility of an ontological
futurity for humanity that – perhaps – evades the sovereignty of metaphysics.
Paul Fletcher explores Kant’s ambivalent response to the question of revolu-
tion in his political philosophy. To be sure, Fletcher shows how Kant remains
the exemplar of a liberal, pragmatic and anti-revolutionary politics: his ethics,
his philosophy of history, of cosmopolitanism, of civil constitution and the con-
struction of international law are all fundamentally antagonistic to what he saw
as the arbitrary, violent and radical change of revolution. Yet, Fletcher also dem-
onstrates how Kant was permanently fascinated by the transformative possibility
of freedom that revolutionary politics affords: his ethics, politics, anthropology
and metaphysics consistently presuppose a principle of absolute ‘messianic’
freedom that is irreducible to, and disavows, every moral, political or historical
form of authority. For Fletcher, Kant’s articulation of a radical freedom from,
and within, authority illustrates the extent to which a revolutionary evental pol-
itics persists at the very heart of the anti-revolutionary liberal project.
Graham Ward’s essay offers another revisionary theological reading of one
of the intellectual architects of liberal, secular modernity: G.W.F. Hegel. Again,
the Hegel that emerges is a very different one from the thinker posthumously –
and notoriously – recruited to the triumphal cause of post-ideological
neo-liberal capitalism by Francis Fukuyama. For Ward, Hegel’s speculative
philosophy remains – in spite of its secularization of the eschaton – beholden to
a Christian and indeed ‘messianic’ logic. Such a logic can be witnessed at work
throughout Hegel’s philosophy of history – whose dialectical mediations are
themselves a kind of historicized version of Christology – but it reaches its cul-

mination in the Hegelian concept of the State which, as Ward argues, is a pro-
foundly metaphysical and indeed theological entity: the Kingdom. Perhaps
most importantly, Hegel’s messianic State is, contrary to his modern appro-
priators, irreducible to any finite secular form of government – whether dem-
ocratic, communist, monarchic, fascist or oligarchic – because its final form is
theocratic: the actualization of Geist entails the realization of Christ’s rule. In
Hegel’s messianic politics, the Kingdom remains to come.
Michael Hoelzl’s contribution considers the significance of a crucial figure
within the Pauline conception of messianic time which endures all the way up
to the modern political theology of Carl Schmitt: the Katechon. As Hoelzl shows,
the Katechon – ‘what restrains’ and/or ‘the one who restrains’ the arrival of
the Anti-Christ (who, in turn, precedes the second coming of Christ) – is a
deeply ambiguous figure within the history of the theologico-political. On the
one hand, it can be viewed positively because it restrains the outbreak of total
lawlessness associated with the Anti-Christ. On the other, though, it can also
be seen negatively because, in doing so, it restrains, and postpones, the return
of Christ. For Hoelzl, the Janus-faced status of the Katechon reflects the larger
tensions of Christian history itself: both are poised between auctoritas and
potestas, the mystical and the political, what we might even call the politics of
the ‘now’ and the politics ‘to come’. Perhaps more importantly, Hoelzl argues
that the figure of the Katechon also enabled Schmitt to articulate, and resolve,
the political tensions he located within secularized modernity. In Schmitt’s
Political Theology, the theological antagonism between the Katechon and the
Anti-Christ – the lawless one and the one who restrains – not only legitimizes
his decisionist model of sovereignty but becomes the basic structural princi-
ple by which the totality of history itself is to be understood.
Pamela Sue Anderson’s essay explores, and critically questions, a psycho-
linguistic view of sacred violence: the repetition of a violent taking of a life. Her
point of departure is Julia Kristeva’s readings of sacrifice in western spiritual,
ritual and social-political practices (which were themselves informed by French
readings of Hegel on death and sacrifice). For Anderson, Kristeva’s distinctive-
ness within this tradition is evident in the role she gives to the sacrifice of the
mother in the individual and collective lives of women and men. If Kristeva’s
focus on the role of the mother articulates a distinct position for her within the
poetics of sacred violence, Anderson does not locate a single concrete, feminist
strategy for a Politics to Come within the former’s work. To what extent, she
concludes, can the messianic power of Christ in expiation address decisively the
violence which continues to be perpetuated against women and other sacrifi-
cial figures by a Christian patriarchal socio-symbolic order? In Anderson’s own
model of the Politics to Come, she urges seeking strength in the ‘weakness’ of
our power to act for the sake of mercy and reciprocal care.
Finally, the collection returns to modernity to consider a set of contemporary
theoretical, historical and empirical sites in which a Politics to Come might – for
better or worse – now be taking place: the Holocaust, environmental catastro-

phe, religious fundamentalism and terror, the crises of contemporary capital;
the global order of security. What determinate form might the Politics to Come
take at the beginning of the twenty-first century? How exactly does neo-liberal
modernity reckon with, foreclose upon, or even put to work the power of the
messianic? Why is the messianic re-emerging as a theologico-political category
here, now? To begin with, Robert Eaglestone’s essay considers the relationship
between messianic time and perhaps the defining event of modern historical
and political time: the Holocaust. As he shows, the Holocaust has consistently
been depicted by survivors, commentators and political actors of every persua-
sion as a quasi-messianic event. For Eaglestone, the Holocaust has been ‘messi-
anized’ in at least three different ways: it is depicted as simultaneously inside and
outside historical time; as an epiphanic revelation or warning from history and,
finally, as a weak messianic power capable of redeeming history. If he acknowl-
edges the political force of the messianic reading of the Holocaust, though,
Eaglestone remains sceptical about what he sees as its universalizing, de-singular-
izing mythological sweep. In closing, Eaglestone turns to Derrida’s reading of
Benjamin in his essay ‘Force of Law’ to canvass for a reading of the Holocaust
that recognizes the complicity of messianic discourse itself in producing the his-
torical catastrophe it seeks to redeem.
Philip Goodchild offers a new genealogy of secularism that focuses on the
messianic status of money. According to Goodchild, the possibility of free ratio-
nal self-determination upon which modernity is predicated remains essentially
blind to its own limits. On the one hand, we are unable to confront the absolute
external limits upon our own will to power: imminent environmental catastro-
phe, the finitude of energy supplies and the proliferation of debt. On the other,
humanity remains equally blind to the internal limit of its own drive to self-
determination: pre-rational, fiduciary practices of preserving cultural memory
such as ritual, writing and other mnemo-techniques. For Goodchild, the privi-
leged sign of secularity’s inescapable theologico-political memory is economic:
what humanity once called ‘God’ – the supreme, immaterial and transcendent
value in which all are obliged to have faith – we now call ‘money’. Perhaps we
might even nominate money as an ironic example of what Derrida calls a ‘mes-
sianism without messianism’: both constitute an essentially contentless promise
that imposes itself on the present by appealing to an infinitely deferred future.
In Goodchild’s account, however, we can detect a different – and arguably more
credible – economy of promise at work in Pauline messianism: Paul describes a
celestial economy in which absolute renunciation of the world – total loss –
becomes the basis of a rich life.
Joanna Hodge’s essay emerges out of what is arguably the defining messianic
event of the early twenty-first century: the global economic crisis. It is tempting,
of course, to see the financial downturn that began with the collapse of the
sub-prime mortgage market in 2008 as neo-liberal capital’s own crisis of faith:
not for nothing was it originally named the ‘credit crunch’ (credere, to believe).
At the same time, Hodge shows that the economic downturn also represents a
geopolitical crisis of belief in a certain idea of Europe as the privileged topos of
reason and enlightenment that goes all the way back to Kant’s cosmopolitanism.
For Hodge, Jacques Derrida’s writings on Europe in the late 1980s and early
1990s constitute an uncanny harbinger of our current economic apocalypse:
Derrida’s ‘L’autre cap’ (the other heading, the heading of the other) describes
nothing other than the precarious and undecidable relationship between la
capitale (the capital city) and le capital (capital reserves). In Hodge’s reading,
Derrida both repeats and interrupts – in short deconstructs – the cosmopolitical
ideal posited by Kant by revealing a Europe that is constitutively (one might even
say messianically) open to what lies beyond its spatial and temporal borders.
Arthur Bradley’s contribution considers one of the most controversial candi-
dates for a contemporary species of the Politics to Come: Islamic fundamental-
ism. It takes as its focus Derrida’s reflections on the aporetic relationship
between religious fundamentalism and democracy in later work like ‘Faith and
Knowledge’ and Rogues. According to Derrida, both religion and democracy
exist in a pathological state of ‘auto-immunization’ whereby any organism –
a body, a belief system, even a sovereign state – is compelled to attack its
own immune system in order to preserve its life. For Bradley, Derrida’s logic
of auto-immunization can be used to narrate the recent political history of
Islamist politics from the rise and fall of the Islamic Revolution all the way up
to the explosion of Neo-Fundamentalist groups like al-Qaeda. If Islamic funda-
mentalism is still feared, detested (and occasionally championed) in the
Western imaginary as essentially inimical to secularism, capitalism and liberal
modernity, Bradley argues that at every stage of its evolution it has in fact ‘auto-
immunized’ itself with such apparently foreign bodies. In Bradley’s account,
Islam’s ‘theocracy to come’ could even be said to represent the site of an ongo-
ing deconstruction of the neo-liberal monopoly upon rationality, democracy
and secularism.
In bringing the collection to a close, Michael Dillon’s sombre essay turns full
circle to return us to the question with which we began: what, if anything, do the
messianic Politics to Come promise us? It is possible to identify many divergent
answers to this question in the preceding essays: a return to a pre-critical dogma-
tism (Beardsworth); the radical opening of an ethical imperative (Thurschwell);
a theological remainder at the heart of liberalism (Fletcher and Ward), perhaps
even the chance of a new political economy (Goodchild). For Dillon, though,
the one thing we can be sure the messianic will certainly bring is violence. If
Derrida’s messianism is frequently dismissed today as a politically vacuous piety –
for who could possibly be against such empty promises as absolute justice, uncon-
ditional hospitality or the democracy-to-come? – Dillon unveils a darker, more
tortured, and tortuous, version of Derrida’s Politics to Come that can only coun-
ter the endless violence of the liberal way of war with the promise of a ‘lesser’
violence. Perhaps, though, even this meagre promise will be empty, Dillon
concludes, because the possibility of a lesser (as opposed to a greater) violence
seems to require the very metric or calculus of violence it seeks to redeem. Such,
ultimately, may be Derrida’s own piety – the faith that, even if we cannot do away
with violence once and for all, we can at least minimize it.
The Future of Futurity

In totality, then, this collection represents an invitation to imagine what we might
paradoxically call the ‘to come’ of the Politics to Come. It will already be clear
from this short introduction that what follows is not distinguished by any shared
political, philosophical or theological agenda. Nor do we pretend to articulate a
common set of answers. For us, what unites this collection is rather a sense of the
singular pertinence of a very old – and yet strangely modern – set of questions:
z What exactly are the Politics to Come? What – if anything – is coming? Who
or what takes the place of the messiah? Alterity? Universality? Revolution?
And who or what will be ‘redeemed’ by that messianic justice – everyone or
a chosen or elect people? What do concepts like ‘peace’, ‘justice’ ‘law’ and
‘violence’ mean in this context?
z When – and where – do the Politics to Come come from? Do they repeat or
radically break from, the messianisms of the Abrahamic tradition, Marx,
Benjamin? Can they move beyond the violence of the determined messian-
isms or are they merely one more historical doctrine of redemption to add
to a long list? To what extent can we speak of a secular or rational
messianism?
z Why has the possibility of a messianic Politics to Come reasserted itself now?
Is it a ‘turn’ or a ‘return’? Is it a monstrous anachronism, postmodern kitsch
or the logical outworking of modernity’s own theological origins? To what
extent might it be the basis of a new political theology – or the sign of an
irreducible theological remainder within the political?
z Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what will become of the Politics to Come?
Do the politics of futurity themselves have a future or – to recall Voltaire – are
they merely a latter-day Sabbatianism? Can they enable us to challenge the
global hegemony of neo-liberal capitalism – or is capitalism itself the real politi-
cal messianism? In the epoch of global liberal governance – which predicates
every aspect of contemporary social and political life on imminent collapse
(market crash, uncontrollable crime and uncontainable immigration, the fail-
ure to expand profit margins, terror) and proceeds by normalizing perpetual
revolution (hyper-legislation, infinite debt, the audit and target culture, the
politics of security, the war on terror) – do we really need another Politics to
Come?
Such questions may only ever be answered on the last day – and perhaps, if
Kafka is right, even on the very last day – but let us now begin to ask them.
Notes
1
Carl Schmitt, letter to Armin Mohler, 14 August 1959, in Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl
Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve, 1987), p. 37.
2
Franz Kafka, ‘The Coming of the Messiah’ Parables and Paradoxes ed. Nahum
Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), p. 81.
3
Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique ed. J. Benda (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1954),
p. 313.
4
See Gershom Scholem, ‘The Mystical Messiah’ Essential Papers on Messianic Move-
ments and Personalities in Jewish History ed. M. Saperstein (New York: New York
University Press, 1992), p. 289. A fuller treatment is offered in Gershom Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1973), ch. 3.
5
See Christopher Hill, ‘A Nation of Prophets’ The World Turned Upside Down: Radi-
cal Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 77.
6
Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1991), p. 86.
Emphasis in the original. All further references will be abbreviated in the text.
7
See Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Towards an (Im)political Theology
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) for a systematic articulation of this theologico-
political structure.
8
See Immanuel Kant, ‘Vom einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmnen Ton in
der Philosophie’, in W. Weischedel, ed. Werke in zehn Bänden (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 5: pp. 377–397.
9
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and
the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 168.
10
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 43.
11
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2003). All further references will be abbreviated in the text.
12
See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008) for an influential recent
critique of the theological implications of the phenomenological tradition. For
Meillassoux, phenomenology’s commitment to the subject–object correlation
means that it de-absolutizes every absolute metaphysical value, but ironically this
gesture ‘legitimates de jure every variety whatsoever of belief in an absolute,
the best as well as the worst’. In Meillassoux’s account, phenomenology thus
presides over a ‘generalized becoming-religious of thought’, (p. 46).
13
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Part One
Promises
Chapter 1
The Messianic Now: A Secular Response

Richard Beardsworth
American University of Paris
French thought’s concerns over the last 40 years with totality, telos and closure
led it from the first to be concerned with the marking of excess within determi-
nation. Whether the specific determination has been individual or collective
(the liberal subject, the nation-state, colonialism, and so on), ontological or
ethical/political (the architectonic of reason, human rights, or capitalist forma-
tion) – the Levinasian other, the Derridean trace, the Lyotardian ‘sublime’, the
Nancian ‘partage’, even the Deleuzian ‘nomadic’ open up each determination
to others and to radical alterity as such. This marking of excess is predicated on
the thinking of modern phenomenology, particularly Husserl and Heidegger’s
temporalization of reason and form. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, it
increasingly looked to both the aesthetic and the religious instance to theorize
the non-conceptual, the non-programmable and the unconditioned. Given our
topic, I concentrate here on the turn to the religious instance.
In an amalgamation of reflections that work with Heidegger, stretch out to
negative theology and dovetail with the work, especially, of Franz Rosenzweig
and Walter Benjamin, French thought reorganized central determinations of
religion such as God, Sovereignty and Redemption in order to re-mark an excess
that formed the condition of all finite form (including the finite figures of the
infinite such as ‘God’). During the 1990s, Jacques Derrida – foremost, I believe,
in making this re-inscription – called this radical contingency that could lead to
the worse or the better – the ‘messianic without messianism’.1 Objectively, as it
were, the ‘messianic’ comes to name the opening to the other within any iden-
tity formation together with the latter’s interruption. Subjectively, as it were, it
names the awaiting of otherness within apparent sameness, an awaiting without
horizon, divorced of religious teleology; an awaiting that is, in its modality and
dimension, neither human nor inhuman, but is the condition of all ethical and
political practices.2 The messianic without messianism constitutes in this sense
the harbouring of promise within any spatial or temporal form.
I believe it important to emphasize here the historico-political context in

which this work on excess began and, historically speaking, ended. From the
1950s onwards, Derrida, Levinas, Lyotard and Deleuze work within four histo-
rical constraints: the failure of communism, the Shoah, the fates of techno-
scientific rationality, and a decolonizing world.3 Since these constraints are
political in nature, French thought (and its crossings with the German critical
theory of Adorno and Benjamin) carry a political dimension before any subse-
quent empirical turn to the political made by an individual thinker. To one side
of a continued investment in the aesthetic, it ends on a reflection on religion
and life in the context of the late-twentieth century return of religion and the
emergent conflation of molecular biology, technology and the neurosciences.
French thought, again summarized most clearly by Derrida’s work in the 1990s,
exposits its thinking of excess as a new form of secularization of the transcen-
dent that works together towards the deconstruction of religion and post-
humanist bio-ethics. Whereas the first wave of secularization – Feuerbach, Marx,
Nietzsche, in part Weber, and Freud – reduce the gesture of religion to social
and/or psychological form and motivation, French thought reconfigures
faith, the irrational, God, within a broader economy of reason and unreason.
This economy places religion within finitude without reducing its condition
to it. Through this re-inscription the opening of the religious becomes the
radical opening to the other upon which all others, including the form of reli-
gion, are rooted. ‘French’ thinking is consequently political in the following
sense: within the force-field of history, the force of thought intervenes, prior to
unintended consequence, to reorient ethical and political possibility. For
Derrida, given the messianic, something else is always already possible: differ-
ence is always already there before identity.
Now, in the context of this sustained, politically embedded deliberation on
the non-conceptual, my questions are the following. Does the French gesture
amount to a qualitatively new atheistic rethinking of religion – one that refor-
mulates God as radical contingency and that allows for new ‘pre-ethical’ distinc-
tions between justice and sovereignty, justice and law, justice and rights, justice
and the economy? Or, all the while rewriting religion, does this gesture remain
complicit enough with the disposition of religion that the categories that
emerge therefrom are blunted in their critical, transformative force?
There is no straightforward, unilateral answer. That said, there is a problem
in the Derridean approach to politics that needs to be addressed in the gen-
eral context of rewriting religion. I simplify here in order to set up a clear
position on present relations between philosophy, religion and politics within
recent continental philosophy. I maintain that in the context of the ‘return’ or
the intensification of religion in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centu-
ries, the concept of the ‘messianic’, together with the discursive strategies
upholding and accompanying it, block the development of new forms of
rationality: that is, in Hegelian terms, the rational development of historical
actuality. Behind this point, I maintain that in an irrational and hypocritical
The Messianic Now: A Secular Response 17
age, such development constitutes an important historical, educational and

intellectual challenge that forms something like the right response to contem-
porary relations of force.4
Let me be clear from the outset. I believe that the instance of the ‘messianic’,
together with its accompanying strategies, is philosophically pertinent. For exam-
ple, the rewriting of religion in terms of a radical excess that no form in time
can recuperate pitches contemporary continental philosophy against the philo-
sophical moves of nineteenth-century atheism. No philosophical atheism
can reduce the excess of the Other: the attempt to do so necessarily leads to
political totalitarianism from this philosophical perspective. A series of power-
ful ‘postmodern’ relations between ethics, politics, religion and art have as a
consequence been established by this philosophy of excess. Indeed, much of
the last 40 years of this philosophy has been spent delving into the subtleties
of these relations in the general context of totalistic thinking and closure (par-
ticularly in the disciplinary fields of comparative literature, cultural studies,
postcolonial studies, woman and queer studies, law and history). They never-
theless remain philosophical strategies suited, I believe, to a critical gesture of
thinking specific to the humanities and ‘soft’ social sciences. They have cer-
tainly not affected ‘harder’ social science. This is not because the latter’s empir-
ical rationalism remains in principle blind to critical thought (although this is
often the case). They have not affected it because these strategies have not
proved either materially or historically transformative. In our context, they do
not reorganize contemporary relations between ethics, politics and religion, as
they proceed, in a way that effects change within those relations for the better.
In this sense, they remain, for me, formal. They are philosophically pertinent,
setting up, in a radicalization of the Kantian move, conditions of (im-)possibil-
ity, but they do not reorganize what they unmake in order to orient change for
the better.
To respond to my above questions, I will focus on Jacques Derrida (since he
is the most important writer re-inscribing religion critically), and I keep this
focus to two moments in his work: the 1996 essay ‘Faith and Knowledge: The
Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ and the 2003 book
Rogues.5
‘Faith and Knowledge’ constitutes a sophisticated reflection on the return of
religion in the last years of the twentieth century. For Derrida, there is no such
return. The essay lays out three reasons why. First, in distinction to Enlightenment
thought, the opposition between science, on the one hand, and religion, on the
other, is undermined by their common, but self-differentiating condition: the
opening to the other, the fiduciary, or radical faith. This excess renders prob-
lematic the secularization thesis and folds faith and knowledge, religion and
science into an originary logic of mutual contamination from which no ‘living
present’ escapes (‘Faith and Knowledge’, pp. 63–5). Second, the return of reli-
gion within history is inevitable given the two sources of religion: the sacred, the
pure and the untouched, on the one hand, and faith or belief, on the other.
Given the trace, religion always returns within history to reform identity at the
structural moment of loss of identity. In a general logic of dis-appropriation,
religion ‘returns’, as it were, as a moment of re-appropriation. Third, this gen-
eral logic points to a complex structure of identity and contamination that
always already re-inscribes the moment of re-appropriation within, also, its own
demise. Derrida increasingly calls this originary structure of contamination
‘autoimmunity’ (pp. 46, 50–51).
Just as a living organism produces spontaneously from out of itself the means to
destroy its own immunizing antibodies, so religion produces from out of itself
the means to destroy its own defences. Analytically speaking, the originary act
of the religious is, first, the positing of identity within a complex environment.
Religion must, second, draw from out of that environment the means by which
to secure its identity, those means all the while undermining that identity from
within: the indissociable, but self-destructive relation between the sacred and
technology, or what I called a decade ago ‘originary technicity’.6 Third, given
this increasing contamination of identity, there will, in turn, inevitably be a
desire to return to the initial identity, a desire that underpins fundamentalisms
and the accompanying religious organization of politics.
Derrida’s response to the so-called return of religion towards the end of the
twentieth century leads, therefore, to a meditation on the tertiary structure of
religion as such, within which this return is inscribed and understood. As Derrida
puts it, ‘Religion can only begin and re-begin, quasi-automatically, mechanically,
spontaneously, that is, from out of its origin and with the automaticity of the
machinal. For the better and for the worse, without horizon’ (‘Faith and
Knowledge’, p. 51). The messianic constitutes the contingency of these moments,
the contingency of time, space, the other, technicity, and so forth. The messianic
is thus the autoimmunity of finitude within which messianism is understood and
superseded philosophically, but never experientially or historically reduced. In
terms of this meditation, reason and faith are predicated on an originary fidu-
ciary structure that becomes itself the unconditioned object of philosophizing
within the general logic of contamination. Here relations between philosophy and
religion are clear. The object of philosophy is the unconditioned; the object of
religion is the reduction of this unconditioned to theological sovereignty. What
is not clear, however, are the relations between philosophy, religion and politics
from out of which this very meditation on the quasi-return of religion began.
As I have argued elsewhere, Derrida leaves us in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ with
no sense of procedure by which one can construct ethical and political possibility
within an ongoing history of secularizing and de-secularizing processes.7 When
Derrida says for example: ‘in the said return of the religious there is no incom-
patibility between the fundamentalisms or their politics, on the one hand, and,
on the other hand, rationality, that is, the tele-techno-capitalistico-scientific
fiduciarity, in all of its mediatic and globalizing dimensions’ (‘Faith and
Knowledge’, p. 45), one loses important distinctions between different types of
reason (speculative, critical, instrumental, empirical) and, thereby, an effective
and critical response to the return of religion – except in terms of radical faith
and the law of contamination. The latter make up part of a very sophisticated
philosophy, but this philosophy is formal. It is not working through determina-
tions to invent them anew. It re-inscribes, rather, these determinations within
an economy that exceeds them and places that excess as their radical condition
to which all future invention is also necessarily beholden.
Between ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (1996) and Rogues (2003) the forces of his-
tory accelerated. With 9/11 and the opening of the second Iraq war, the inter-
national situation became the primary object of intellectual focus in the
Northwest, and the phenomena of religious fundamentalism and terrorism
became the international political question to be addressed. From several quar-
ters there has also been increasing interest, within the general discourse of
postmodernism and multiculturalism, in communities of faith and/or ethnicity
in distinction to the violent borders of the juridical nation-state. In response to
these historical and intellectual events, in dialogue at this historical juncture
with Jürgen Habermas, Derrida places in Rogues radical faith and the messianic
in general within reason and aligns anew philosophical deconstruction and
rationality. As ‘The “World” of the Enlightenment to Come: Exception,
Calculation and Sovereignty’ puts it, ‘the excess of reason is reason’, the ‘space
of radical faith is rational’, and again ‘reason is the element of a faith without
church or belief’ (Rogues, pp. 143, 144, 153). These phrases summarize a gen-
eral strategy in the second essay to re-invent reason beyond its classical hori-
zonal formulations (most importantly, for Derrida, Husserlian and Kantian
reason) and extend its powers beyond its circumscription in ‘Faith and
Knowledge’ as rationality per se. In distinction to the a-rational description of
deconstruction from the 1970s to the 1990s, Derrida now defends a rational
deconstruction against the emergence of fundamentalism, the implicit confla-
tion of his work with postmodernist irrationality and, critically, I believe, a post-
modernist apology for pre-juridical forms of community.
This re-inflection of reason and its deconstruction is important for those
working with Derrida’s future legacy. Within its terms, for example, the ‘messi-
anic’ can be considered a hyper-secular concept: There is thus no need for a
secular response to the ‘messianic now’! The ‘messianic’ is a more than secular
‘quasi-concept’ since it undoes the explicit and implicit teleology that informs
both religious and secular thought and practice. It is clear where Derrida’s
thought goes here. Post-Kantian secularism often repeats the redemptory struc-
ture of religion in its very opposition to it (the notorious example being the
messianism of Marxian thought). Derrida thereby aligns reason with – I quote
from ‘Enlightenment to Come’ – the ‘reasonable’ relation between the uncon-
ditioned and conditioned (Rogues, pp. 150–1 and p. 158).
This line of thinking is strong: my own Derrida and the Political of a decade ago
was informed by it.8 I believe now, however, that this gesture of thinking remains
formal and idealist in its very rewriting of the fields of formalism and idealism.
As a consequence, I do not consider it to lead to an effective secular rebuff of
religious fundamentalism. Let me return to the tertiary structure of religion, as

Derrida adumbrates it in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, to suggest why.
There are, in turn, three structures to religion in this analysis of the identity
of religion, its differential spacing through technology, and the radical desire to
return to the initial identity. (1) An analytical structure in which religion is
analysed in terms of the trace; (2) an ontological structure in which religion is
understood in terms of the self-infection of ipseity; and (3) a pre-ethical struc-
ture in which religion is inscribed within the contingent economy of something
like, in another radicalization of Kant, ‘radical evil’, an economy from out of
which the originary relation to the other is underscored. All three structures
are the same, but are posited from different perspectives: the messianic fits best
the pre-ethical structure of ‘radical evil’ since it provides the terms within which
the ethical horizons of sanctity, identity, redemption and hope can be rewritten,
given their originary contamination by their other, in terms of an a-theological
and non-horizonal horizon: ‘the promise to come’. Consequently, all three
structures work, to begin with, from out of identity (here the identity of reli-
gion) in order, then, to displace this identity in terms of the larger constitutive
logics of difference and dis-appropriation. The contemporary return of reli-
gion is thereby thought as one moment within the autoimmunity of religion.
This procedure is idealist. Starting with identity and deconstructing its forms,
it remains within the conceptual framework that it, at the same time, punctures.
There are ample reasons for this strategy from within a fundamentally
Heideggerian-conceived reading of history. We start from out of what is given
to us, radical invention is impossible, and so on. If, however, effective priority is
to be given to the specific determinations at play and to the means of their re-in-
vention, a more materialist approach towards historical actuality is, I believe,
required. The return of religion comes indeed within the loss of identity, but
the material causes of this dis-appropriation need to be traced within an account
of this return so that structures of redress are circumscribed as clearly as possi-
ble, and structures of transformation are developed. I am not suggesting an
historical sociology of religious interest or motivation at this point (one that
would lead to social or political theory). I am suggesting that the material terms
through which religious form intensifies should be developed to their rational
end if one is interested in developing political reason. This is one thing theory
can do, in coordination with practice, but in distinction to it. Any account of
the messianic today must take into account the following, for example:
First, religion has become an important social force in the world since the
end of the Cold War, although the causes of such return are historically deep,
to be situated in a series of political, economic and cultural givens prior to the
end of the Cold War.
Second, these givens range from the failure of communism in the East and
South East of the world, to the failure of nationalization programmes and
postcolonial ‘nation-state’ socialism in the Middle East and on the African
continent in the 1960s and 1970s; from the increasing importance of cultural
identity in the United States from the 1970s to the normative role religion has
played in politics in the former communist countries, South Africa and in Latin
America from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The re-emergence of religion as a
social force should be set squarely within the parameters of these social
phenomena.
Third, together with the recent hypocrisy of North-western liberal demo-
cratic foreign policy and liberal democracy’s domestic difficulty in articulating
multi-religious civic space, these givens have led to a religious radicalization of
social identity – both inside and outside the Northwest.9 Cutting across the clas-
sical liberal distinction between the public and the private – liberal neutrality –
this disposition has produced political fundamentalism.
If these events make up a general return of religion from the 1970s, it is
important to underscore the close correlation between the end of the Cold War
and the return of religion. The conjuncture between the end of the Cold War
and religious revival accompanies, from the beginning, the underside of the
victory of liberal democracy. Market modernization processes fracture custom-
ary social identity; the religious bond provides the strongest social form within
which this identity can be reconstructed. There is consequently an inextricable
constellation between polity, economy and religion that should be addressed,
from the first, when considering the ‘return’ of religion. This return forms one
force within a qualitatively new historical force-field that is shaping the disjunc-
ture between global modernizing processes and the lack of determined politi-
cal and ideological forms to address those processes and direct them towards
the better.10 Following early Hegel, I would call this disjuncture the contempo-
rary ‘diremption’ (Entzweiung) between the economic, the political and the
religious.11 In the gaps between an increasingly integrated, but highly hier-
archised world economy, little invention of post-nation state democratic institu-
tions except through bargaining, and the perceived and real hypocrisies of
Western liberal democracies, religion necessarily plays an important political,
social and proto-civic role. This is inevitable. But it has little to do with the auto-
immunity of religion and its spontaneous, machinal automaticity. The real is not in
deconstruction: the real is a force-field, to be transformed for the better or
worse according to what forces are in play and how they organize themselves. A
renewed, strong Nietzscheanism is needed in this context.
Religion is irrational when it places the authority of political conduct in the
dogma of revelation. Modernization is irrational, as we have now experienced
in full since the summer of 2007, when investment and governance decisions
regarding the welfare of persons and peoples are left to the market system and
unregulated risk-taking. A philosophical, ethical and political priority today is
to put these concerns back in the secular uncertainty of the political arena and
develop new interrelated national, regional and global institutional responses:
what the sociologist Ulrich Beck has called ‘our second modernity’.12 In the
gap between modernization processes and reinvented modernity, this means,
in distinction to Beck, however, being firm and clear about the kind of general
principles under which world politics should be thought and developed.

Economic and technological globalization has created a world of interdepen-
dence. Both the global reach of the present financial crisis and the latter’s
rapid effects in the real economy testify to this interdependence. An inter-
national community, worthy of its name, will be concerned in the general
context of globalization with coordinating national development within a
global system that at the same time increasingly respects internationally-set
norms of sustainability. The above refers to a very complex ethical and political
set of processes, one that demands a large rethinking and repracticing of
national and individual identities (political, economic, social and cultural).
In this context, religious fundamentalism presents a hopeless response to
these processes, a response that can only propose death as the solution to
modern complexity. Since irrational political force has precisely taken advan-
tage recently of Western political aggression and hypocrisy, the ideological
and institutional architecture of the following four general principles merit
careful deliberation.
1. The principles of reciprocity and symmetry: To treat the other as a person

with dignity (to speak in classical Kantian terms) is to treat the other as an
end in him or herself, an agent that can set his or her own ends. Reciprocity
between two ethical agents is the condition of different ends, not their annul-
ment in the name of some so-called totalizing Enlightenment reason.13
2. The principle of personhood and the ethical and legal cosmopolitanism that
this principle underpins: it is important to affirm that law is the condition of
difference, not its annulment; that universal structures of law – like the
supranational regime of human rights and that of fundamental social and
economic rights – form the minimal basis of complex, modernizing societies
seeking their own modernity; and that rights when complemented by empow-
ering structures of political participation, responsibility and loyalty gradually
embody a cosmopolitan dimension.
3. The principle of subsidiarity according to which decisions are taken at
municipal, national, regional and global levels that are closest to those
affected by those decisions, while remaining effective: this principle will be
crucial, for example, for working out in the coming years the regulation of
national, regional and global banking and accounting systems.
4. The principle of legitimacy of power. With the increasing density of nation-
state interdependence, the question of the legitimacy of political power
becomes more and more explicit because the constraints on political agents
are all the greater. Greater density of relations means both greater risk of
denial and greater need for legitimacy at the level of constraint. Within the
force-field of increasing interdependence, it is therefore important to con-
vince proactively powerful political agents of more cosmopolitan arrange-
ments and distinguish, in the field of ideas and practice, legal and institutional
forms of cosmopolitanism from imperialism.14
When I first wrote this paper in 2007, the last point seemed very difficult given
the last 6 years. Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib scandals, the revelations of
CIA centres for interrogation in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Maghreb,
unambiguous support for the 2006 Israeli war in Southern Lebanon – the
hypocrisy of US and UK engagement in the democratically inspired notion of
rule of domestic and customary law had brought to an end not only any messi-
anist engagement in democratization, but it had severely undermined the
defence of democracy as such. Religious fundamentalism, I argued, would con-
tinue to reap the rewards of this hypocrisy. Despite Israel’s appallingly dispro-
portionate use of violence in Gaza, the election of a highly proactive presidency
in the United States will affect a sea-change in these perceptions. With the
financial crisis, the importance of China and India to the future of the world
economy in general and to global political arrangements in particular is now
recognised explicitly. International terrorism will, of course, persist within the
developed world for decades to come, and religious movements will be per-
ceived by the losers of the world economy to have a legitimate monopoly on
political and social justice. The juridification of national and international com-
munities remains, therefore, a crucial secular challenge. Habermas’s analysis
remains, I believe, correct in this context.15
Without the juridification process, new wars of intervention and strategies of
development continue to run the risk of being perceived as ‘moralizing’ and/
or as ‘Western’. Given, precisely, the dis-analogies between domestic and cus-
tomary law and between national and post-national democracy, the above
demands sustained intellectual work between the reflective and the empirical
in order to develop new forms of rationality and modernity. With recent Western
hypocrisy, the quasi-concept of ‘democracy to come’ has been tempting here.
As Derrida’s Rogues argued in 2003, the United States has been itself a rogue-
state outside international law. In this regard, my argument is simple: the quasi-
concept of ‘democracy to come’ does not do the work needed to construct
another world; and, once that world begins to take shape, the quasi-concept
continues to offer only formal conditions of possibility and critique. This kind
of philosophy was, I believe, effective in a period of mourning and critique, spe-
cific to the second half of the twentieth century; it is no longer effective in an
age of construction. Our age is one of global construction.
I have suggested that, within French thought, Jacques Derrida is the foremost
thinker to have reorganized religious categories in terms of the messianic.
Derrida, particularly in his last work Rogues, is absolutely aware of the need for
invention at the international level. The messianic in international relations
calls, for example, for new forms of divisible sovereignty, for the invention of
supranational democracy, for an attenuation of the conflict between the sover-
eignty of the person in human rights discourse, informing the principle of
humanitarian intervention, and the sovereignty of the nation-state. All this is
very clearly stated in Rogues.16 Each time, however, Derrida addresses these sub-
jects, they are placed within the autoimmunity of sovereignty and democracy,
and intellectual priority is placed on the messianic moment that this autoimmu-
nity both presupposes and repeats. The work to be done is formally envisaged,
indeed summoned; but it is not begun. Philosophy holds off from the empirical.
The hyper-secular concept of ‘messianic excess’ remains, accordingly, complicit
with the categories of religion in two deep senses: it delays firm response to an
irrational age; and it leaves to others – the architects, the builders, the states-
men, and so on – the rational responsibility of shaping the world.
Notes
1
See, especially, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge,
1994).
2
See, especially, Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Of
Hospitality trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
3
I have discussed the nature of these constraints at greater length in ‘Modernity in
French Thought: Excess in Derrida, Levinas and Lyotard’ in Telos, 137 (Winter
2006), pp. 67–95.
4
These words were written in the summer of 2007. The symmetries between
‘Islamic’ fundamentalism and ‘Bush’ fundamentalism are now over. That said,
despite the importance of the new US administration for a reconfiguring of pro-
gressive liberalism, hypocrisy and irrationality remain evident from a critical
global perspective.
5
Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the
Limits of Reason Alone’ in Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo, trans. Samuel
Weber (London: Polity, 1998); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael B. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). All
further references will be given in the text.
6
See Richard Beardsworth, ‘Thinking Technicity’ in Cultural Values, 2:1 (1998),
pp. 70–86.
7
See Richard Beardsworth, ‘In Memoriam Jacques Derrida: The Power of Reason’
in Theory and Event, 8:1 (2005) and ‘The Future of Critical Philosophy and World
Politics’ in Madeleine Fagan et al., eds. Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy, (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 45–65.
8
Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996).
9
Compare on this Christian Joppke’s excellent Veil: Mirror of Identity (Cambridge:
Polity, 2009).
10
With the present financial and economic crisis (2007–2009), this disjuncture
has now entered the political fore. The ideological and practical move from neo-
liberal to neo-Keynesian policies is in process, but the social effects of the present
crisis remain to be identified and shaped.
11
Richard Beardsworth, ‘Political Love in our Global Age’ in Contretemps: An Online
Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Fall 2005).
12
Ulrich Beck, Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Order
(Cambridge: Polity, 1997).
13
See David Held’s important elaboration of this point in his ‘Principles of
Cosmopolitan Order’ in G. Brock and H. Brighouse, eds. The Political Philosophy
of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 10–27.
14
I discuss this point at length in ‘Cosmopolitanism and Realism: Towards a
Theoretical Convergence?’ in Millennium: Critical Journal of International Relations,
37:1 (2008), pp 69–96.
15
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two
Hundred Year’s Hindsight’ in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann, eds. Perpetual
Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge MA: MIT, 1998), pp. 113–153.
16
See the first essay in Rogues ‘The Reason of the Strongest (Are there Rogue
States?)’, pp. 6–114, esp. pp. 95–107.
Chapter 2
Politics without the Messianic or a ‘Messianic

without Messianism’?:
A Response to Richard Beardsworth
Adam Thurschwell*
Office of Military Commissions - Defense, United States Department of Defense
Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary
arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life (1948)
Why messianism, and why now? Why orient a ‘politics to come’ around religious
categories at a moment when the mix of religion and politics has proved so
toxic in all of its (Western) variants, Christian, Jewish and Islamic? Around the
world (or worlds, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’), a Counter-Enlightenment
theocratic impulse has emerged in response to the hegemony of secular, ratio-
nal, Enlightened modernity. Radical elements of Christian fundamentalists in
the United States, the religious right in Israel, and Islamicist militants through-
out the Islamic world share a fundamental distrust of the secularizing drive of
Enlightenment rationality and have been willing to take up arms, literally and
figuratively, against it. Against this background, can the doctrine of messianic
restitution common to all religions of the Book be deployed to save the concept
of the political, without falling back into unintended complicity with the forces
within religion that threaten the social progress made under the secular
Enlightenment?
In his ‘Secular Response’, Richard Beardsworth offers a nuanced ‘no’ to this
question.1 He is himself a former participant in one of the philosophical
projects that looks to religious categories as a source of inspiration for its politi-
cal thinking, the project that culminated in the political quasi-concept that
A Response to Richard Beardsworth 27
Derrida called a ‘messianic without messianism’.2 He therefore knows enough

to avoid the know-nothing reactions of some members of the secular left to any
mention of ‘God’, ‘messianism’, or religion more generally.3 A sophisticated
reader of Derrida, he takes seriously the claim that religious terminology in
Derrida’s writings is fundamentally atheological – that it represents a ‘thinking
that “repeats” the possibility of religion without religion’, as Derrida put it.4
Indeed, it is clear that Beardsworth has no real disagreements with Derrida on
the intellectual merits of his positions. Instead, his objection to the messianic
approach occurs at an entirely different level of discourse: the level of strategy
or strategic utility.5 In Beardsworth’s words, at this historical juncture ‘the mes-
sianic, together with its accompanying strategies is philosophically pertinent’
but it is not ‘historically transformative’ (Chapter 1, p. 17). What philosophers
ought to be doing instead, he argues, is to develop ‘new forms of rationality’,
ones that comport with, explain, and thus potentially transform the ‘rational
development of historical actuality’ (pp. 16–17).6
Beardsworth’s complaint is therefore not with the substance of Derrida’s
philosophical approach, but with the intellectual resources it consumes that
could be more productively spent elsewhere from an instrumental-political per-
spective. This is a very different (and much weaker) objection than one that
goes to the underlying philosophical legitimacy of a ‘messianic’ approach to
the political. Nevertheless, because Derrida is Beardsworth’s focus, and because
I agree with him that Derrida is ‘foremost in making this re-inscription’ of reli-
gion in philosophy (p. 15) among contemporary Continental philosophers (as
well as for reasons of space), I will restrict my reply to Derrida’s work as well.
Before considering the details of Beardsworth’s indictment of Derrida, it
ought to be pointed out that there are other variations on the theme of political
messianism that go unaddressed by him, ranging from Giorgio Agamben’s
influential Homo Sacer series to the burst of cross-disciplinary studies of Paul that
began in the 1990s (to which Agamben also contributed).7 Agamben’s messian-
ism in particular differs from Derrida’s in fundamental ways and deserves its
own defense.8 Nevertheless, because Derrida is Beardsworth’s focus, and because
I agree with him that Derrida is ‘foremost in making this re-inscription’ of reli-
gion in philosophy (p. 15) among contemporary Continental philosophers (as
well as for reasons of space), I will restrict my reply to Derrida’s work as well.
Beardsworth’s claim that the messianic approach is politically ineffective has
two prongs. The first is that it is out of date. It was marked by the time period
that gave birth to it, Beardsworth argues, and has become an anachronism now
that that time has passed. Second, he claims that the ‘messianic without messi-
anism’ is too abstract and formal, too detached from ‘historical actuality’ (pp.
16–17), to provide the concrete guidance needed to analyze ‘the specific deter-
minations at play’ (p. 20) in our contemporary ‘historical force-field’ (p. 21)
and ‘the means of their re-invention’ (p. 20).9
The first charge is difficult to take seriously for a number of reasons.
Beardsworth’s claim is that Derrida’s (and the other avatars of ‘French thought’,
including Levinas, Lyotard and Deleuze’s) thinking was constrained by four

historical realities of post-War Europe: ‘the failure of communism, the Shoah,
the fates of techno-scientific rationality, and a de-colonizing world’. At the out-
set, this period constitutes a remarkably short half-life for the significance of as
presumptively major a writer as Derrida. More than 200 years later we are still
reading Hegel and Kant, for example, as living philosophers with something to
contribute to contemporary philosophical debates. By that standard, Derrida’s
interment in/as history seems a bit premature. Nevertheless, accepting as (triv-
ially) true the proposition that writers’ thinking is inevitably coloured by their
time (and that in that sense ‘French thought’ of this period no doubt did ‘carry
a political dimension before any subsequent empirical turn to the political
made by an individual thinker’), it is still rather difficult – or what amounts to
the same thing, far too easy – to draw a line between these historical determi-
nants and Beardsworth’s definition of philosophical messianism as ‘the open-
ing to the other within any identity formation together with the latter’s
interruption’ (p. 15). Dismissing any writer as a product of her times is virtually
always a reductionist rhetorical trick, one that, as Beardsworth is well aware, has
been turned on Derrida by others on a regular basis (usually in connection with
derisory accounts of ‘postmodernism’). I don’t impute any such derisory intent
to Beardsworth, but his historical thesis is extraordinarily weak – belied, for
example, by instances of non-French messianic thought developed both before
(Walter Benjamin) and after (Giorgio Agamben) the historical period that
supposedly gave rise to it.
Moreover, any attempt to ‘periodize’ Derrida must come to terms with the
fact that his thought generally, and the notion of a ‘messianic without messia-
nism’ in particular, significantly complicate the idea of linear and progressive
temporality that enables the whole practice of historical periodization. There is
a ‘messianic without messianism’, Derrida says in Specters of Marx, only where
the ‘onto-theo- but also archeo-teleological concept of history’ is put in ques-
tion. Having put these classical concepts of historicity into question, Derrida
goes on to explain,
[i]t was then a matter of thinking another historicity – not a new history or
still less a ‘new historicism’, but another opening of event-ness as historicity
that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to
an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as prom-
ise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or
design. (Specters of Marx, pp. 74–75)
I will return shortly to what Derrida means by history as ‘promise’, ‘promise as

promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or
design’. For my current purposes, it ought to be enough to point out that any
periodization of Derrida’s thinking ought to address the resistance that think-
ing itself puts up by way of its critiques of the very concept of ‘periodization’
and the view of historicity that makes such periodization possible. Beardsworth’s
critique fails to address that aspect of Derrida’s thinking, and having failed to
do so, perhaps inevitably falls back into a naive language of historical determi-
nation that Derrida (along with many others, it ought to be said) have rightly
debunked. I suspect that, as with Kant and Hegel, we will still read Derrida 200
years hence, because there is something in his writing that transcends our
times even if the works themselves are indelibly marked by those times. That
moment of ahistoricism in historical works is the real subject of philosophical
interest – one that Derrida’s messianism goes a long way towards explaining,
while the naive historicism that Beardsworth displays (in this aspect of his
criticism, at least) does not.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which Beardsworth’s other objection –
that Derrida’s secularized messianism is too formal to do the concrete intellec-
tual work that we need now to solve our global problems – is correct. Derrida
himself says as much. But Beardsworth misunderstands both the necessity and
the nature of Derrida’s formalism. It is a strength, not a weakness; indeed, it is
the condition of possibility of precisely those ‘new forms of rationality’ that
Beardsworth favours, at least if they are to avoid the ‘fates of techno-scientific
rationality’ (p. 16) that he (along with many other progressive thinkers, both
religious and secular) deplores.
Beardsworth’s charge of political formalism ultimately derives from Derrida’s
account of the relationship of the ethical to the political. For Derrida, there
is a necessary and unbridgeable hiatus between the ethical relationship, con-
ceived in Levinasian terms as absolute responsibility for the Other, and any
given form of politics. This is so because ethical responsibility (in Levinas’ for-
mulation) entails a responsibility that is ‘absolute’ and infinite in the sense of
singular, owed absolutely and uniquely to each singular Other in each unique
relationship, whereas the concept of the ‘political’ necessarily entails the con-
sideration of all those multiple ‘Others’ who must be taken account of – whose
interests must be balanced, whose preferences or votes must be counted or
otherwise aggregated – and thus requires a form of responsibility that must be
calculable, rather than infinite or absolute. What this means is that, on one hand,
there is an absolute gulf between ethical responsibility and political responsibil-
ity, insofar as ‘I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even
the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others’. On
the other hand, these ‘other others’ cannot be distinguished from the singular
Other of the ethical relationship since ‘[e]very other (one) is every (bit) other
[tout autre est tout autre], every one else is completely and wholly other’ as well,
and the same singular and infinite responsibility owed to the ‘original’ Other is
owed to each singular ‘other other’ as well.10
From the outset, then, ethical responsibility renders political responsibility –
and the ‘calculation’ that it entails – both impossible and necessary; impossible
because no calculation can do justice to the singularity of the Other, but
necessary because each other Other demands that same singular responsibility
owed to the ‘original’ Other. What issues from this paradox, according to
Derrida, is an absolute ethical demand that we nevertheless attempt to perform
the required political calculations – ‘incalculable justice [i.e., the infinite
responsibility of the ethical relationship] requires us to calculate’11 – while recog-
nizing that the results of these calculations will not themselves be ‘just’ precisely
to the extent that they are the result of a calculation, an accounting, a balancing
or accommodation of interests, rather than the discharge of a singular and infi-
nite responsibility. Justice never is or can be ‘present’ in any given political pro-
gramme or platform, whether realized in practice or represented as an ideal.
It remains suspended in the ‘to come’ of a future that never arrives, and there-
fore can never become the subject of knowledge or representation, because no
calculation can do justice to the infinite responsibility that genuine justice
demands. ‘Justice remains, is yet, to come, à venir, it has an, it is à-venir, the very
dimension of events irreducibly to come’ (‘Force of Law’, p. 27). Derrida says,
in another formulation of the promissory structure of the messianic event.
As a result of this promissory structure, Derrida concludes, ‘[e]thics enjoins
a politics and a law . . . [b]ut the political or juridical content that is thus assigned
remains undetermined, still to be determined beyond knowledge, beyond all
presentation, all concepts . . . ’.12 No determinate content issues from the ethical
demand because ethics, in Derrida’s (and Levinas’s) sense, is non-normative.
To derive or deduce a legal or political rule of decision (or norm for the ‘ratio-
nal development of historical actuality’) from one’s ethical responsibility would
be, paradoxically, to displace that responsibility onto a ‘calculation’, and thus
would itself be unethical precisely to the extent that it relieves one of further
responsibility for the decision in any given case. Ethics therefore demands a
legal/political decision that can only rest on something like a ‘mystical founda-
tion’ (see ‘Force of Law’), since such a decision cannot be founded on any
determinable rules, reasons or values without abandoning its claim to ethical
status. Accordingly, the legal/political decision can only be ‘determined beyond
knowledge, beyond all presentation, all concepts’ (Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,
p. 115) – which is to say, at least on one reading, beyond the reach of reason
in any form.
Before addressing the question of the putative a-rationality of the messianic
decision, however, we should note the reasons that not only Beardsworth but
Derrida himself views the ethical injunction as a formalism.13 The injunction is
formal because it enjoins nothing – it requires that a calculative political deci-
sion be made in responsibility to ‘all the other Others’, but provides no substan-
tive content or guidance for that decision. The ethics of the political decision is
thus emphatic – it is an injunction, it imposes responsibility – but entirely empty.
It is a non-normative ethics, and by that same token, is incapable of doing the
work that Beardsworth thinks must be done (i.e., delineating particular, direc-
tive interventions in fields of social and political force). From Beardsworth’s
perspective, Derrida’s ethico-political messianic philosophy takes us only so
far – it pushes us towards political action but refuses to tell us what to do. Why
shouldn’t he complain?
I will leave aside here the most fundamental defense of Derrida’s ‘messianic
without messianism’, which is based on the concept of freedom – the notion
that only a formally empty ethical injunction leaves room for a genuinely free
(and therefore also responsible) political decision, in a way that no diktat of
political theory ever could – because that defense does not speak to Beardsworth’s
complaint. He is not concerned with freedom; indeed, as noted at the outset,
he fundamentally agrees with Derrida’s underlying philosophical account.
Instead, he is looking for a concrete theoretical engagement with and solutions
for the critical problems of the day. Can the avowed formalism of Derrida’s
Levinasian account of the political offer anything on that front?
The answer, I think, is threefold. First, on the negative side, Beardsworth is
asking something of Derrida’s philosophy that it was never designed to give. For
all the cultural and political analyses that Derrida offered up alongside his phil-
osophical arguments, he was not a cultural theorist, sociologist, anthropologist
or political theorist, at least of the type that Beardsworth is looking for, and his
justified fame does not rest on any of his intermittent suggestions or interven-
tions in these disciplines. Indeed, I am often struck when reading these cultur-
al-political asides by the pertinence of a point that Derrida made about Levinas’s
own sometimes controversial political views: ‘This discontinuity [i.e., the hiatus
between the ethical injunction and the calculative political decision, the main
point of Derrida’s ethico-political theorizing] . . . allows us to subscribe to every-
thing Levinas says about peace or messianic hospitality, about the beyond of the
political in the political, without necessarily sharing all the ‘opinions’ in his
discourse having to do with intrapolitical analysis of real situations or of what is
actually going on today with the earthly Jerusalem, or indeed with a Zionism
that would no longer be just one more nationalism’ (Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,
p. 117). One need no more agree with Derrida’s similar ‘opinions’ than with
Levinas’s to recognize the value of his thinking. He was a great philosopher,
and it is senseless to blame him for failing (also) to be a great theorist of inter-
national relations, politics, culture, law, or any other discipline, even if it is also
true that his philosophy touches and opens up all of these other disciplines in
different ways.
Moreover, second, Beardsworth’s charge of formalism ignores one whole side
of Derrida’s messianic structure: the political decision itself, which has been
enjoined as an ethical matter. That decision is of necessity calculative and ratio-
nal, and thus calculation and rationality are intrinsic to Derrida’s schema.
There is no justice for Derrida without rationality and calculation, because what
the ethical injunction enjoins is rationality and calculation. That is just the type
of thinking that Beardsworth is advocating.
Nevertheless, third, there is no doubt that the emphasis of Derrida’s messi-
anic philosophy is on the initial, ‘ethical’ (in Levinas’s sense) injunction, and
that that injunction is conceptualized as entirely empty. It thus remains a fair

question, one that Beardworth asks, what the messianic ethical injunction has
to offer in our current situation, given this empty formalism. The answer, I
think, is that its emptiness, its ‘indifference to content’, is not simply a formal-
ism. The emptiness is instead best understood not as pure negativity but as an
affirmative trace of the Other embedded in the ethico-political messianic struc-
ture. This trace is in fact what gives it its messianic power, what calls the injunc-
tion into being and allows or causes it to impose responsibility to act in the first
instance. As Derrida puts it,
This indifference to content here is not an indifference, it is not an attitude

of indifference, on the contrary. Marking any opening to the event and to
the future as such, it therefore conditions the interest in and not the indiffer-
ence to anything whatsoever, to all content in general. Without it, there
would be neither intention, nor need, nor desire, and so on. (Specters of Marx,
p. 73)
That is, the formal emptiness of the injunction is the sign of the future as such,
the pure and simple à venir that is the dimension of the Other but also of all
desire, intention, and interest. It provides no norms or guidance for action, but
it is what makes one act politically in the first place – or to be more specific, it
is what makes one act out of an ‘interest’ and ‘desire’ for the Other, rather than
acting out of pure self-interest or self-regard.
It is that dimension of Derrida’s ‘formalism’ that, it seems to me, Beardsworth
has missed. He is correct that it adds nothing to the stockpile of intellectual
weapons available to the theorist of ‘historical actuality’ and its ‘fields of
force’. What it offers instead is hope – hope that there is another way of
theorizing, one that does not reduce to just another variation on the theme of
sovereign self-interest, whether that sovereign is a state, an individual, or an
economic class defined by its shared self-interest. That hope is based on the
indelible ethical moment inscribed – purely formally, as the opening to the
absolute future, the à venir, and therefore to the Other, to freedom, and to
responsibility – in every historical moment. The formal element of Derrida’s
messianism thus goes not to the content of progressive political thinking but
to its motivation.14
This reading also returns us to the question of rationality that Beardsworth
raises, that is, whether the deconstructive gesture of locating a ‘constitutive
outside’ in every purported totality can be brought within the realm of reason.
That, it seems to me, was Derrida’s intention all along, but especially in the
later works that Beardsworth addresses.15 Specifically, Derrida was concerned
to demonstrate the presence of an ethical moment of concrete engagement
with an Other inscribed in each ‘here and now’ of our times – the presence of
an injunction and a call to act politically, in the emphatic sense of an ethical
and not a self-interested politics.16 Any rationality without such hope for ethical
political engagement, including one aimed at the ‘rational development of
historical actuality’, is doomed to suffer the same fate as ‘techno-scientific

rationality (p. 16).
On that note, I will close with a passage from a critical essay written by another
defender of a rationality of the type that Beardsworth advocates, Jürgen
Habermas. In this passage, Habermas is discussing the godfather of contempo-
rary political messianism, Walter Benjamin. Habermas was clearly troubled by
the challenge posed by Benjamin’s messianic concerns; and, mutatis mutandis,
his concerns seem equally appropriate with regard to Beardsworth’s rejection
of Derrida:
Can we preclude the possibility of a meaningless emancipation? In complex

societies, emancipation means the participatory transformation of adminis-
trative decision structures. Is it possible that one day an emancipated human
race could encounter itself within an expanded space of discursive formation
of will and yet be robbed of the light in which it is capable of interpreting its
life as something good?17
No less than Habermas, Beardsworth fears the prospect of the world-as-market,

a globalized society of the spectacle where the meaning of freedom can only be
understood in terms of commodity fetishism. From a very different direction,
that prospect is also the driving fear behind the forces of reaction at work in all
of the Western religions today. In this situation, one need not embrace funda-
mentalism to recognize in the categories of religion potential allies in the intel-
lectual battle against the global hegemony of the market and its consequent
cultural pathologies. And, it is an enormous error to think that either rampant
capitalism or fundamentalist reaction can be combated by the same limited
notion of Enlightenment and reason that gave rise to them.
Political reason requires more than the right tools for socio-political analysis;
it needs to incorporate an emphatic moment of ethical impetus or motivation,
one that addresses itself to the Other and not to the self. The only vocabulary
at our disposal imbued with such an ethical impetus that at the same time has a
sufficiently intrinsic link to the life of Western culture to give it political traction
is the vocabulary of messianism that is common coin to all the religions of the
Book. To use the phrasing from my epigraph, these are ‘the reactionary argu-
ments against Western culture’ that must themselves be saved by placing them
‘in the service of progressive enlightenment’ today. In that sense, the notion of
a ‘messianic without messianism’ responds to an eminently strategic political
opportunity to intervene in the ‘historical force-field’ of our culture, quite apart
from its philosophical ‘pertinence’. Derrida’s (and others’) lasting contribu-
tion to political-philosophical discourse, for our own time and for the foresee-
able future, is to have recognized that political opportunity and to have acted
on it by demonstrating, as a matter of reason, how the religious category of ‘the
messianic’ is the condition of possibility for those ‘new forms of rationality’ that
can provide for the ‘rational development of historical actuality’ that, as
Beardsworth recognizes, we so desperately need today.
Notes
* The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and not those of the United
States Department of Defense.
1
Richard Beardsworth, ‘The Messianic Now: A Secular Response’ (pp. 15–25). All
2
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 73. All
3
Compare Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge,
1996) with, for example, Mark Lilla, ‘The Politics of Jacques Derrida’, The New
York Review of Books, 45:11 (25 June 1998), pp. 36–41.
4
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), p. 49.
5
He describes Derrida’s thinking of the messianic in secular terms as ‘strong’
but not an ‘effective secular rebuff of religious fundamentalism’ (pp. 19–20,
emphasis original), for example, and his complaint about the ‘quasi-concept
of “democracy to come”’ is that, although ‘tempting’, it does not do the work
needed’ (p. 23).
6
While this language may sound like a call for a return to Hegel, what Beardsworth
seems to have in mind is a ‘more materialist approach to historical actuality’
(p. 20) that à la Foucault and Nietzsche, focuses on ‘contemporary relations of
force’ (p. 17).
7
See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben,
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(New York: Zone Books, 1999); Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception trans.
Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Giorgio Agamben,
Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogica teologica dell’economia e del governo (Milan:
Neri Pozza, 2007); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul trans. Dana
Hollander (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
8
For a comparison, see Adam Thurschwell, ‘Specters of Nietzsche: Potential
Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida’ (1 September
2004) (available at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969055).
9
These charges recapitulate an argument that Beardsworth has made elsewhere
in greater detail. See Richard Beardsworth, ‘In Memoriam Jacques Derrida: The
Power of Reason’, Theory and Event, 8:1 (2005).
10
Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 68 (emphasis omitted). Indeed, as many have noted,
the ‘other others’ are implicated in Levinas’ ethical relationship from the outset.
See, for example, Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Third Party. Levinas on the Intersection
of the Ethical and the Political’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 30:1
(1999), pp. 76–87.
11
Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in
Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson, eds. Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 28. All further references will
be given in the text.
12
Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas trans. Pascal-Ann Brault and Michael
Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 115. All further references
will be given in the text.
13
See Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 115 (referring to ‘formal injunction’);
see also Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 73 (referring to structure of messianic as
‘apparently “formalist”’).
14
For another recent work that attempts to give the question of political motivation
philosophical stature, see Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of
Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007).
15
At a minimum, Beardsworth is wrong to limit this intention to Rogues and suggest
that it was absent from the earlier work. To cite one example, as early as Adieu to
Emmanuel Levinas – a text that is contemporaneous with ‘Faith and Knowledge’,
which Beardsworth cites as an example of Derrida’s supposed earlier rejection of
reason – Derrida was explicitly reconceiving ‘reason’ in Levinasian ethical terms
as a ‘receiving’:
Reason itself is a receiving. Another way of saying it, if one still wishes to speak
within the law of the tradition, though against it, against its inherited opposi-
tions, is that reason is sensibility. Reason itself is welcome inasmuch as it
welcomes the idea of infinity – and the welcome is rational. (Adieu to Emmanuel
Levinas, p. 26)
As Derrida puts it, in Levinas’s hands – and Derrida is clearly endorsing as well as
reading Levinas in this moment – ‘[t]he long line of the philosophical tradition
that passes through the concept of receptivitity or passivity, and thus, it was
thought, of sensibility as opposed to rationality, is here reoriented at its most
basic level’, p. 26.
16
On this point, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’,
in Chantal Mouffe, ed. Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge,
1996), pp. 82–83:
. . . I would not call this attitude utopian. The messianic experience of which
I spoke takes place here and now; that is, the fact of promising and speaking is
an event that takes place here and now and is not utopian. This happens in the
singular event of engagement, and when I speak of democracy to come
(démocratie à venir) this does not mean that tomorrow democracy will be real-
ized, and it does not refer to a future democracy, rather it means that there is
an engagement with respect to democracy which consists in recognizing the
irreducibility of the promise when, in the messianic moment, ‘it can come’. . . .
There is the future . . . There is something to come . . . That can happen . . .
that can happen, and I promise in opening the future or in leaving the future
open. This is not utopian, it is what takes place here and now, in a here and
now that I regularly try to dissociate from the present. . . . I try to dissociate the
theme of singularity happening here and now from the theme of presence
and, for me, there can be a here and now without presence.
17
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing
Critique?’, Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985),
p. 160.
Chapter 3
A Brief Response to Adam Thurschwell’s

‘Politics without the Messianic or a
“Messianic without Messianism”?’
Richard Beardsworth
American University of Paris
In a gracious and thoughtful response to my previous article ‘The Messianic

Now: A Secular Response’, Adam Thurschwell criticizes my own criticisms of
the ‘messianic’ as an appropriate philosophical approach to contemporary
political challenges. He takes me to task on several issues. In the following, I will
focus on what I consider important disagreements in order to underscore the
validity of my own position. I thank both Adam Thurschwell for the care with
which he has responded to me and the editor of this volume, Arthur Bradley,
for giving me space, after the fact, to respond.
For both myself and Thurschwell, the stakes of our interventions are clear:
either the practice of politics can be better addressed without the messianic or
the messianic without messianism presents the condition from which to develop
better ethical and political practices. We are both, in doing so, arguing for polit-
ical reason: myself, within a large context of modernity; Thurschwell, within
a deconstructed notion of reason that associates reason with a radical passivity.
I find it important that towards the end of his intervention, Thurschwell stresses
the reasonable nature of deconstruction. Indeed, he suggests that my article
exaggerates the extent to which Jacques Derrida recuperated deconstructive
practices within reason in the last years of his work (note 15 in Chapter 2). I will
turn to his point at the end of my response but, here, let me just stress that I am
delighted to hear that those presently working with Derrida now explicitly
acknowledge that they are engaged with the future of political reason.
I accept that my chapter, by focusing on the work of Derrida, ignores recent
and contemporary work by Georgio Agamben and other contemporary philos-
ophers influenced by French thought. I focused on what I consider the kernel
A Brief Response to Adam Thurschwell 37
rewriting of the religious. I do not believe that it has advanced structurally since
Derrida’s work. Since the paradigm remains the same in later work, I argued –
I believe correctly – that this thinking ‘ends’ with Derrida (see Chapter 1,
pp. 15–16). But Thurschwell’s major points lie elsewhere. There are five points,
in particular, that are outstanding.
First, since I have no fundamental disagreement with the philosophy of the
messianic, only a strategic one, my political-instrumentalist objection to decon-
struction is weaker than a philosophical objection that attacks the messianic
approach to the political as such. Second, my reduction of French thought, and
most particularly Derrida’s thought of ‘the promise’, to an historical epoch is
historicist and philosophically naïve. Third, my charge regarding Derrida’s
rewriting of religion and its ethical political consequences, is correct, but for
the wrong reasons: Derrida’s re-inscription of the radical opening to the other
is indeed formal because the opening is substantively empty. But this emptiness
is not to be deplored or lamented for lack of our ability to use it politically.
It is the unanticipated injunction of the other within any identity. Fourth,
I therefore miss the ethical dimension of the messianic, one that intervenes in
every moment of seeming closure, summoning us out of our own interests
towards the other. It is this non-normative, ethical effraction that sustains
the importance of Derrida’s thinking for any rational account of our historical
actuality. Fifth, since our actuality is the threat of a ‘world-market’, and since
Enlightenment reason cannot offer a way beyond either ‘rampant capitalism’
or ‘fundamentalist reaction’ to it (Chapter 2, p. 33), the notion of the ‘messi-
anic without messianism’ (of ethical alterity within the same) can help us to
intervene in the historical force-field of our culture. For these five reasons, I fail
to understand Derrida’s reasoned articulation of the messianic and, ironically,
I underestimate, from out of this reasoning, the strategic utility of the quasi-
concept ‘the messianic without messianism’. Since Thurschwell accuses me of
wishing to instrumentalize thinking in his first point, and of missing the strength
of Derrida’s rigorous formalism in his third point (substantive emptiness), it is
a little ironic to be told at the end that there is nothing more strategic at our disposal
than the ‘messianic’ to resist the twin evils of untamed capitalism and religious
fundamentalism. I will respond to each point in turn and will come to this
larger irony at the end of my response.
On the first point, there is a misunderstanding. Thurschwell quotes me
arguing that ‘the messianic, together with its accompanying strategies is philo-
sophically pertinent’, but not ‘historically transformative’ (Chapter 1, p. 17). My
complaint is ‘therefore not with the substance of Derrida’s philosophy, but with
the intellectual resources it consumes [that] could be more productively spent
elsewhere from an instrumental-political perspective’. He adds later: ‘[Derrida]
was a great philosopher, and it is senseless to blame him for failing (also) to be
a great theorist of international relations, politics, culture, law or any other
discipline, even if it is true that his philosophy touches and opens up all of these
different disciplines in different ways’ (Chapter 2, p. 31). The misunderstanding
is simple: to say that something is philosophically pertinent does not mean to

say that it is conceptually valid for the domain that one is addressing. The ges-
ture of French thought that looks to the excess of reason (double genitive) is, I
believe, pertinent to the processes of thinking particular to the discipline of
philosophy and has interesting things to say regarding both the Abrahamic reli-
gions and the unconditional nature of reason. I do not believe, however, that
focus on this excess is a valid way to think and develop the relations between history
and reason. Such focus entails losing many of the determinations of history
through which transformation of one’s epoch is possible in the first place. To
divide my thinking between philosophical reason, on the one hand, and instru-
mental reason, on the other, and to suggest consequently that my ‘complaint’
concerns only strategy radically underestimate my engagement with Derrida’s
re-inscription of the messianic. I am arguing that this re-inscription will neces-
sarily remain complicit with the idealist structure of religious thinking however
much it claims to deconstruct the ‘binary opposition’ between idealism and
materialism. In ‘The Messianic Now: A Secular Response’ this complicity is situ-
ated in Derrida’s unwillingness to develop the relation between politics, eco-
nomics and religion. With the rewriting of nineteenth century atheism and
secularization theses, Derrida’s reticence is understandable: nineteenth cen-
tury atheism can be understood philosophically as saturating the real. But it
does not offer a good philosophical point from which to develop our historical
actuality: the reconfiguration of relations between polity, economy and culture (religious
or secular).
As I suggest in the piece and elsewhere, lack of reflection on the economy
redounds to a Husserlian and Heideggerian understanding of reason and ratio-
nal development: the economic is reduced in this thinking to the technological
and/or rational-scientific. As the present global financial and economic crisis
now explicitly shows, renewed focus from critical philosophy on the material
arrangements of social life is needed to address our actuality and develop ratio-
nal possibilities from within it. Within my piece there is therefore major dis-
agreement on how to philosophize in the modern world. Derrida’s philosophy
is sophisticated, and his strategies of thinking are philosophically pertinent;
they do not however focus on the matter at hand when discussing the so-called
return of religion. This takes me to Thurschwell’s second point: my historicism.
Thurschwell is graceful in his criticisms, but he thinks that I am very naïve in
reducing a philosophy to its historical context. I do not know whether Derrida
will be generally read in 200 years time, but I know this: the move in French
thought against totality and closure, together with the insistence on radical
alterity, come at a moment in history when Western thinking is placed in ques-
tion. The suspicion is laid, in general, against the rational legacy of the
Enlightenment: along various paths – some complex, others simplistic – rea-
son is considered to have contributed to the ills of humanity (and nature) in
the twentieth century. One of the particularities of French thinking in the
second half of the twentieth century was to have addressed those ills (from the
genocide of the Jews through decolonization to sexual normativity) in terms of

the tradition of reason and its exclusions. As I argued in detail in Derrida and
the Political, Derrida’s own thinking in this general gesture is ambivalent and
the most complex. This thinking is nevertheless concerned to break down; not
to build up. Following Heidegger’s intellectual framework, the age of building
is generalized by him as the age of ‘metaphysics’. A ‘post’-metaphysical, non-
foundational philosophy cannot therefore construct without contradicting
itself. I believe this latter gesture of thought, together with its generalizations
(especially concerning politics), are specific to the second half of the twenti-
eth century. This specificity does not mean that they will not have import
beyond that moment of history; the former gains its meaning from the experi-
ences of this period and these experiences will return in the future in new
forms. That said, these experiences have changed in nature over the last few
years, culminating, for the moment, in the financial and economic crisis of
2007–2009. For this era, we need another gesture of philosophy: one that
claims the rationality of constructions. If Thurschwell can show, as he main-
tains in principle, how the messianic opening leads to such constructions from
out of our histories, I will listen carefully (although I am very sceptical that he
can). To ask as much is not to ask too much from a philosopher, and certainly
not one who claims a strong critical tradition, as Derrida does. Critical philos-
ophy is not fringe philosophy; it wishes to challenge and change mainstream
thought. To put it in Derrida’s own terms, the margin is the centre. My article
does not therefore reduce either Derrida’s thinking or French thought in gen-
eral to a historical period; it assumes that historical periods will solicit different
philosophical gestures, and that our age is one of construction, not decon-
struction. This is not a historicist point. I also consider that the last assumption
is a response in turn to the non-totalising nature of the relation between his-
tory and reason – a point to which I return at the end.
Third, I miss, according to Thurschwell, the pertinence of Derrida’s formal-
istic account of ethics. He is happy to accord me Derrida’s formalism, but I am
wrong not to see in this formalism the strength of Derrida’s rewriting of reli-
gion (as the radical opening to the other). As Thurschwell carefully unties
(Chapter 2, pp. 29–31), the relation between the ethical and the political in
Derrida’s work is both necessary and impossible. Radical singularity demands
respect, but must be disrespected for the respect of other singularities. The
ethical relation to the other necessitates rational calculation (equity, for exam-
ple), but is also destroyed by it. Derrida is in a sense a hyper-ethical watch-
keeper of this recurrent ethico-political dilemma that eludes any politics of the
present. The promissory structure of the messianic event ensues therefrom.
Thurschwell’s account follows Derrida well. He is wrong, however, to emphasize
that the ethical relation and its injunction ‘provide [therefore] no substantive
content or guidance’ for a decision concerning ‘all the other Others’ (p. 30). As
Thurschwell himself argues, for Derrida, the messianic event is the very condi-
tion of any rational determination; without recognizance of the event, rational
determinations would be more violent, not less. Derrida’s reworking of Levinas

takes him, consequently, to an ethics of ‘the least violence’ in the knowledge
that one cannot fail to disrespect the singularity of the other. An ethics of the
least violence is the guide to political decision.1 Derrida, however, refused to
determine what this least violence might mean concretely within the determi-
nations of our own age: particularly the disjuncture between polity and econ-
omy. Unlike Thurschwell, I do not believe it enough for philosophical practice
to determine the (ecstasies of the) event as the condition of reason. Since the
event is assumed by reason, it is for reason to develop its determinations in
order for the least violence to be possible. Again, reason must address historical
determination in order to be able to transform it for the better (or the least
worst). There is a larger point here that I turn to in my fourth response.
My response to Thurschwell’s fourth criticism is therefore clear. I do not
believe that my reading of religion within the ‘stricture’ of autoimmunity and
radical evil misses the ethical dimension to the messianic event and is there-
fore complicit with the deontological flatness of positivist social scientific
analysis (Chapter 2, p. 31). Here, Thurschwell reduces my argument to the
temporality of instrumental reason (Frankfurt-school-style): urgency, pres-
ence, calculation. I argue something deeper: greater ethical contingency and
singularity (the concerns of French thought from Levinas onwards) can only
appear from out of determination, and such determination must adjust, his-
torically, to what Hegel famously called the ‘matter at hand’. As I have argued
elsewhere, this matter is the contemporary diremption between polity and
economy: global capitalism, on the one hand, intrastate politics, with a touch
of supranational bureaucracy, on the other. A global response is required
that is tailored at one and the same time to the sustainable principles of
Enlightenment reason, to the political and practical unfeasibility of world
democracy, and to the emerging forms of reactive and proactive regionalism.
In this context, ‘intercivilizational’ debate about messianism and its unitary
condition is culturally important, and cultural diplomacy of the future might
well exploit it. I suspect, however, that the ethical impetus of the ‘messianic’ in
the public realm will not go much beyond this particular realm of determina-
tion: culture. Our concern is to develop the relations between the municipal,
national, regional and global such that conditions of singularity are possible in
the first place. The ‘we’ here stands for agents of political reason.
Finally, Thurschwell argues at the end of his piece that ‘I fear the prospect of
the world-as-market . . . where the meaning of freedom can only be understood
in terms of commodity fetishism’ (Chapter 2, p. 33) and that I therefore miss
the ‘eminent strategic political opportunity’ to use the concept of the messianic
in order to intervene in the force-field of our culture and resist both ‘rampant
capitalism’ and ‘religious fundamentalism’. I initially wondered whether to
respond to this final comment or not. I sense that it is an after-thought on the
part of Thurschwell, although it rhymes with his exergue from Adorno that sug-
gests one uses the ‘reactionary religious arguments against Western culture in
the service of progressive enlightenment’ (Adorno). Thurschwell’s final

argument – in a displaced, deconstructive move – is accordingly that one must
use the ‘messianic without messianism’ to develop forms of rationality that
counter global capitalism. This after-thought is inconsistent with the main push
of Thurschwell’s argument against me. Throughout his four earlier points, he
suggests that I reduce thought to a political instrumentalism that necessarily
misses Derrida’s strong formalism and the philosophical bent of his writings. At
the end, in a move against both global capitalist fetishism and religious funda-
mentalism, he suggests that using the concept of the messianic from out of
religious discourse is the only resource of enough ‘political traction’ today to
help us further ‘progressive enlightenment’ (Chapter 2, p. 26). On the one
hand, Thurschwell wants, philosophically, the ethical opening to the other to
be pure (the object of philosophical consideration); on the other hand, strate-
gically and politically, Thurschwell wants the messianic to do the work against
religious fundamentalism that secular thinking (without the messianic) cannot do.
Like many Levinasian-inspired Derrideans, Thurschwell is left at the end argu-
ing at one and the same time for ethical/philosophical rigour (to one side of
political and social transformation) and for political and social transformation
(to one side of non-ethical politics). Thurschwell is attempting to square a cir-
cle: hence my first point above. If one holds to the formal analysis of eventhood
as a philosophical priority, one’s political strategy will necessarily ride free of
the determinations of historical actuality and not be in a position to transform
them for the better. If one develops historical actuality rationally in order to
transform it, one will develop the social relation out of its determined forms,
but one does not need recourse to the so-called messianicity of the social rela-
tion to do so.
Thurschwell’s final argument is therefore not simply paradoxical given his
first argument against me; it appears incorrect. He says that ‘it is an enormous
error to think that either rampant capitalism or fundamentalist reaction can
be combated by the same limited notion of Enlightenment and reason that
gave rise to them’ (Chapter 2, p. 33). There are a large set of discourses behind
Thurschwell’s comment, but, basically, for him, techno-scientific instrumentality
leads to both market hegemony and the recent religious reaction against it.
Following Derrida’s strategy of thinking in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (see Chapter 1),
Thurschwell reduces the Enlightenment to the fate of instrumental reason
and rampant capitalism to the hegemony of the market, positing against both
the messianic. This gesture will not deter religious fundamentalism. What will
deter the latter is the gradual development of rational (accountable, sustain-
able and transparent) analysis and institution between global markets, nation-
states and supranational authorities. This process is slowly taking place (and it
has been given a push again both by the financial crisis and by the advent of
the Obama administration state-side). But it needs to be advanced further by
critical secular thought, especially with regard to those who, with the failures
of Marxism, wish to puncture reason or associate reason and its traditions with
Western hegemony. I am not concerned with commodity fetishism or the

world-as-market. Rather, I am concerned with the IMF’s regulatory regime, the
future of the security council in the United Nations, what the relative decline
of American hegemony implies for progressive liberalism, the integration of
China into international institutions and their norms, and so on, and our criti-
cal ability to assume these economic and political contingencies into an effec-
tive progressive discourse that is rational and, as rational, can prove more persuasive
and sustaining than other discourses. I am concerned with how markets create
growth, individualism and innovation; how, when of global reach, they can be
effectively framed to allow, in an incremental manner, for global public goods
like social justice and sustainability. I am concerned with whether this framing
can be political or not, whether human beings, at a global level, are con-
demned to a liberal proceduralism of public rules, one that fosters demands
for community and, therefore, the possibility of fundamentalism, etc. These
questions animate many contemporary debates. They are secular and require
reason to be expanded, debated and refined. Secular thinkers do not need
the ‘messianic’ to mobilize their articulation against contemporary fundamen-
talisms: they need the wealth of determination to find out what is rational for
our day.
In the end, therefore, despite a certain generosity towards deconstruction in
my previous responses, Thurschwell and I stand in very different positions with
regard to the relation between history and reason. We are not on the same phil-
osophical ground. Because of these different positions, I do not consider that
‘the doctrine of messianic restitution . . . will save the concept of the political’
(Chapter 2, p. 26), however much this doctrine is deconstructed. The ‘messi-
anic without messianism’ deters us from doing the work necessary to build a
political world, and in that sense it has become, for me, a red herring. Our dif-
ferences are clear. The conversation has been helpful to me and will, I hope,
prove useful to others.2
Notes
1
On this point, see my Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996).
2
I add a final note to a note. In note 15 of Thurschwell’s response to me (Chapter 2),
he argues that I am wrong to limit my attention to Rogues, suggesting (as in the
main body of the text) that deconstruction was always rational in the sense that
it wished to bring radical alterity within reason. This is not true as any cursory
reading of Derrida’s writings in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s will show: following
Heidegger, attention to the unconditioned is the domain of thought, not the
domain of reason. Rogues is the first and last text explicitly to deliberate upon
the structure of autoimmunity as a double figure of rationality: a reason that is
open to the event, a reason that anticipates and calculates, with both reasons
exceeding and delimiting the other. Derrida defines the process of transaction
between the two (the incalculable and the calculable) as ‘reasonable’ (see
Rogues, pp. 149–151). This is a new way to fashion the practice of deconstruction
in an irrational age. In note 15, Thurschwell nevertheless points out that a text
contemporaneous with ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (written 1994), Adieu to Emmanuel
Levinas (written 1995) speaks already of reason as a receiving (the unantici-
pated, the event, the promise). As Derrida says, ‘the welcome of the idea of
infinity is rational’ (Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 26). Thurschwell is right to
remind me of these lines: it is clear from them that Derrida is already beginning
to think of hypercritical faith in rational terms. That said, the preceding ‘Faith
and Knowledge’ still fails to differentiate between different kinds of reason, as I
argue in ‘The Messianic Now: A Secular Response’. More importantly, this radi-
cal receptivity to the event, of which Derrida is talking, passes through Levinas’s
reading of Descartes’ Meditations in Totality and Infinity (trans. Alphonso Lingis,
Pittsburgh, PA : Duquesne University Press: 1969, pp. 48–52) . For Levinas, the
Cartesian idea of the infinite is the idea of a radical disjuncture between the idea
and its referent, since we can have no idea of the infinite, just an idea of it. This
disjuncture, for Levinas, attests to the effraction of the infinite within the finite,
or the Other in me – justice. It is therefore completely understandable in this
context that Derrida, following Levinas, speaks of this moment as ‘rational’ since
Descartes is rehearsing what Kant calls later a ‘speculative idea’ (in the Kantian
architectonic the height of human rational power). This disjuncture testifies
more, to the development of our rational faculties to address alterity than it
does to the recurrent effraction within these faculties. Within the history of phi-
losophy I do not consider it a moment of passivity. It is a moment in which
reason incorporates ‘radical exteriority’ as an idea. This incorporation develops
more the relation between history and reason (one in which God becomes
a philosophical idea that grounds the transcendental ego) than it does testify to
a reorientation of philosophical sensibility.
Part Two
Genealogies
Chapter 4
Messianic Deposition: Representation and

the Flight of the Gods
Laurence Paul Hemming
At the origin of Western thought lies a fragment of poetry which presents itself
as a dramatically contemporary, forcefully immediate, thought. A thought as if
capable of collapsing the distance between us and antiquity. It says: τί θεός; τò
πάν.1 Usually translated as ‘what is God? Everything!’, it could, it seems have
been uttered by Spinoza or Feuerbach as the metaphysical or psychological elu-
cidation of the meaning (if there is any left) of substance, or by an epigone of
Nietzsche’s – one of those many who seek at one and the same time to doff their
cap to the death of God and restore the dimmed sufficiency of deity to some
place in modern intellectual life. The all, as everything we know, is all we know,
and it is us ourselves.
This translation is reinforced by the one at whose hands we receive it, the
Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, who preserved this otherwise lost
fragment in the context of baptizing it, adding for good measure (and to rein-
force how prescient the pagans were of Christian antiquity) ‘and how the lyric
poet Pindar is enthused when he says outright’ – τί θεός; τò πάν.2
The word that is translated as ‘enthused’ is εκβακχεύεται, and says literally,
‘overflows with Bacchic frenzy’: drunk with surplus itself. Clement as good as
tells us that even Pindar, filled as he was with pagan spirit is forced to acknowl-
edge that God is all. We read this therefore, as Pindar’s modern acknowledge-
ment in Bacchic frenzy attesting of the fullness of presence: ‘God and the all: the
same’. Pindar, a plastered pagan prophet, is made to announce the totality of
presence, that God is all, and is made to pronounce this discovery as a proleptic
Christian truth of the domination of divinity over all things, the plenitudinous,
the causal origination of all that is in being. Pindar’s fragment is read, by Clement
as much as by us, as a messianic fragment, announcing the consummation of the
world by divine presence, and so the triumph of presence as such. We who read
this can read it even without divinity – for inasmuch as divinity – God – is equated
with the all, the totality of the all, the fullness of the extantness of the extant
names how the being and nature of divinity and God is reduced to plenitude, and
measured to the All. Were such a God to be declared dead, the all, plenitude and
full presence, prevails: the will to power. Domination is the mode of announce-
ment of presence as such. Because we already know what the all – τò πάν – is, and
how it is, every determination of divinity and God (even when that God is not)
will be made out of what we already know of the All.
The announcement of messiahs – every messianic proclamation – arrives
always seeming engulfed in the tone of futurity: in apocalyptic; in prophecy; in
foreshadowing. The shadow cast by the messiah comes from ahead of us, and yet
Clement makes us read this messianic shout ‘outright’ and plainly (άντικρυς):
something easy to see and uncover. If the heart of modernity and its successions,
however, is the technical refusal of the future, then here, even in antiquity, we
find that with a little teasing, we have been made to discover the future through
a projection back. We have been sent back into the past, where we find out how
this technical refusal is already at work. We listen to Clement, who speaks of
Pindar, and who tells us that Pindar knew already what Clement knows better,
and we who know better even than Clement what Clement knew (because we
live in the past’s future), all of which means that we can see that this future was
already foreshadowed, already told and known and plain for all to see. It was,
therefore, no real future at all. This is a technical refusal because Greek τέχνη, the
begotten, begets from out of the past: what is begotten is planned ahead of time,
already present, already decided. Mental τέχνη works in the opposite direction to
every other kind of truth as the Greeks knew it: what is technically true has been
already made (in the mind) and strives simply to be realized, to be achieved.
Technique and the planetary domination it produces abolishes the place of
the messiah, reduces it. The imaginary is not freed from this – repeatedly philos-
ophy has noted that what can be imagined is simply the reordering of the
already-known, the already-experienced, into forms that appear to be new but
in fact are not. This is what Kant called the capacity of the imagination to recon-
struct experience: he speaks of how ‘the power of imagination is therefore very
powerful in creating another nature out of the stuff which actual nature gives
it. We also even remodel [actual nature]’.3 We can interpret our dreams, psy-
chologically speaking, because they are about what has already befallen us, and
not what is yet to come. Reality – in whatever form we have it (the present, ‘his-
tory’, ‘culture’ and so forth) is so much bricolage from out of which new collages
can be made.
At the heart of technique, of τέχνη itself, is representation. The plan, already
existing, seeks to be realized. It seeks to be realized not only through what is
already known, but because it is already known, it is already familiar. The results
of the plan are always familiar to us. Representation, Vorstellung as Heidegger
named it, literally means fore-placing: placing before us what already-is.
Presenting what was already-present. From Aristotle to Nietzsche – indeed this is
Representation and the Flight of the Gods 49
Nietzsche’s resistance of Aristotle – ‘being’ means no more than this. At the

heart of metaphysical being is the representational character of the subject –
announced but not invented by Descartes, that one who runs ahead of every
world, so that every world exists as a subjectival production. The cogito-me-cogitare
– ‘I think me thinking’ that occurs prior to, and as the representative possibility,
of everything thought at all. Before ever anything is, I am. Descartes places the
human subject midway between God and creation, however, whilst making God
firmly the cause and originating possibility of all things. As such, God is always
more already-there than the cogito, prior, before. Τέχνη, ever at its work, shows
God to have caused, and so planned everything there is, including that I am. I am
shows God to have been. The predominating rulership of τέχνη overtakes even
God when God is dead. Now, and for full 200 years, the future has been utterly
overcome by the presence of a technically dominant subjectivity. I am is all there
is. What is the effect of this upon the messianic, the question before us? I am, the
represented, fore-present, ever-present, subject disbars the future, overcomes it,
blocks the access. How? Now every messiah must already have been as something
possible, already have been inevitable, already have been able to be foreseen
before he is. This is Clement of Alexandria’s most telling point, in representing
Pindar to us. The subject, as prior first cause of all that is, saturates the cosmos
with itself – but how? Surely if now, since Nietzsche, we have rid ourselves of God
as first and prior cause, how can the human subject function as a cause?
That this atheistic epoch in which we live operates out of prior first causes
turns out to be no less true now than that at any other epoch in metaphysics. In
this, the repeated claims of postmodernity to be free of ontotheology manifest
themselves as false. But how, one might ask, can an age in flight from the gods
and from theology and all its claims be ontotheological? The source of this
question is to be founded in the very identity of human identity itself.
The increasingly apocalyptic claims of orthodox religion – that the world is
engulfed in nihilism, and that Antichrist is abroad – place at the centre of their
messianic rhetoric a claim about what is ‘natural’. Ever-increasingly this has
become a claim about sexed identity – about what is normal and natural, posit-
ing an ideal of humanity – even the papacy has begun to speak energetically of
a ‘new humanism’ in messianic terms as the only hope of salvation for an ever-
darkening Europe. The natural man becomes focus of a religious concern.
How are we to understand this appeal to the natural, and why should we be
suspicious of it? The word ‘natural’ comes from the Latin natura, which means
‘that which comes forth for itself’, for its own sake. The intention here is
medial, and nature translates the Greek φύσις with the resonance of its medial
verbal form, φαίνεσθαι, that which brings itself forth into the light. Thought in
a Latin sense, a nature indicates that which acts under its own impulsion and
necessity. The Christian adoption of the natural as a category is a marker of the
fusing of what belongs in the order of faith with the order of being itself – the
very ground of ontotheology. St. Thomas Aquinas indicates how this operates
in a typical way when he says ‘an operation of a nature which is for a definite
end presupposes an intellect that has pre-established the end of the nature
and ordered the nature to that end’.4 From this it is obvious that for Aquinas
something that possesses a nature, something natural, is not so because it
appears for itself and emerges, but something whose extantness indicates a
purpose and meaning that has already been decided and intended. The one
doing the intending is God: a nature is the product and expression of God’s
will. Aquinas discusses this in the context of defending the notion that there
are ideas (we might now say something more like types) in the mind of God –
in other words of defending a (Christian) kind of Neoplatonism.5
In this, Aquinas seeks to reverse the understanding of nature in its relation to
divinity that he finds in Aristotle, for he says: ‘Similarly, those who say that all
things proceed from God by a necessity of nature and not by a decision of will
cannot admit ideas, because those who act impelled by the necessity of a nature
do not determine the end for themselves.’6 For Aquinas, and for the particular
understanding of being which he wishes to defend, a nature cannot be some-
thing that can enquire into itself to determine the character of its nature for
itself, and so disclosing itself to itself. Rather the enquiry into any nature must
disclose what God (already) intended and willed that nature to be. Why is
Aquinas concerned with this? Why should Aquinas not assert that our own self-
enquiry into who we are, and the way in which we appear for ourselves, will dis-
close for us a relationship to God from out of the enquiry we undertake? Or put
another way, why can Aquinas not simply say that the self-enquiry we undertake
will find its concomitant in revelation (that is to say, in the scriptures and how
they are interpreted) which reveals the purpose of the nature, a purpose which
will joyfully turn out to correspond with our own journey of self-disclosure? 7
The question turns on the character of causes. For Aquinas asserts that if
natures are not preordained to their purpose then the activity of their natures
would deny God’s prior causation of them, that is to say, would deny that God
is the ‘first cause of all beings’.8 If we make this a formal basis of our under-
standing of being, then, for Aquinas, we transform the character of what is natu-
ral from something in itself which is to be worked out and disclosed for itself,
into something whose meaning is decided in advance by God. No longer, in this
understanding, does anything address us as itself, and for itself, but rather God
addresses us through things. The working out and disclosing of the causes of
nature therefore becomes an enquiry not into phenomenal natures, but into
the mind of God. This means that the outcome of every enquiry has already
been decided, is already foreclosed, somewhere else (in the mind of God) and
has a determinate end – τέχνη at work again. ‘Truth’ comes to be the discovery
of what God both already knows, and what God decided (willed) was to be
known. Every enquiry with regard to the ‘natural’ is therefore an enquiry into
the pre-existing, an enquiry, in a sense, into the past: ‘I’, the very positing of
every ‘I’ abolishes the future, as what God can announce, and as what would be
personified in the messiah. What identity does the messiah have? Who does he
approach us as, and in name of what God?
When we describe a matter as ‘natural’ or one conforming to the ‘natural

law’ what is meant is not a phenomenon which appears for itself and so has to
be diagnosed and understood, but rather something whose being and appear-
ing is decided in advance of its appearing, in virtue of the will of God. In the
absence of any universal understanding of God as first cause, it would seem that
these problems of the meaning of the ‘natural’ would simply evaporate. In one
area of thought, however, the question of the natural has refused to be extin-
guished. Sexual identity persists as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, which has caused
no end of trouble for theorists of gender and sex. On the one hand we want to
say that gender is a matter of will – that I ‘identify’ as male or female, straight or
gay, and so forth. Unfortunately physiology appears to intervene, surgical
realignments notwithstanding, and at the same time we want to say that I do, or
did, not ‘choose’ the identity I assume, lest I be culpable for the acts which
instantiate the identity I have chosen.
At the same time, identity politics strives to avoid the error of essentialism,
that their sexed or gendered identities are ‘essences’ of any kind, with all the
consequences that would follow on from that claim. To escape from the bind-
ing character of sexed identity, to show how identity is at one and the same time
enforced and not essential, has led the theorist Judith Butler to unravel the
knot by appeal to the now familiar argument of performativity. I do not per-
form the identity I am, I am performed by it. In this, Butler has indicated well the
sheer complexity of sexed identities. What has been less well understood in her
arguments is how performativity, taken as a metaphysical solution to a problem
concerning essences, relates to the question of the will. If God did not ‘will’ me
to be this way – male, female, straight, gay, or something in between, then how
do I relate my gendered identity to the performance of a will?
Put another way – a way related to Aquinas’ assertion that the identity of any-
thing (inside or outside gender configurations) – is in consequence of a deci-
sion of God’s will, why, when ‘we’ no longer assert the existence of such a willing
God, which means when there is no common we who universally accept that
God exists, should we determine sexual identity – identity in its very roots –
from out of a decision of God’s? Isn’t there a more natural way?
Butler answers this when she says, ‘the replication of heterosexual constructs
in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of
the so-called heterosexual original. Thus gay is to straight not as copy is to orig-
inal, but rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of “the original” . . .
reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural
and original’.9
The very juxtaposition of these arguments – of Butler’s and of Aquinas’ –
reveals a startling fact: they both depend on an identical structure for their
analysis of the natural. However, in asserting the identity, we must draw atten-
tion to the difference, a difference entirely historical in character. We must
ask: if God is the ratio – literally, the working out, of the natural in Aquinas, what
ratio is the causa omnium, the cause of all things, that we could identify at work
in the atheistic Butler? (Here we draw attention to the fact of Butler’s atheism
not as a psychological ‘fact’ of what she may or may not believe, but rather that
she writes after Nietzsche, after the death of God has been proclaimed.)
Or we might better put the question the other way around: if Butler can
describe the character of sexed identities and expose their pretensions to be
‘natural’ without reference to God – to what extent should we take seriously the
understanding of God that Aquinas advances as the originating cause of every
nature? The identity between Butler’s and Aquinas’ analysis of ‘nature’ is in the
matter of the will. For Aquinas, God wills natures to be: for Butler, writing in
postmodernity when God as the willing causa omnium is presumed to be dead,
it is harder to see how the dominant, heterosexual, matrix, the ‘Law of the
Father’, which strictly speaking is impersonal, and so can take up no prior point
from which to exercise its willing, can function in the place of Aquinas’ God.
Except that Aquinas’ God is (in the matter of the ideas) itself a discursive con-
struct, a placeholder for a certain understanding of prior presence. In other
words, it is not that God is like this, but that when Aquinas begins to describe
God in relation to natures as such, this is what God would have to be like in order
for these natures to be.
For Aquinas, every messianic utterance of God, although it appears as an
already in the single act God is, appears as future for mankind. In Aquinas’ tem-
poral metaphysics, every moment of time is one and the same moment to God.
This ingenious solution to the freedom of God means that the manifold of cre-
ation, past and future, in all its multiplicity of conditions and things, is accom-
plished as a unity and singularity in God. God as a single act can let change be
and be free within himself of change. This means God’s singular sempiternity
lets humanity have a present and a future such that the future can still occur as
an address (and freedom) to an individual man or woman.
Both Aquinas’ and Butler’s understanding of nature share this in common:
they are derived out of an understanding of the willing character of subjection.
This is why, both in Thomas’ account of nature and in Butler’s account of per-
formativity, I, the subject, appears as something willed to be in certain ways. In
each respective case: for Aquinas, God as the cause of all things; and for Butler
the prior projected matrix of heterosexual masculinity – the Law of the Father
(from which all other identities are deflected, and indeed which are the only
ones that can become ‘conscious’). Yet these two first and efficient causes differ
in one important way: in the manner each of them could represent any messi-
anic figure they might posit.
What Butler elicits is that the dynamism of the performative, and its very
authorization of the incompleteness of what it cites, depends: first on its being
able to cite a stable, ideal identity from ‘over there’, that is, not-here, not imme-
diately present; and secondly on the very incompleteness in question – the fact
that the citation ‘draws on and covers over’ what it cites, and so experiences as a
power its own lack, its own instability, because the success of the performative ‘is
always and only provisional’ (Bodies that Matter, pp. 227, 226). This incompleteness
is the very feature on which Butler draws to advocate the subversion of the heg-
emonic and ideal heterosexual matrix. What she advocates as the triumph of the
subversion of sexed identities is in fact a phenomenal description of the only
thing the very identities she describes in their actuality could ever be. Far from
deconstructing the metaphysics of substance, she has simply re-described them
in the locus laid out for them by the death of God and Nietzsche’s devaluation
of the uppermost values. Now not something divine, but something human and
ideal is the stable type and archetype of present impermanence. This means that
every individual normative, male heterosexual is himself only a dynamic citation
of the stable presence he cites and unstably makes present: however, it is pre-
cisely through the instability and incompleteness of the citation that we are able
to explain both his pretension to the absolute, hegemonic, general power that
he cites and his particular depotentiation. Becoming is always less than the (ideal)
being it cites. This ‘less than’ and lack can be its tragic fate (for Plato) or its
euphoric liberation (for Nietzsche, Butler, and beyond). Of greatest importance
is that for both Aquinas and Butler (and, indeed, for the interpretation of Plato
that lies behind them both, itself only a citation, something less real than the
man himself) the ‘over there’ is at the same time ‘already there’ and the ‘stably
there’, the ‘ever’ present.
Although Butler’s and Aquinas’s understandings of the prior willing cause
are not coterminous, yet they have the same structure, and the same metaphys-
ical force. They are the prior (absent) presence (and so presence as such) that
stabilizes and brings to presence the presence of everything that appears to be
present, and that appears as the site from which the willing takes place. Surely
an ‘absent’ presence is an oxymoron? Except that this is how the metaphysics of
presence functions – by being the most real things and at the same time some-
where else, ἐπέκεινα says Plato, ‘over-there’, they produce actual realities that are
less real than themselves (as ideal types), but these less real things stand here,
now, as presences.
Butler’s iteration of the heterosexual matrix supplants the place of (the meta-
physically thought) God, whilst employing the same structure of ideality and
presence that the metaphysically thought understanding of God deploys. Does
this mean that the white heterosexual male, the one who embodies the Law of
the Father, the ideal type to which every other gendered identity is binary, from
which every other identity is deflected, and which legitimates and authorizes
every alternative to himself, appears as the messiah? Perhaps he might wish it so!
But rather this ideal male, who authorizes even the actual white heterosexual
male as the only genuine copy, the perfect simulacrum of the real, must of right
supplant the voice of the future, supplant the messianic voice and bar the path of
each and every one to come. The triumph of the willing subject evacuates the
messianic place, it depotentiates it. Butler exposes (and Nietzsche before her)
that the will in question here, the originating will, is not the intentional act of a
subject, but the very condition of possibility of an intentional subject. Nothing,
as such, wills. And yet, in the question of identity and its performances I appear
not as one who wills, but as one willed as. The predominance of the will in post-
modernity is nothing new in itself, it is only in consequence of the death of God
that the will takes on a new and paradoxical form, it is the harbinger of nihilism:
every utterance of the one who speaks and commands from out of this willing is
the claim to the messianic that is at the same time its deposition. The messianic
ends in kitsch. This kitsch depotentiation has been well explored especially in
relation to political realism, messianic in tone, but banal and pedestrianizing in
its effects. Is there no more to be said?
If we return again to the beginning, we might strive to hear again, Clement
of Alexandria aside, what the fragment says, when it says τί θεός; τò πάν. For it
does indeed ask a question, in Greek – τί; – but the word does not only ask
about what, about ‘quiddities’ and ‘whatnesses’. For what is asked about here is
not divinity as such, god-in-general, θειôν, but a god, since the gender of the
word is masculine (into which nothing much should be read – it could as easily
be feminine). As sexed and so not neuter the word θεός denotes something, or
rather someone, who is a person rather than an essence. The question asks not
so much ‘what?’ as ‘who?’.
The Greeks do not experience divinity as such, but gods, divinities who are
manifest for man in particular places and in particular ways. And for the Greeks –
for Pindar especially, no god, not even wide-seeing Zeus, can appear as a totality,
an All. The answer – τò πάν – cannot mean the ‘all’ as in the extantness of the
extant, the totality and singularity of Aquinas’ metaphysical God-as-singular-act.
In short, no equation is possible in this question: rather we are brought up short
against a disjunction: ‘who is (this) God? The all’. The very absurdity of the
answer denies that we have found in the ‘all’ the answer to the question: the
being of the god cannot be known as if he or she were an ‘all’. The all, τò πάν, can-
not, therefore, name an ‘essence’, a category of being or substance. The πάν, the
‘all’, stands for itself as something other and separate to who is enquired about.
Moreover, the enquiry, as an enquiry at all, names not what is to be grasped as an
essence, but what is to be grasped with respect to the one asking. As soon as we aban-
don the unifying character of essences (metaphysically given), we let go of what
they enforce, totalities of meaning, such that the same meaning is given irrespec-
tive of the place in which it arrives. Greek myth – invariably poetic in form –
necessitates that the same myth is told differently depending on where it is told
and by whom. The unity of the myth is harder to grasp than anything encapsu-
lated in a concept, it arrives always rooted to the place in which it is given, rooted
to a world in which it is said. Greek art – the art of myth-giving – lives in its set-
ting, dies beyond it. As art and artefact it stands against modern τέχνη, for it is
precisely not endlessly reproducible, the same in the same, indifferent to loca-
tion and place, imposed and stamping itself on spaces and stamping out the
spaces in which it is set. To make myth, in Greek, μυθέομαι, means ‘to speak’ but
in the sense of to ruminate and speak over, to take oneself into what is said and
to be self-reflexively included in the saying. A medial form, it means to speak
oneself speaking: to speak from out of the place one is in.
The πάν, the ‘all’, stands for itself, therefore, as a region, a place, a ‘from out
of which’, a ‘whence’. The ‘all’ of the question asks ‘who?’ with respect to a
whence, a ‘from out of where?’. The ‘all’ in question names, therefore, a direc-
tion, a place, from out of which the god may emerge and come to be known. If
in the speaking of myth the speaking of the god is accommodated to place and
given there, disclosed by an art (either visual or rhetorical) then the question
‘who is a god?’ is the question asked before myth is made and given: before the
place is fully disclosed. For a god completes a place: completes the meaning of
a place by showing how it is shaped in and by the gods. Our brief excursion into
myth reveals the ‘all’ to be a place unlike any particular place: as the all it is not
the place that is the ‘essence’ of places (because we have already abandoned
every desire for essences) but is rather the place that stands over against every
place as ‘other’ to places. It is, thought in an entirely Greek way, ‘anti-place’.
Not the binary opposite of place, but that place which manifests itself as not
having been given: the ‘unknown’ of place. The unknown in place specifically
lets the question be asked: ‘who is a god?’, since a god would yield a place for
where it is.
Thought in a Greek way, the ‘all’ is not the extant totality but the encircling,
absent, nothing. This is not the nothing of nihilism, the annihilating as such, but
all that lies other to what man knows. In the very question ‘who?’, is named
what is not known with respect to what can be known, and from out of where.
The encircling nothing is therefore the unknown for man, an entirely ontologi-
cal determination. For the gods know what lies undisclosed to man: to the
Greeks, the gods are those ones seeing what man cannot yet see, in order that
they help him into seeing. The ‘all’ is the encircling nothing from out of which
all that is emerges, and into which it falls back. Above all, the unknown for man
is his future, and all he has forgotten. The god, should he or she arrive, steps
out of what is unknown, and future, and forgotten, for man. The gods orient
man to the future, to hiddenness and the mysterious. This is not a future as an
ever-pressing into progress – as a euphoric attainment for man. Rather it is the
future man’s nothing now, what most questions and interrogates man as he looks
out. Here, a god’s help is truly required.
Yet the gods, thought in a Greek way, are not messianic, nor could they ever be.
They do not disclose to man how he should become divine (as Adam receives the
promise that he should become a god),10 but rather how he is as man. Of man’s
mortality they know nothing, nor can they ever have contact with it – the gods are
,
α θάνατος ‘without death’. Is the messianic therefore ever destined to be in conse-
quence of metaphysics, a voice of ontotheologic? In announcing the absence and
death of God and the gods must it also always stoop to political kitsch? Or is it an
emptiness, ever-filled by falsehoods inasmuch as filled by men and thereby depo-
tentiated, until the messiah should arrive? Or does the voice that holds and gives
rest to what Heidegger calls the ‘silence of the passing-by of the Last God’11 both
unravel all messianism and set at their rest the gods at last?
Feast of the Precious Blood, 2008
Notes
1
Pindar, Fragment 140 d, in Pindar: Nemean Odes; Isthmian Odes; Fragments, ed. and
trans. William H. Race, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
2
Clement of Alexandria in Pindar: Nemean Odes; Isthmian Odes; Fragments, p. 376.
See Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book 5, chapter 14, p. 219. ∏ίδαρός τε ό
μελοποιòς οίον εκβακχεύεται άντικρυς ειπών.
3
See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [1790] (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1990)
trans.James Creed Meredith as The Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1952), §49, p. 168. ‘Die Einbildungskraft [. . .] ist nämlich sehr
mächtig in Schaffung gleichsame einer anderen Natur aus dem Stoffe, den ihr
die wirkliche gibt. Wir [. . .] bilden auch wohl um’.
4
Thomas Aquinas, Quæstiones disputatæ: de veritate (Rome: Marietti, 1965),
Q. 3, art. 1, resp. ‘et similiter operatio naturæ, quæ est ad determinatum finem,
præsupponit intellectum, præstituentem finem naturæ, et ordinantem ad finem
illum naturam’.
5
See Aquinas, De ideis in Quæstiones disputatæ: de veritate, Q. 3.
6
Aquinas, Quæstiones disputatæ: de veritate, Q. 3, art. 1, resp. ‘Similiter etiam secun-
dum eos qui posuerunt quod a Deo procedunt omnia per necessitatem naturæ,
non per arbitrium voluntatis, non possunt poni ideæ: quia ea quæ ex necessitate
naturæ agunt, non prædeterminant sibi finem’.
7
I am deliberately asking – at the expense of a certain kind of neo-Thomism – why
could Aquinas not have followed Aristotle more closely – or on their terms, have
been more Aristotelian?
8
Aquinas, Quæstiones disputatæ: de veritate, Q. 3, art. 1, resp. ‘causam primam entium’.
9
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1990), p. 31. All further references will be given in the text. This posi-
tion has been amplified in an unpublished paper by F. Knapp, ‘“Walk the Walk,
Talk the Talk”: Blokes, And Why It Doesn’t Matter That They Think They Are
Real’ for the Peterhouse Theory Group, Cambridge, April 1998, which develops
the notion of ‘heterosexual camp’ to illustrate the phenomenon of the British
‘lad’ culture, now paralleled among certain young women, or ‘ladettes’.
10
See The Testament of our Father Adam 3:2, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed.
and trans. J.H. Charlesworth et al., 2 vols (London: Doubleday, 1983), vol. 1,
p. 994. ‘[God] spoke to me about this in Paradise after I picked some of the fruit
in which death was hiding: “Adam, Adam, do not fear. You wanted to be a god;
I will make you a god, not right now, but after a space of many years.”’
11
Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1989), p. 406 (and §§253–256, pp. 405–417, passim.); Die metaphysis-
chen Grundstellungen des abendländischen Denkens in Seminare (Übungen) 1937/38
und 1941/42 in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 88 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2008), p. 6, ‘die
Stille des Vorbeigangs des letzten Gottes’.
Chapter 5
Towards Perpetual Revolution:

Kant on Freedom and Authority
Paul Fletcher
In 1613, Leonard Lessius, one of the most formidable Christian apologists of

the early modern period, published the Latin edition of his best-known work,
De providentia numinis.1 This absorbing work, by a man who had joined the newly
formed Society of Jesus in 1572, directs a sustained and sophisticated assault
upon the two foci of the cultural and intellectual ellipse of his present: atheism
and politics. As regards the latter, Lessius denounces the manner in which the
politicians – and by this term he means the political theoreticians – tended to
reduce religion to utility and, in the process, refused its essential legitimacy:
These men be commonly called Polititians, in that they subject all religion to
policy, and consequently by how much the more any religion is conducing to
the bettering of their political and temporalle estate; by so much it is by them
more esteemed and practised. Among these men Nicholas Machiavel hath
gained the chiefest place.2
Already, the Florentine thinker had taken his place beside the most infamous
of atheists due to his utilization of religion as a state asset, in a manner that was
to be theoretically perfected by Spinoza. Yet, despite the entrenched nature of
his condemnation of the subordination of religion within the thought and
political practice of the early seventeenth century, the legacy of Lessius lies not
in his Christian apologetics but in the methodology which induces and informs
his assault. Rather than confront his present and his adversaries with the tools
of reason founded on the gifts of faith and revelation and their concomitant
authority, as canonical practice would require, Lessius utilizes the reductionist
and immanentist tools of his opponents so that religious truth is subjected to
the criteria of natural and political philosophy.3 Here, almost despite himself,
Lessius constitutes moral and religious commitments on the very basis for
which he takes Machiavelli to task: utility. God is the final sanction in the light
of whom the deeds of men and women must be seen, and because of whom,
mundane actions and intentions are transcendently policed. With the refusal
of the definitive judgement of the divine –– an immanental revolution that
happens to be a characteristic assertion of both the atheists and the politicians
–– morality is meaningless. The force of Lessius’s argument is repeated with
added sophistication in Kant’s moral justification of the existence of God,
which the latter crafted some 150 years later. However, in another respect
Lessius threw himself (and much of what constitutes modern religious meta-
physics) into the trap that Kant was to spring on religious thought as he sought
to delineate the grounds and limits of rationality. Lessius argued for the
existence of God on the basis of an array of sensible and intelligible evidences
and, because of the inevitability of our terror in the face of this divine creature,
posited a framework of moral necessity that was secured by speculative reason.
With Kant’s critical turn and the restriction of any theological use of pure
reason, we see the concrete indications of the death of God and the over-
coming of the demands of Providence, which were but nascent phenomena in
civic republicanism, brought to their fruition in the quest for freedom that
characterizes liberalism.
In the context of this philosophical deicide, it is no surprise that Henrich
Heine offers a portrayal of Immanuel Kant in his History of Religion and Philosophy
of Germany (1834) that describes Kant as the primary advocate of an intellectual
revolution in Germany which rivalled the transformative regicide that was
pivotal to the political revolution in France of 1789. In his comparison of the
protagonists of the two revolutions, there is no doubt in Heine’s mind as to the
identity of the more radical figure:
Immanuel Kant, this great destroyer in the realm of ideas, far exceeded the
terrorism of Maximilian Robespierre, yet he displays similarities to Robespierre
which calls for a comparison of the two men. Firstly, we find in both the same
inexorable, incisive, unpoetic, sober honesty. Then we find in both the same
talent for distrust, but the one exercises it in thought and terms it criticism
while the other uses it against human beings and calls it republican virtue. Yet
the type of the philistine is perceptible in the highest degree in both men —
nature had destined them as weighers of coffee and sugar, but fate willed that
they weigh other things, placing a king on the scale of one, on those of the
other a God . . . and they gave right weight.4
Heine may well be correct in his estimation of Kant’s radicality but his analysis
rejects the importance of Kant’s practical or ethical treatises as little more than
pious sops intended for the consumption of Lampe, Kant’s man servant. Yet he
almost completely overlooks the significance of the Kleinere Schriften, the ‘smaller
writings’ devoted to political right and cosmopolitanism and those dedicated to
Kant on Freedom and Authority 59
the status and explication of religion.5 It is within these moral, religious and
political writings, however, that we can most clearly distinguish some of the
most remarkable elements of the liberal project, elements which shed consider-
able light upon the nature of liberalism itself and which illustrate the extent to
which the republican project of Robespierre and the liberal undertaking of
Kant converge.6
This trait of the modern is undoubtedly elided in the majority of liberal
exponents and commentators. It is the ineluctably juridical texture of Kant’s
political writings that has fuelled a renewal of interest in his work amongst
contemporary political theorists. This is the philosopher who, avant la lettre,
offered a mature assessment of the possibilities of constructing international
legal institutions that are fitting for a globalized context.7 From this perspective,
Kant is an exemplar of anti-revolutionary thought, whose relationship to
Robespierre may well have some arcane currency with regard to his overcoming
of traditional metaphysics but which has no purchase when we consider him as
a paradigmatic political thinker of liberal modernity.
Revolutionary Nomadism
In so many ways, of course, this recent appropriation of Kant has sound founda-
tions because the philosopher of absolute moralism constructs his doctrines of
right and federalism on the basis of the metaphysics and principles of duty.
That is why any honest assessment of the political thought of the philosopher
from Königsberg must not only consider his well-documented fascination with
the French Revolution but also the fact that his attitude to revolution as a means
to political change was fundamentally negative. This attitude is clearly adum-
brated by the editor of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, Johann Erich Biester, in a
letter he wrote to Kant in 1793 on receipt of the latter’s manuscript of On the
Common saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory but it Does not Apply in Practice’. Biester
was quite thrilled with the tenor of the essay:
To speak quite openly, it pleased all the more since it refuted the rumour
(which I suspected from the start) that you had come out in favour of the
ever increasingly repulsive French Revolution [Revoluzion], in which the
actual freedom of reason and morality and all wisdom in statecraft and legis-
lation are being most shamefully trampled underfoot –– a revolution that
even shatters and annuls the universal principles of constitutional law and
the concept of civil constitution, as I now learn from your essay. Surely it is
easier to decapitate people (especially if one lets others do it) than coura-
geously to discuss the rational and legal grounds of opposition with a despot,
be he sultan or despotic rabble. Till now, however, I see only that the French
have mastered those easier operations, performed with bloody hands; I do
not see that they have the power of critical reason.8
The reason for Biester’s relief arises from the fact that some of Kant’s earlier
musings had suggested a less disapproving view of revolutionary change. At
the end of his exposition of the eighth proposition of the Idea for a Universal
History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Kant had posited that, because war is
fundamentally contrary to the self-interest (that is to say, economic interests)
of states and threatening to the security of other states, the fact of unrest itself
will engender the constitution of a trans-national body which will arbitrate in
the interests of the whole. ‘And this encourages the hope that, after many
revolutions [Revolutionen], with all their transforming effects, the highest
purpose of nature, a universal cosmopolitan existence, will at last be realized as
the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may
develop.’9 Revolutions are presented as episodic upheavals, which provoke
and produce progress. In contrast, in the essay that prompted Biester’s corre-
spondence with Kant, we are offered the most searing denunciation of the
revolutionary project:
All resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of the sub-
jects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into
rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in the commonwealth.
This prohibition is absolute. (Political Writings, p. 81)
Kant’s condemnation of revolution was compromised only once in an impor-

tant footnote in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, a text that was in any
case written after the essay in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. Even in this ‘justifica-
tion’ of the dethroning of a monarch, the excuse is fundamentally qualified:
because ‘the people who extorted this from him have at least the pretext of a
right of necessity (causa necessitatis) in favour of its crime’.10 Otherwise, consis-
tent and careful as ever, Kant stands resolutely against revolution, regicide and
the arbitrary surmounting of right.
It is evident that Kant was no lover of revolution, despite his reputation (most
famously cultivated by Heine) as a Jacobin. His most straightforwardly political
works typify the kind of juridical formalism that questions, undermines and
eschews the more popular strains of democratic and civic sovereignty. Indeed,
Kant’s fundamental structural preference for the moral law and its attendant
metaphysics, to the extent that it serves as the very condition of the possibility
of any authentic political right, has led to the indictment that his work marks a
tragic ‘retranscendentalizing’ of the political sphere.11 So here we have an
Immanuel Kant who is the bête noire of a champion of civic republicanism and
the bête blanche of the liberal cosmopolitans. In each case, however, the singular-
ity of liberalism’s political fracture that is evident within the Kantian corpus is
ignored or quite simply overlooked. The purpose of this essay is to unveil this
fissure.
Hidden within the very heart of the modern project is the vital role and
purpose of the revolutionary moment and its disclamation of authority. At the
beginning of his own revolutionary project (and here Heine is absolutely

correct in his estimation), Kant elucidates the nature of those characters whose
purpose it is to overcome the despotism of heteronomy, dogmatism and super-
stition. His analogy is laid at the feet of traditional metaphysics, the territory of
which has been transformed by its own turmoil and strife. In the place of the
old came the sceptics, ‘a species of nomads,’ who, ‘despising all settled modes
of life, broke up from time to time all civil society’.12 Kant, on the one hand,
celebrates this always-dissatisfied disposition (along with the infinite desire for
knowledge) but he must, on the other, construct a system that is grounded in a
manner that will engender a ‘full guarantee for the completeness and security
of all parts’ (along with the drawing of the definitive bounds of reason) (Critique
of Pure Reason, B27–28). This is the Janus-faced Kant who eulogizes the acts and
disposition of the nomad and who provides roots and victuals so as to ensure
the demise of their vocation. But when Kant considers his own undertaking, he
allies himself to the most nomadic and revolutionary thinkers of all. In the
Preface to the second edition of the first Critique, he charts a philosophical path
(that is to say, a methodos) akin to that of Copernicus and Galileo.
The course that Kant is willing to replicate, if we take this self-comparison
seriously, must inevitably lead to crisis in a manner that is comparable to the
overcoming of a ‘worldview’ that was effected by the revolutionary cosmologists.
The subsequent crisis of the meaning of space and identity, generated by a loss
of place and perspective that was engendered by the publication of De revolu-
tionibus orbium cœlestium in 1543, is formulated by Nietzsche in a way that is
relevant here: ‘Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the centre toward
X.’13 Speculative metaphysics of a theological kind no longer retain a warrant,
whether provisional or ultimate, to provide meaning and specification to the
status of the world. The cosmos no longer provides a supraindividualistic frame-
work upon which social and ethical structures might be coordinated and
assessed. What Nietzsche alerts us to is the fact that Copernicus and Galileo
propelled humanity into a new world in which the species was lost without
compass or direction and into a place that was no longer a providential home
but constituted little more than a fateful territory of loss. ‘Since Copernicus,’ he
cries, ‘man seems to have been on a downward path, – now he seems to be
rolling faster and faster away from the centre – where to? into nothingness? into
the piercing sensation of his nothingness?’14
In response to Nietzsche’s lament, it would seem judicious to ask whether his
evaluation of the status of modern life and living is rather unbalanced, if not
melodramatic. When it is possible to align as sober a figure as Alexandre Koyré,
the eminent historian of philosophy and science, with the unapologetic nihilist,
however, there seems to be something substantial in Nietzsche’s verdict, even if
it is grounded in a uniquely psycho-poetic appreciation of the human condi-
tion rather than a straightforwardly historical-intellectual interrogation of the
vicissitudes of historical development. According to Koyré, the Copernican
revolution can be characterized as a ‘fundamental process’ in which ‘man . . .
lost his place in the world, or, more correctly, lost the very world in which he was
living and about which he was thinking, and had to transform and replace not
only his fundamental concepts and attributes, but even the very framework of
his thought’.15 The world in question here boasted an internal organization
that reflected divine providence and which portrayed a ladder, composed of
both material and spiritual elements, rising from the terrestrial heart right up
to the empyrean. With its passing, Koyré finds that we have nothing less than ‘a
very radical spiritual revolution of which modern science is at the same time the
root and the fruit’. (p. 1). A dislocation that is both essential and existential is
the consequence of what is more than a simple ‘scientific’ innovation, a feature
of modernity that is recognized by both Koyré and Nietzsche. Copernicus
initiated a revolution that impacted upon more than knowledge. Premodern
cosmologies, especially in the Christian examples of an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic
kind, had the rank of a spiritual exercise or art as well as that of scientific theory.
Such aesthetic and spiritual concerns are at the heart of the ordering of
the cosmos, a factor that is evident in Ptolemy’s Almagest where physics and
metaphysics are indivisible in practice as well as theory:
In addition, as to the excellence (kalokagathia) that concerns practical actions

and character, it is [astronomy], above all things, that could make men see
clearly; from the constancy (homoiotēs), good order (eutaxia), symmetry (sum-
metria) and calm (atuphia) which are associated with the contemplation of
divine things, it makes its followers lovers of that divine beauty, accustoming
them and reforming their natures (phusiō), as it were, to a similar spiritual
state.16
Such speculations, within the realms of the Kantian revolution, amount to

nothing more than sentimental delusions of an arcane nature and, what is
worse, they justify and authorize tutelage on such a grand scale that the atten-
tion of revolutionary nomads is urgently required. The problem is not that the
ancients resorted to ‘natural philosophy’ in their pursuit of truth. Kant always
viewed natural philosophy as fundamental to any proper understanding of the
nature of truth, politics and history.17 Yet his relationship to nature was never
one of passive contemplation: ‘Reason . . . must approach nature in order to be
taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens
to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who
compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated’
(Critique of Pure Reason B XIII, p. 20).
It is perhaps instructive, and by no means accidental, that this notion of an
appointed judge appears once again in the Critique of Practical Reason and, not
surprisingly, in Kant’s treatment of good and evil in Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone. While the disposition of the judge in Kant’s treatment of natural
philosophy is predicated on a need to elucidate what is, the reappearance of
this overseer of the recourse to the highest possible tribunal is established on
the requirement to illuminate what ought to be. In the second Critique, the ‘judi-
cial sentences of that wonderful capacity in us which we call conscience’18
emerge as a voice within, whose utterances and expressions are untouched by
the fetters of sensible inclination but which endeavour to (re)form the procliv-
ities and habits of our sensuous nature. The judge is a voice of conscience that
is nothing less than the sentiment of respect for duty. Yet even the existence of
this unerring judge – elsewhere Kant claims that ‘an erring conscience is an
absurdity’19 – is already problematic from the point of view of his metaphysical
revolution: the conscience has noumenal grounds which can in no way be
theoretically demonstrated. Kant is required to offer a sustained analysis of
the manner in which the supersensible or intelligible, of which the sentiment
of respect that is conscience is an example, provides the foundations for the
sensible actions of subjects.
Moral Revolution
Such an analysis is found in Kant’s Religion book. Kant offers something of
a surprise, however, in his point of departure for the quest of an adequate
foundation for a practical demonstration of the significance and substance of
that which is beyond sensible inclination. The measure of this surprise is
made all the more clear if we consider the first ‘Kantian’ book to be written
on religion. In his Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, published in 1792, a
full year before Kant’s own Religion book, J.G. Fichte outlined the fate of
religion, revelation and doctrine when subjected to the demands of practical
reason: ‘only that revelation can be from God which establishes a principle of morality
that agrees with the principle of practical reason and only such moral maxims as can be
derived therefrom’.20 In a similar vein, Kant prefaces the ‘four essays’ that make
up his examination of rational religion with the diremption of a divine being
and those principles upon which morality is founded. ‘So far as morality is
based on the conception of the human being as one who is free but who also,
just because of that, binds himself through his reason to unconditional laws,
it is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in order that he
recognize his duty, nor, that he observe it, of an incentive other than the law
itself.’21 So far, so Kantian. But rather than follow through the logic of this
beginning in a manner similar to the (pre-emptively) ‘Kantian’ Fichte, that is
to say, with an assessment of the meaningfulness (or otherwise) of religious
claims and authorities within the constraints of the critical method, Kant
begins his philosophical doctrine of religion with the notion of radical evil
in human nature.
In doing so, Kant is predicating the very possibility of the good on a principle
of freedom in which, because evil cannot be founded upon any other principle
than itself, even the personality willing to legislate as to the good can only locate
its foundation on the moral law. Evil, then, is not related to a historical sequence
of particular ‘acts’ or ‘habits’ that, individually, might be judged wicked. It is, as

a consequence,
a contradiction to seek the temporal origin of man’s moral character, so far

as it is considered as contingent, since this character signifies the ground of
the exercise of freedom; this ground (like the determining ground of the
free will generally) must be sought in purely rational representations.22
Yet the moral law transcends sensibility and can only be apprehended as purely
intelligible: ‘the rational origin of this perversion of our will whereby it makes
lower incentives supreme among its maxims, that is, of the propensity to evil,
remains inscrutable to us’ (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 38). This
is an essential point. Put rather crudely, Kant generates a conception of human
nature in which it is ‘normal’ to choose the evil (despite the fact that such a
choice remains rational). This point acts as an important qualification in Kant’s
anthropology. Human beings are evil by nature, but they are not devilish.
Notwithstanding the importance of this qualification and for all the attention
of Kant’s peers and commentators, from Goethe and Herder and beyond, this
basic element of his work, this elemental figure of evil, remains something of a
metaphysical embarrassment. When, as is the case in the philosophy of the
Aufklärung, history drives towards the undimmed sunset of the future, it does so
as Man. But not as Man with a fundamental tendency to evil. Kant highlights
the politico-theo-logic of liberalism in a way that finds its summation in the
majesty of the law which instils awe (p. 19). The very supremacy of this law,
however, is the condition of the maxim of the will that determines the location
of evil as the corruption of the grounds of these maxims, a corruption that is
‘inextirpable by human powers’ (p. 32).
The construction of a theory of malum defectus is more than controversial or
discomforting. Kant provides us with a clear example of the way in which the
necessity of freedom, even when rooted in a juridical moralism, undermines
and disarticulates authority. The break occurs on the basis of an anthropology
of autonomy in which freedom is the mysterious condition of human nature
and the constitution of an evil tendency. Concomitantly, the possibility of salva-
tion arises outwith political, narrative or comprehensible forms of mediation.
This last point is most perfectly illustrated in Kant’s assessment of how the
individual can (and must) be converted from the radically evil principle. As a
universal schema of the course of transformation, the process of redemption
from evil demonstrates the manner in which the authority of habitus, history
and politics is decisively rendered meaningless:
. . . if man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a good man (pleasing
to God), that is, a man endowed with virtue in its intelligible character (virtus
noumenon) and one who, knowing something to be his duty, requires no
incentive other than this representation of duty itself, this cannot be brought
about through gradual reformation so long as the basis of the maxims remain
impure, but must be effected through a revolution [Revolution] in the man’s
disposition (a going over to the maxim of holiness of the maxim). (Immanuel
Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 42–43)
What Kant means by revolution is quite clear.23 The moral revolution is the only
means through which we can dispose ourselves to the good and this revolution
is only possible because of the instant of transformation. The articulation of the
moral law is only intelligible in theory, and possible in practice, subsequent to
the disclamation of any authority, not least because this discrete temporality of
change cannot be captured or measured by either the law or the limits of free-
dom. The instant of revolution is the irruption of a destructive eternity into the
very foundations of moral, legal and political authority and its temporality –
history. Only in this light can we make sense of a ‘political’ paradox that is
situated at the heart of Kant’s analysis of action.
If the good in Kant’s schema is comprised of the law and yet the purity of
duty cannot be theoretically apprehended (and thus requires a ‘rational
faith’), it is no accident that when Kant points to examples of heroism and
sacrifice on the basis of the good they are mirrored by something altogether
more troubling. In the third Critique, Kant complements his defence of the a
priori nature of the moral law with an appeal to a moral sentiment that affects
men of all epochs and is engendered by exemplars of sacrifice and selfless-
ness.24 However, when we are presented with instances and illustrations of
radical evil in the Religion book, they are made conspicuous by their logical
correspondence to the earlier paradigms of the good in action (Religion within
the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 28). The state of nature and the state of our being
disposed towards the purity of duty are conditions in which the law is, as it
were, immolated: in the former we have instances and illustrations of cruelty
as the norm; in the latter we are offered a paradigm for moral adoption in
which the consequences of a pure juridical comportment results in death and
destruction. In both sets of cases, lawlessness is prior to the law and, as Kant
admits in a moment of awkwardness, it is easy to identify a certain nobility or
sublimity in these (seemingly) opposed dispositions.25 Dissociating law from
lawlessness, the norm from the exception, only serves to illuminate their
fundamental similitude and the manner in which the authority that achieves
freedom is destined to disclaim the authority of authority. Freedom is realized
most truly as the event. And it is this event that lies between noumena and
phenomena or, better, between the purity of the moral law and authentic
politics. The danger, not only for Kant but for a liberalism that exists within
and because of the aporia of freedom and authority, is that the event not only
will, but must, be normalized. It alone has authority. But it alone produces
an authoritative disarticulation of authority.
Revolutionary History
In this light, it is in no way remarkable that some 5 years after the publication
of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant attempts to rein in or, more
accurately, postpone the effect of the revolutionary moment. In the second
part of The Conflict of the Faculties, a question is broached which, because of its
importance to the modern as such, cannot be ignored: ‘An Old Question Raised
Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ In the midst of his endeav-
ours to offer an original rejoinder to this most hackneyed of modern queries,
Kant rather surprisingly has recourse to the very category of event that, in any
other context, he would have found repulsive: the French Revolution.26 Kant
argues that
. . . this revolution [Revolution] . . . finds in the hearts of all spectators (who
are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders
closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger;
this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral disposition in
the human race. (The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 153)
This quotation is remarkable. Although Kant is only too aware of the divine ter-
ror that enthusiasm can give rise to (he reminds us that ‘passion as such deserves
censure’) (p. 155), here he is actively appropriating the spectacle of political
revolution for the purpose of moral guidance. Revolution is the outward sign of
the overthrow of evil, the more eminent example of which is the inward instant
of the conversion of every individual. It is this passion that deserves not censure
but salutation. Nevertheless, because of the danger of the instant of enthusi-
asm, Kant ‘historicizes’, through the idiom of progress, the revolutionary ten-
dency (consider again the ‘old’ question). Genuine enthusiasm, he declares,
‘always moves towards what is ideal and, indeed, to what is purely moral, such
as the concept of right, and it cannot be grafted onto self-interest’(p. 155).
It is essential not to forget the context in which revolution is made acceptable
by Kant in political terms, that is, as a figurative example of the manner in
which evil is overcome in futurity: the movement towards the ideal. However,
this movement towards the ideal, (while it is so often contrasted with the heresy
of theological politics, especially evident in Judaism),27 is signified by those
revelatory and revolutionary moments in history that are external presenta-
tions of what is inwardly requisite. Kant is constructing a political theology in
which these external signs are the action of Providence. As with revolution,
which is before the limits of political form, so with the overcoming of evil,
Providence, which is beyond the limits of political authority. Defining the revolu-
tionary moment in this way is no accident. Kant perceives the religion and
politics of modernity – which we might term a ‘political theology’ (after Jan
Assmann)28 – as free from the fetters of ‘adolescence’. The most essential focus
of obedience is that of the ‘(non-statutory) law which he prescribes to himself’
(Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 112). Freedom as such, which is
ineluctably tied to the law as ‘the will of a World-Ruler’ revealed through

reason, unites all ‘by invisible means’ under ‘one state – a state previously and
inadequately represented and prepared for by the visible church’ (p. 112). To
be mature, enlightened and true to the principles of rational faith entails
recourse not to revolution, Kant tells us, because ‘such an upheaval produces
its effect tempestuously and violently’ and, it has to be said, contingently
(p. 112). Rather, from its source in ‘a continually recurring divine (though not
empirical) revelation for all men’ (p. 113) a gradually advancing reform is
possible: ‘As for revolutions [Revolutionen] which might hasten this progress,
they rest in the hands of Providence and cannot be ushered in according to
plan without damage to freedom’ (p. 113). If this is true, and revolution must
be eschewed, the avoidance of tempest and violence is only achievable because
of the recourse to those revolutions imparted and bestowed by Providence.
This is the politics of (modern) history in which rule of law is the basis of civility
and equality and the ideal is the nomadic questioning and refutation of the
norm. It is not a matter of juxtaposing two opposing principles but of framing
the political – that is to say, authority – with the freedom of radical evil or the
state of nature (which Kant equates with ‘complete lawlessness’) (Political Writings,
p. 82) as the origin of right, and Providence as the origin of the end of right.
The two elements of this framing of the law converge in the process of the
fulfilment of historical purpose. Or so it would seem. Nature, in Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, has provided society with an
elemental antagonism (for which it should ‘be thanked’) (Political Writings,
p. 45). This ‘unsocial sociability’ (p. 44) is the necessary platform from which
desire for the law arises; it is the condition for a sustained progression from
barbarism to culture. What marks this ‘progression’ is the recourse to the ratio-
nal nature of the creature. If we consider this Kantian maxim from a nomadic
perspective, however, the grounds of progressive evolution slide from below
our feet. In the third and last section of On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True
in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice’, Kant again resorts to a vision of that
which engenders the teleological consummation of human potentiality:
The end of man as an entire species, i.e. that of fulfilling his ultimate appointed
purpose by freely exercising his own powers, will be brought by Providence to
a successful issue, even though the ends of men as individuals run in a diametri-
cally opposite direction. For the very conflict of individual inclinations, which
is the source of all evil, gives reason a free hand to master them all; it thus gives
predominance not to evil, which destroys itself, but to good, which continues
to maintain itself once it has been established. (Political Writings, p. 91)
Delivered in terms of more than a hopeful declaration, and supported by the

twin bulwarks of rationality and history, the quotation nevertheless returns to
Providence. Yet the providential exceeds historical determination of a planned
and consistent nature, as the French Revolution demonstrates. First and
foremost, Providence is secured to history by the fragile thread that not only
guarantees freedom but does so in a manner that contravenes the principles of
freedom. The destruction of evil, on Kant’s own terms, cannot be assured if the
instrument of this transformation as the medium of an inward conversion is
then confused or conflated with its outward sign. Once again, in his quest for
the completeness and security of all parts of the system, Kant inevitably moves
to demolish the necessary grounds of the doctrine of right. The parallel between
Sittlichkeit, an ethos of moral freedom, and Schrecklichkeit, an ethos of terror, can-
not be disengaged. This fact is most completely exposed in the wake of Kant’s
systematic failure.
Revolutionary Freedom
In September 1793, J.G. Fichte (one of the great master’s closest disciples, at
least in the early 1790s) wrote to Kant and confessed that he had anonymously
presented to the public a work in progress. Within the perspective of Kant’s
unavoidable aporia, the impasse between freedom and authority, Fichte’s specu-
lations are obligingly revelatory. His rationale for issuing the text, his Contribution
to the Correction of Public Judgement of the French Revolution, which was published
earlier in the same year as his missive to Kant, was simple and reasonable: when
he ran into difficulties with his ideas he would place them before a critical audi-
ence (Correspondence, p. 466). Yet on reading the text, we can identify a ten-
dency that is, as it were, a progeny of the Kantian system but which, in many
respects, spells the implosion of the architechtonic of moral and political vir-
tue. In the terms we are outlining here, Fichte is a more faithful Kantian than
Kant.
In the Revolution book, Fichte criticizes Kant’s essay on cosmopolitanism,
Towards Perpetual Peace, and in doing so rejects the notion that the natural and
subjective grounds of right originate in an inclination towards a maxim of the
will that is contrary to the good. Moreover, Fichte does not see the need for a
transcendental concept of public right in the Kantian mould because he per-
ceives the subject through the lens provided by Rousseau. But he was not pre-
pared to take Rousseau without a dose of essential criticism.29 As with so many
of the Frühromantik who were deeply influenced by him, Fichte tended towards
a revival of the idea of the polis as ideal. Against Rousseau, Fichte placed the
political ideal of the state of nature not in the past but in the future; against
Kant, he encouraged an orientation of the subject which sprang from a prelap-
sarian integrity. In the midst of this orgy of critique, Fichte fashioned an uncom-
promising stance of subjective and political right: ‘Every man is naturally free
and nobody but he himself is entitled to make him follow a law.’30
There is more than a hint of the triumph of subjective voluntarism in this
reflection on the status of law and revolution. Because of Fichte’s predilection
for an anti-naturalistic conception of reality, a radical concept of human
freedom is created in which nature as experience is only one element of the

process in which the subject comes to self-knowledge through the identity of
subject and object. In consequence, that which Kant termed Providence comes
to be seen not as an alien event but as a contingent necessity, a factor that was
fully developed in Romanticism with the contention that the divine nature is
realized only through human self-consciousness or action.31 This does not entail
a notion of necessity as whim, or as a product of unreflective appetite, but
reconstructs purpose and teleology as an immanent necessity, a necessitas rerum.
The event that makes possible a moral disposition and operates as the ground
for an authentic doctrine of right emerges and is apprehended as immanent.
So the subject and the polis are presented as, simultaneously, recipients and
architects of a Providential vitalism that is a world-historical task.
Notwithstanding the apparent (and often crucial) differences in the systems
of Kant and Fichte, it is possible and essential to align the basic elements of
their theologico-political reflections. They both expound positions that might
be characterized as a preternatural outgrowth that materializes at the very point
where religion and politics merge. In another idiom, this disposition is the con-
quest of a Protestantism that refuses revelation and which tends towards the
conflation of internal conversion – the event of freedom – and the external
form of sensible inclination and political authority – revolution as the status
civilis.32 The key to this profane liberation from transcendent authority, a pro-
cess that is concurrently the consecration of immanence, is to be found in the
Lutheran Reformation. This is no accident. The thrust of the Reformation
attack on the church of the Middle Ages finds its focal point in Martin Luther’s
assault on the juridical status of the body that had mutated into a corporation
following the struggle over the right of Investiture.33 In response, the Reformers
advanced a vision of the church based on the freedom of the communion of
saints that was exclusively guided and restrained by biblical revelation. ‘Neither
pope nor bishop nor any other man has the right,’ declared Luther, ‘to impose
a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his consent’.34
Unsurprisingly, consent in a Lutheran context is intrinsically associated with
the conscience as an authority that lies before the Law and the messianic event
which is situated beyond the Law. In the process of this critical change of direc-
tion, the apostolic tradition is discarded in favour of palingenesis, the fact of
being born again, and again and again, over and against metamorphosis, gradual
evolution.35
What we see with the perfection of Kantianism, in the wake of Kant, is this
spiritual situation of rebellion translated into the grammar of politics. Indeed,
we can already see Kant moving in this direction. In the ‘Appendix’ to the first
part of the Conflict of the Faculties, we are offered a consideration of Judaism
that is all the more surprising because, and Kant knows this only too well, it is
a religion of the Law. But the fundamental character of this Law-bound faith is
that its identity is predicated on the externalism of its form; Judaism is, Kant
proclaims, all ‘garments without a man (a church without religion)’ (The Conflict
of the Faculties, p. 95). In the quest for a ‘pure moral religion, freed from all
statutory teachings,’ Kant calls for the ‘euthanasia of Judaism’ as a means to
the ‘restoration of all things’ (p. 95), an eschatological concept that is trou-
bling because of its status within Judaism and Christianity. In effect, Kant is
replaying the division of Old and New Testaments that finds its most renowned
pattern in the Marcionite heresy of early Christianity. Marcion’s theology was
‘strictly anti-Jewish’ in defining theocracy in a purely spiritual sense, to the
extent that any political sense (the garments of Kant’s analogy) is strictly
shunned, except for the necessary edification and organization that is expedi-
ent in the context of the perversity that pervades natural life.36 In the place of
the Jewish proclivity for externalized theocracy, Kant appeals to an illegitimate
anticipation of the eschaton (the restoration of all things) and, in the process,
abandons the ambivalence that is central to St. Paul’s reading of the gospel: in
short, the continuity and discontinuity of law and gospel.37 (It is no surprise
that Luther was accused by his many of his contemporaries of repeating the
Marcionite heresy.)38
The force of Marcion’s rejection of the Law is to be found in its a-political
emphasis upon the instantaneity of salvation and the revolutionary redemption
of the event of the gospel. As a political ground it is a refusal of the world, a fact
that is confirmed by the demise of a sect that was once the most popular of early
Christian groups. Marcion’s followers took Paul’s proscription of marriage, an
interdiction that makes perfect sense when the event of the end is imminent,
and adhered to it rigorously. The outcome of their antinomianism was that the
group failed to procreate and withered away.39 The result of the modern liberal
embrace of a Providential vitalism that is realized as an immanent necessity lies
not in sexual renunciation and extinction but in the abandonment of the Law
as premise of authoritative political form and the universalization of the event
as the condition of the possibility of politics. It is with early German Romanticism
that this current of modern onto-politics reaches its definitive climax, or more
accurately, its apotheosis.
Universalizing Revolution
It is something of a commonplace among historians of philosophy that
Romanticism marks less a fundamental break with the Enlightenment than a
thoroughgoing Reformation of its central tenets. The antinomian, indeed
Marcionite, inclination of a (paradoxically) juridically saturated modernity was
disclosed by the Jena Romantics in a wide range of reflections upon, and criti-
cal engagements with, the quintessence of modern freedom. The ontology of
the event is unfolded in its entirety in the new frame that is bequeathed by the
Kantian aporia and the Fichtean emphasis upon immanent necessity. From this
perspective, the triangulation of the Reformation, the French Revolution and
Enlightenment freedom that is a constant thematic within the fragments and
essays of the Frühromantik, marks the universalization of the revolutionary

instant.40 Accordingly, Friedrich Schlegel can confidently announce that
The revolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God on earth is the elastic
point of progressive civilization and the beginning of modern history.41
The tone and tenor of Schlegel’s uncompromising verdict might well seem
alien in the wake of the twentieth century and the critical disclosure of the dia-
lectic of Enlightenment. But his assertion is truly modern. This is because
Schlegel’s conception of human action and desire is marked by the proximity
of a new Jerusalem which is constituted without the enabling constraints of law
and tradition.42 In line with this sentiment, a perception of the past as a concep-
tual and political mausoleum is inevitable. ‘The conception of times past,’
Novalis informs us in Pollen, ‘draws us towards dying – towards disintegration.
The conceptions of the future – drive us towards living forms – to incorpo-
ration, the action of assimilation’.43 It is the life of freedom that is produced by
the insecurity of the future in its most essential form, and the formula for fulfil-
ment of liberty is complete in itself. It is in this light that Schiller’s adage dis-
plays its full force: ‘The law has not produced a single great man, while Freedom
breeds titans.’44
Structured thus in the aperture that is fashioned by the difference between
true religion – Novalis, in his essay Europa, reminds us that ‘true anarchy is the
element within which religion is born (Philosophical Writings, pp. 145–146) –
and a political form that is constituted by radical freedom, the modern con-
firms itself as the reformation of the Reformation. It is this position between
freedom and authority, between two simultaneously continuous and discontin-
uous dimensions, that characterizes the revolutionary Protestantism of liberal
political existence. That is why the search for the universalization of the experi-
ence that is provoked by the particularity of revolutions (the French, the
Aufklärung, the Reformation, etc.) is a task that is only made possible by a sin-
gularity that is stripped from positive religion in its historic forms. If medieval
Catholicism provided a unifying principle through the architecture of its polit-
ical authority (or, in other words, Christendom), Protestantism offers both a
‘polemical revolutionary service’ (Athenaeum Fragments § 231, p. 49) as an indis-
pensable irritant in the quest for transformation, and the unstable substances
which serve to establish a revolutionary constancy. Again, with an eye to histor-
ical change and potential, it is Novalis who most fully understood this singular-
ity of a stability that is produced by volatility. ‘Religious peace was concluded on
quite faulty and counterreligious grounds, and something thoroughly contra-
dictory – a revolutionary government – was declared permanent as a result of
the continuation of what is called Protestantism’(Philosophical Writings, p. 141).
The permanence of the abrogation of the norm typifies the manner in which
sovereignty in its distinctively modern form is a relentless recomposition of
itself on the basis of those conditions which eviscerate its very formation.
The Revolutionary Figure

It would be both incorrect and inappropriate to think that this trajectory we are
tracing is that of a revival and repristination of religion (as some commentators
have argued). The modern reformation of religion and its renovation of politics
are established on the principle of the continuity of the breach or fissure between
discontinuous elements. That is why it is the case that this true, which is to say,
modern, religion must necessarily incorporate and involve the entirety of
irreligion. Liberalism thrives on the oscillation and irresolvability of its own
differential elements. In the same way as this delimits and inflates the claims of
consciousness through a comprehensive critique of the claims of inwardness
itself, so politics is both destabilized and maintained through the unrestricted
critique of the claims of freedom itself. Politics and religion flourish between
the synthesis of entheism (God’s indwelling) and pantheism; religion and poli-
tics are excited by the contrary and complementary forces of freedom and
authority. The politics of freedom is the new church, the new Jerusalem, and
the immediacy of crisis constitutes the reality of an eschatological completion
of the Law.
The most dangerous force within liberalism arises, as a consequence, from any
attempt to repair the irreparable that marks the originary principle of modern
political formation. In some respects, the fate and fortune of the Jena Romantics
clarifies the nature of this hazard. In the case of Friedrich Schlegel, he converted
to Roman Catholicism in 1808. Schlegel’s proselytism has fermented extensive
critical comment since his death, most of which assents to Carl Enders’ view that
the flight into the bosom of the Catholic Church was a sign of ‘bankruptcy’ and
intellectual suicide.45 More importantly, it was Schlegel’s nostalgia for the infi-
nite that provides a golden mean when we consider the significance of the
revolutionary and anti-revolutionary commitments he held at different points in
his life. The desire for the permanence of the revolutionary moment begins with
the irruption of freedom into the heart of authority and ends in a blind commit-
ment to the most conservative and calloused institution in Europe. Similar
courses were traced by his brother, A.W. Schlegel, and Fichte. In their cases,
however, the political phenomenon that brought all-comprehensive and all-
explaining certainties was German nationalism. In these three instances, the
productive force of revolution hardens into anomic fragmentation or the abso-
lutism of the terror. And a decision is necessary: between the Kingdom of God
on earth (nationalism, Christendom, etc.) or the earthly Kingdom of God
(revolution and the end of the law). In each case, the event is everything. The
transcendental policing by divine sanction, which Leonard Lessius utilized in
defence of God, has been brought into the scope of the mundane as the
prevailing measure of revolutionary transformation.
Within the perspective of this universalization of the event, we can observe,
along with Kant, that the Kingdom of God is always at hand in the context of
modernity. Or almost. Kant’s claim comes in the seventh, and concluding,

section of the first division of the third part of his Religion book which is enti-
tled ‘The Gradual Transition of Ecclesiastic Faith to the Exclusive Sovereignty
of Pure Religious Faith is the Coming Kingdom of God’ (p. 105). His narra-
tive is one that charts the surmounting of particular religious denominations
and faiths by a universal church and its citizens, through the triumph of an
inward moral disposition. But, in contrast to the allegiances of the Romantics
who would come after him, this vision is a paradoxical and yet typical discla-
mation of authority in the name of the universal. The consecrated is irreli-
giously profaned and the profane is religiously consecrated. In nuce, that
which is understood and delimited as divine violence, and irrupts as revolu-
tion into the status quo, has coalesced with the sovereign violence of law-
making and law-preserving authority. It is the abnormal normalization of the
politics of divine violence as sovereign violence, of the production of political
form as the non-identical repetition of the founding destruction and decay
of the law. In the aftermath of this perpetual revolutionary situation we call
modernity, the unencumbered claims to power on behalf of sovereign power
(and the widespread homogeneity of obedience exchanged for security)
and the untrammelled claims to freedom on behalf of the advocates of self-
determination (and the antinomianism of the consecration of the profane)
expose the fact that the secret interface between the two (intra-parasitic)
domains of religion and politics is the event of liberal politics. But this fissure
between freedom and authority, forever reflected upon in the context of
liberal governance, is not a phenomenon that can be healed technically or
voluntaristically, nor is it a opportunity that an ever more pragmatic politics
of consensual realism can melt away with an initiative. The split resists any
attempt to characterize its essence as either disaster or satiety, as famine or
gluttony. In consequence, the figure who most perfectly characterizes the
anomalous and aberrant dimensions of our religio-political present is per-
haps J.W. von Goethe’s beautiful soul.46 For she is the revolutionary figure of
western Protestant politics, she is the spectacular rendition of the unveiling
of the truth of modernity as an onto-politics of precariousness.47
Notes
1
Leonard Lessius, S.J., De providentia numinis et animi immortalitate. Libri duo adver-
sus atheos et Politicos, in Opuscula Leon. Lessii, S.J. (Paris: P. Lethielus, 1880).
2
From the English translation of 1631, Rawleigh His Ghost. Or, A Feigned Apparition
of Syr Walter Rawleigh, to a friend of his, for the translating into English, the Booke of
Leonard Lesius (that most learned man) entitled De providential Numinis, et Animi
immortalitate; written against Atheists, Polititians of these days trans. A.B., in D.M.
Rogers ed. English Recusant Literature, 1558–1640 (London: Scholar Press, 1977),
Vol. 349, p. 2.
3
For a sustained analysis of the significance and philosophical methodology of
Lessius, see M.J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1987), pp. 42–67.
4
Henrich Heine, Zur Geschichte de Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, in
H. Schanze, ed. Schriften über Deutschland Vol. 4, (Frankfurt a. Main: Insel, 1968),
p. 124.
5
The presentation of Kant as an anti-metaphysical revolutionary who was formally
a-political is not, as Frederick Beiser demonstrates, an uncommon feature of an
array of reflections upon Enlightenment philosophy and philosophers. The root
of this tendency is Madame de Staël’s influential tract, De ‘l’Allemagne, published
in 1806. See Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The
Genesis of German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
6
A more sober, but nonetheless convincing, portrait of the relationship between
revolution and classical German philosophy is offered by Dieter Henrich. He
takes both projects as converging historical examples of constructive rationality;
the one as an engineering of a rational state, the other as a liberation of a rational
and social human nature. See Dieter Henrich, ‘The French Revolution and
Classical German Philosophy: Toward a Determination of Their Relation,’ in
Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 85–99.
7
Examples of this trend are legion. See, for instance, Daniele Archibugi, ed.
Debating Cosmopolitics (London: Verso, 2003); David Held and Daniele Archibugi,
eds. Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1995); James Bohman and Mattias Lutz-Bachmann, eds. Perpetual Peace:
Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
8
Letter from Johann Erich Biester, 5 October 1793. In Immanuel Kant,
Correspondence trans. and ed. A. Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 467. All further references will be given in the text.
9
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in H. Reiss,
ed. Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 51.
All further references will be given in the text.
10
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy trans. and ed.
Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6: 321n, p. 464.
11
Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern
Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
12
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan,
1929, AIX). All further references will be given in the text.
13
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 8.
14
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and trans.
C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 122. It is also
worth noting that the proclamation of the death of God in The Gay Science is
presented by Nietzsche as an event that is intelligible in cosmological terms.
‘What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? . . .’ Nietzsche,
The Gay Science trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974),
pp. 181–182.
15
Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), p. 2. All further references will be given
in the text.
16
Ptolemy, Claudii Ptolemaei Opera quae extant omnia, vol. I: Syntaxis mathematica
(Leipzig: Bibliotheca Teubneriana, 1957), I:7, pp.17–24.
17
A point elucidated by Pheng Cheah in his analysis of Kant’s organismic model of
politics. See his Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial
Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 61–113.
18
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason in Practical Writings trans. and ed. Mary
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5:98, p. 218.
19
‘Concluding Remark’ On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy, in
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings
trans. and ed. A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 8:268, p. 27.
20
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation trans. G. Green
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 134.
21
Immanuel Kant, ‘Preface to the first edition’, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason and Other Writings, 6:3, p. 33.
22
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone trans.T.M. Greene and
H.H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1934). All further references will be
given in the text.
23
It should be noted that the term ‘revolution,’ as utilized by eighteenth-century
philosophers, ‘still contains the cosmological urgency of a planetary revolution’.
See Reinhart Kosselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of
Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), p. 160, n. 6.
24
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement trans. J.C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford
25
See the footnote to 6:33 in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. We may also
note Alexandre Kojève’s devastating criticisms of both Georges Bataille, and his
celebration of violent sacrifice, and Immanuel Kant, and his attempt to construct
a measure of right and value in relation to the status quo. Kojève avers that the
sacrificial ends in a ‘“beautiful death” but death just the same: total, definitive
failure’. As for Kantian morality, it is rejected because it fails in a different man-
ner: it is ‘utter inactivity . . . hence a Nothingness’. In each case, because they are
little more than mirror images of each other, we are offered nothing further than
a political barrenness, a wasteland. See Alexandre Kojève, ‘Hegelian Concepts’ in
D. Hollier, ed. The College of Sociology: 1937–39 (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 89, 87.
26
Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties trans. M. Gregor Lincoln (Lincoln,
NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 141ff. All further references will be
given in the text.The section in which Kant tackles the status and significance of
the French Revolution is (strikingly) entitled, ‘Concerning an Event of Our Time
Which Demonstrates this Moral Tendency of the Human Race.’ Kant published
the text in 1798.
27
See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 116.
28
See Jan Assman, Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und
Europa (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2000).
29
Fichte’s most sustained critique of Rousseau is provided in his lectures of 1794,
Bestimmung des Gelehrten in Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke ed. I.H. Fichte
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), vol. VI, pp. 335–346.
30
J.G. Fichte, Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische
Revolution in R. Lauth, H. Jacob and H. Gliwitzky, eds. J.G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der
Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1966), vol I, p. 384.
31
See Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German
Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 184 for a con-
cise analysis of this issue.
32
It is of considerable interest that Nietzsche considers Protestantism to be the pec-
catum originale (the original sin) of German philosophy. See Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin,
1990), p. 133.
33
See Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age trans. F.W. Maitland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1927).
34
Martin Luther, Luther’s Works ed. J. Pelikan and H.T. Lehmann (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1955–1986), vol. 36, p. 70.
35
See Kant’s comments on the revolutionary status of palingenesis. Immanuel Kant,
The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, 6:340, p. 480.
36
We are borrowing the definition of Marcionite Christianity from Jacob Taubes’s
prescription. See his ‘Walter Benjamin – ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems
Benjamin-Interpretation religionsgeschichtlich überprüft’ in N. Bolz and
R. Faber, eds. Antike und Moderne. Zu Walter Benjamins ‘Passagen’ (Würzburg,
1986), p. 143. However, we disagree with Taubes’s characterization of Walter
Benjamin as Marcionite. We are also reminded of Nietzsche’s critique of (Kantian)
Christianity which is condemned as ‘the miscegenous offspring of rational
morality and Jewish heteronomy’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,
trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990) § 52, pp. 80–81.
37
For a thorough assessment of Marcion, see E.C. Blackman, Marcion and His
Influence (London: SPCK, 1948).
38
See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine,
Volume 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 168–169.
39
See the opening pages of the classical study by Peter Brown, The Body and Society:
Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber & Faber,
1988).
40
Indeed, Friedrich Schlegel, in one fragment, offers an unusually straightforward
historical association between various particular ‘revolutionary’ moments and the
French Revolution. ‘The Revolution is the key to the entire modern history, the
Reformation and the partial civil wars in Europe are probably only preliminaries
of it and in relation to it.’ Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796–1806
nebst philosophischen Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796–1828 in Kritische Friedrich-
Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. XVIII ed. Ernst Behter (Erster Teil, 1963), § 790, p. 259.
41
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, § 222, in Philosophical Fragments trans.
P. Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 48. All
42
A point that is underlined by Ernst Bloch in his most ‘Romantic’ work. Kant,
according to Bloch, ‘gives “subjective” spontaneity, our only salvation and decla-
ration of colour, now that nothing else can still provide colour or substance, its
due’. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia trans. A.A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p. 173.
43
Novalis, ‘Miscellaneous Observations’ in Philosophical Writings trans. and ed.
M. Mahoney Stoljar (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 45. All further refer-
ences will be given in the text.
44
Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers trans. R.D. MacDonald (London: Oberon Press,
1995), Act One, Scene Two, p. 28.
45
Carl Enders, Friedrich Schlegel: Die Quellen seines Wesens und Werdens (Leipzig:
H. Haessel, 1913), esp. pp. 159–160 and pp. 383–385.
46
This principal character of modernity, the product of ‘Protestantism,’ is also the
protagonist central to Goethe’s masterpiece, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a
book that could be described as the De Anima of the nineteenth century. She – for
she is gendered in Goethe’s text – makes her appearance in the sixth book that
goes by the title of ‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’. Here Goethe tells the story
of the fate of politics and religion in the modern ‘Protestant’ world. If political
and religious life is to survive, it will, almost of necessity, follow the tragic course
of this feeble yet erudite young woman. She suffers a haemorrhage at the age of
8 and, thereafter, her ‘soul became all feeling’. On the basis of a commitment to
the fostering of her piety, the beautiful soul rejects the grandeur of society and
the luxuries of a worldly existence. Romance, marriage and the pleasures of the
body, along with the allure of bourgeois society and success, are refused. In the
course of the narrative she moves from a ‘corporeal cheerfulness’ to a state where
she decides to ‘abdicate life’. Hers is a withdrawal from the world, not in order to
cultivate body and soul in a communal setting of salvific self-abnegation and ser-
vice, but to foster a religious piety that has neither a public outlet nor an ethical
or political significance. See J.W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship trans.
T. Carlyle (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899).
47
Her religious life, according to Gillian Rose, is ‘impotent’ in that it opposes the
world. There is an interdependence between an engorged spirituality and the
departure from the public realm: ‘Hypertrophy of the inner life is correlated
with atrophy of political participation.’ According to Rose, Goethe exposes an
unintended consequence of the Protestant ethic that augments Weber’s famous
claims concerning capital and rational accumulation. For Goethe (along with
Hegel, Kierkegaard and Walter Benjamin) it is the ‘unintended psychological and
political consequences’ of Protestant inwardness, encouraged by nascent State
power, that are so important for any analysis and comprehension of modern
socio-political conditions. The world’s significance dissipates as the inner life pro-
cures a greater cultural capital. See Gillian Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the
Sources of Modern Judaism,’ Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), pp. 178, 180.
Chapter 6
Hegel’s Messianic Reasoning and

its Theological Politics
Graham Ward
University of Manchester
Introduction
In this essay, I want to challenge a certain reading of Hegel with respect to escha-
tology. A number of commentators on Hegel, probably most famously, Adorno
and Löwith, have paid attention to the role the eschaton plays in his thinking. As
Löwith sums this up: ‘Hegel completes the history of the spirit in the sense of its
ultimate fulfilment, in which everything which has taken place hitherto or has
been conceived is comprehended in a unity; but he completes it also in the
sense of an eschatological end, in which the history of the spirit is finally
realized.’1 As we will see, I am not convinced Hegel ‘completes’ the eschatology
in terms of the final realization of the Spirit, but certainly he claims to have
uncovered the logic that necessitates such a completion. Meanwhile, noting this
eschatological dimension in Hegel’s thinking, a number of commentators wish
to diminish its association with Christian theology, conceiving it as a purely
immanent and organic teleology: the sublation of the infinite and eternal
Godhead in the inner-worldly, Spirit-led dynamics of the community.2 As such,
‘eschatology’, as it is represented in Christian theology, becomes a metaphor for
dialectical becoming; eschatology is conflated with immanent teleology.3
Now I would concur that Hegel’s eschatology has nothing of the Christian
apocalyptic in it – an apocalyptic such as that narrated in the Book of Revelation
where, following the last battle, there is the subsequent descent of a new heaven
and new earth from on high. However, I will be wishing to point to a divine
interruption into time that marks the beginning of a new creation. Neither is
Hegel’s eschatology concerned with Christian parousia (the return of Christ).
Nevertheless, it is messianic insofar as the Holy Spirit is the mediation of Christ’s
victory over evil and natural immediacy and the one who brings about the
Hegel’s Messianic Reasoning and its Politics 79
reconciliation of God with humanity.4 More specifically, Hegel’s eschatology

concerns the coming of the Kingdom (or what Hegel calls ‘the spiritual com-
munity or even the State’) in its consummate form according to Philosophy of
Right);5 a decidedly Christian Kingdom actualizing Christian values and
governed by an overriding salvation conceived in terms of the freedom of all, by
all, for all. There is at work, in time and through history, a divine Providence
ushering in this freedom.
One might ask freedom from what? Hegel interprets the Biblical account of
the Fall of humanity, through eating of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, positively as a new turn in the development of human beings’
ability to know, a new self-consciousness. The natural condition is not evil or
sinful in itself, but that new knowledge enables human beings to recognize
their own possibilities for being free. For Hegel, it is sinful either to remain in
the natural condition (which Hegel depicts in a somewhat Hobbesian manner
as human beings isolated one from another, living for themselves and therefore
warring with each other) or to refuse to begin the process of rational reflection.
This propensity to sin (to live in the immediate and to live in a splendid isola-
tion from one’s fellow human beings) remains because in the cultus there is the
ongoing practice of repentance and penitence.6 Sin is the refusal to the free.
What Hegel foregrounds is the movement to a true freedom from bondage, the
bondage of the will, and The Bondage of the Will is Luther’s title for his extensive
commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans; a letter interpreted by Luther,
concerning the nature of sin and the grace received by faith onto freedom in
Christ.7 But where Hegel differs from Luther is on the matter of the individual.
For Luther, the bondage concerns the individual will that is transformed by
faith. Hegel does not deny the individual will but his interest lies in the bond-
age of the community that struggles to realize its full freedom. The individual
is part of this larger collective drive that moves history forward as it reaches
towards a full realization of itself as free. From his earliest writings to his latest,
this collective was conceived in terms of the Kingdom of God.8
The Messianic Kingdom of God

The messianic in Hegel’s Kingdom theology has to be seen in the context of
Protestantism and the role it played in God’s providential movement in history.
Not that the Kingdom was inaugurated with Protestantism because the ‘Kingdom
of God, this new religion’9 came about with the resurrection and ascension of
Christ to the Father and the coming of the Holy Spirit in the realization of what
Hegel calls the ‘subsisting community’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,
p. 333); subsisting [bestehende], that is, because its being is in God, not in itself.
But German Protestantism was, for Hegel, a new concretization of the Spirit
of God in the world insofar as the Absolute in Christ enters more profoundly
into human subjectivity. So that rather than having, as in the Mediaeval Church,
a godly community separated from the State and worldly pursuits of human
beings, now the unity of the Divine and the human (in Christ), attains a new
level of perfection, ‘recognizing itself in Subjective freedom, as the economy
of social morality in the State [sittliches Reich]’.10 Nevertheless, a new attention
to the Kingdom and its apocalyptic dawning came with the Protestant
Reformation.11 Here the Reformers saw that there was a new working of God’s
Providence in history, and with that the return of Christ was firmly placed on
the theological agenda. In Britain, throughout the Elizabethan period and well
into the seventeenth century, commentaries on the Book of Revelation were
eagerly devoured. They had enormous consequences for the reintegration of
the Jewish people, for the messianic was related, as it is today among contempo-
rary evangelical millenarianists, with the mass conversion of the Jews.
With the outworking of the Reformation, one might say, apocalypticism and
eschatology were intimately related. If, in the eighteenth century, memories of
the wars of religion faded as a new concept of the State developed, then the
State increasingly became the substitute for the Kingdom. The State became a
secularized form of the millenarian dream.12 Theologically, eschatology was
once again separated from apocalypse; and, at a later stage, eschatology itself
became secularized as teleology: the coming of the Kingdom of Christ contin-
uing, at some mythic level, to inform the full realization of the national sover-
eignty. Enter Hegel, who draws the politics of the State into an alignment again
with a messianic logic at the heart of history.
We know theology was never far from Hegel’s mind. The early theological
essays composed between 1793 and 1800 and ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (1804),
where he began to develop philosophically the notion of the ‘speculative Good
Friday that was only otherwise the historical Good Friday’,13 established a trajec-
tory that would issue in his first major rethinking of religion in the closing sec-
tion of Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Later, he began regular lecturing cycles
on the philosophy of religion, the first in 1821, the second in 1824, the third in
1827 and the fourth in 1831 (the year he died). This recurring meditation on
religion, and the place of Christianity as the consummate religion with respect
to the more generic ‘religion’, was paralleled by two other regular cycles: on the
philosophy of right and the philosophy of history. He lectures on the philoso-
phy of right first in 1817 and continues to do so until Elements of the Philosophy of
Right was first published in 1821. He then returns to rethink his ideas in lecture
courses offered in 1822 and 1824. In 1831, when he gave his last set of lectures
on this subject, Hegel was on his seventh cycle. Although in these lectures the
church and Christianity more broadly is touched upon, Christ is never men-
tioned. What I wish to point out in this essay is that both the political develop-
ment he outlines in Karl-Heinz Iting’s edition of Hegel’s Vorlesungen ueber
Rechts-philosophie 1818–1831 and the historical development he outlines in the
Lectures of the Philosophy of History are informed by the Christology worked out in
the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The lectures on Philosophy of History were
begun in 1822–1823, were revisited in 1824–1825 and delivered for the final
time in 1830–1831. It can be seen from this that the year 1831 saw him lecturing
on all three topics. It is by cross-referencing these three sets of lectures that we
can begin to appreciate the messianic in Hegel. In fact, in bringing together
these three sets of materials, we might concur with such scholars as Hans Küng,14
Emil Brito,15 James Yerkes16 and Andrew Shanks17 that the abiding problematic
in Hegel philosophy concerns his Christology.
Logos Christology
Hegel’s Christology is not Christocentric; it is always viewed in relation to the
Trinity on the one hand, to which much attention has been paid in the twentieth
century, and the world on the other. But many scholars have raised questions
concerning the orthodoxy of this Christology, for example, the detailed analysis
of Hegel’s heterodoxy by Cyril O’Regan.18 In part, these questions concern the
way Hegel transposes traditional doctrines of Christ into philosophical catego-
ries like subjectivity, thought and consciousness.19 This transpositioning is part of
the wider methodological strategy developed out of Hegel’s ‘phenomenology’.
Although we credit Rudolph Bultmann with developing ‘demythologization’ as
a hermeneutic, we might understand what Hegel calls the ‘translation’ of reli-
gious picturing into philosophical thinking as a demythologization avant la lettre.
This demythologizing translation can be found everywhere in Hegel. For exam-
ple, in his Philosophy of History, where he maps out the great epochal changes in
religion, polity and rational course of the World-Spirit from the Oriental world
to his present time, he views a ‘theodicy’ in which the divine Providence is made
manifest (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 12–15, 457). The sovereign
power in this Providence is Reason; in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion this
is Logos or Sophia (Wisdom) revealed for the first time in its fullness in Christ.
‘Divine Providence is Wisdom, endowed with an infinite Power, which realizes its
aim, viz., the absolute rational design of the World’, he writes (Lectures on the
Philosophy of History, p. 13). In the history of religions there have been intima-
tions of this reason – the Chinese notion of Dao, for example – but what is
revealed in the incarnation of God’s Logos is that reason in being essentially
divine is essentially Christic. We must then speak of Christic reasoning, as dis-
tinct for Hegel from human understanding. More of this later. Following the
early Church Fathers, Hegel’s ‘absolute rational design of the World’ is nothing
less than parousia, the final fulfilment of which Paul describes in his Letter to the
Philippians: ‘at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and
things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should con-
fess that Jesus Christ is Lord’ (2.10–11). Parousia is not understood here as the
return of Christ but the ‘being’ [parousia] of God or the presence of God that
can come about by the ‘return’ [parousia] of God to Himself in a Trinitarian rec-
onciliation that enfolds the World. ‘The defining characteristic of this Kingdom
of God is the presence of God’, Hegel writes (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,
3, p. 322). The principle upon which his dialectic turns is mediation between the
universal and the particular with respect to the human self-consciousness of its
potential for freedom and a subjectivity that recognizes the immorality of selfish
individualism. This principle of mediation is founded upon the Christian theol-
ogy of the incarnation, just as the negation inherent to the dialectical process
itself is the working of the Cross and resurrection, and the triadic ‘logic’ that
operates throughout is the economic working of the Trinity. The pneumatic
labour of the negative, sublation (Aufhebung), is both revealed and outworked in
the resurrection (Auferstehung) and the ascension (Auffahrt) of Christ. Hegel
identifies the fact that human beings have the ability to recognize the possibili-
ties for the infinite expression of freedom within themselves and each other
(and, in recognizing, participate in a manifestation of the divine Spirit), as the
imago dei. Human beings were created with this potential for elevation to the
divine (beatification or ultimate happiness) but have, in the course of their jour-
ney through life, to realize it. With these demythologizing ‘translations’ in mind,
I wish to read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Christologically in order to foreground
his messianic politics.
But what are the central tenets of Hegel’s Christology? It is important to
sketch these tenets for two reasons: first, because they have been the topic of
controversial debates among scholars; secondly, because Hegel’s theology
developed between the early writings, which saw Christ more as an Enlightenment
teacher, and his later emphasis upon the uniqueness of the incarnation of
Christ as God’s own ‘miraculous’ and ‘monstrous’ entry into the human condi-
tion.20 We need to examine the role Christ plays both in the Philosophy of History
and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, pointing out how my own reading, while
building upon conclusions reached by some of Hegel’s commentators, differs
from the readings of his Christology by others.21
In his own fine book on Hegel’s theology, Cyril O’Regan observes that while
Hegel in the third volume of his Lectures of the Philosophy of Religion lists the
Christian churches as Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, there is no mention
of the Eastern Orthodox tradition.22 And yet the main approach of my interpre-
tation will draw attention to associations found between Hegel’s Christology
and the Alexandrian Logos Christology (and Sophiology) out of which that
tradition develops.
The ‘miracle’ of the incarnation, its ‘monstrosity’ [das Ungeheure - outrageous-
ness], is, for Hegel, made possible by a twofold determination in God that we
need to think through theologically. The first determination is the generation
of the second person of the Trinity that we represent to ourselves in the familial
language of Father and Son. Hegel thinks the representational language is con-
fusing; the natural and representational must be sublated. But we have to recall
that sublation does not mean erasure. In sublation something yet remains of
that which is sublated, even if the difference between the object under subla-
tion and the movement of Spirit is overcome.23 Putting aside our own naming
for the moment, this first determination in the Godhead (which is entirely
hidden from us) establishes a difference, an otherness in the Godhead that

the Spirit reconciles. But such a begetting makes possible, in some sense, the
second determination of the Godhead, the creation of the world. ‘It is in the
Son, in the determination of distinction, that the advance to further distinction
occurs, that distinction comes into its own [true] diversity’, he writes. What all
too briefly is being hinted at here is, after the Prologue to John’s Gospel, that
in the beginning there was the Logos and all created things were made possible
through that Logos. The slide between these two determinations (i.e., the
generation of the Logos and the creation of the world) is nothing more that a
cleavage [Entzweiung] in Godself, a ‘true’ cleavage (to take up the word inserted
by the English editors and translators of the text). The cleavage is emphasized
by Hegel’s interpretation of creatio ex nihilo24 and the rejection of any emana-
tionist25 doctrine – the world is entirely other than God, outside of God. It is in
this cleavage that the immanent trinity becomes the economic trinity – and it is
the power of God’s goodness that makes this possible. It is in this cleavage that
genuine difference, otherness and distinction, are manifest. For, as Hegel
recognizes, in the first determination the otherness and difference installed by
the generation of the Logos is a moment in the Godhead that is immediately
reconciled: ‘The act of differentiation is only a movement, a play of love with
itself, which does not arrive at the seriousness of other-being, of separation
and rupture’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3, p. 292). But the creation
of the world installs a serious otherness because it involves a movement from
infinity to finitude, from eternity to temporality, from Spirit to nature, from the
plenitude of being to subsistent and contingent existence or what Hegel
described as ‘borrowed being’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1, p. 369).
Otherness is ontologically divisive. And hence it is nonsense to talk of the
univocity of being in Hegel. Heidegger was wrong. Onto-theology does not
have its apotheosis in Hegel’s thinking. Hegel is post-onto-theological (as the
Early Church Fathers and Latin fathers like Augustine and Aquinas were),
before the advent of onto-theology.
But let me follow this through, for we can speak of three forms of alterity on
the basis of Hegel’s work. First, intra-trinitarian otherness, which is the play of
love and reconciled immediately; secondly, what might be termed radical oth-
erness that establishes a dualism between God and human beings, a gulf never
to be crossed (a dualism Hegel rejected);26 and, thirdly, an otherness which
announces an independence (of creation from its creator) but the possibility
for which lies in the Godhead. We need to approach this third form of other-
ness carefully because of the theological corollaries that might follow for our
understanding of the relationship between God and creation, immanent and
economic Trinity. That there is a relation bears with it the inference that
Christianity does not treat a God as wholly or absolutely or radically other.
There is that in God which makes creation (finitude, temporality, nature) pos-
sible; and that makes also a reconciliation with the world, salvation, possible.
One could say critically that this is the point where Hegel’s orthodoxy begins
to unravel; that, carried away on an Aristotelian distinction between potentiality
and actuality, Hegel develops the notion of logical necessity: that the Godhead
needs to actualize all that is potential within itself and return it to itself in unity;
the Godhead needs to determinate all that remains still undetermined within
itself. God lacks something that only creation can return to Him. But this line
of interpretation runs into three difficulties. First, it has to downplay the lan-
guage of the world’s independence from God and the Godhead’s ‘releasing’ of
creation to be as other.27 How can the world have independence if God needs
history for his own self-constitution? Secondly, and as a corollary, such a line of
argument has to downplay Hegel’s emphasis upon God’s absolute freedom
because this freedom would be compromised if it depended upon finitude for
its development. Thirdly, that God requires finitude in order to realize God’s
own subjectivity does not sit easily alongside ideality as the truth for Hegel.
When the Logos (as idea) is incarnated as actual, he returns through his death
and resurrection to his ideality (at the right hand of the Father) and the
redemption that is wrought is the bringing of creation into its own ideality. It is
development and becoming for us, but in the eternity of the Godhead the spati-
ality and temporality of the finite is a flashing moment or, as Hegel describes it
(in a metaphor that was employed by the early Church Fathers), ‘the sound of
a word that is perceived and vanishes in its outward existence the instant it is
spoken’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3, p. 88).
More favourably, we can argue that the abstraction of the immanent Trinity is
an abstraction for us and for the philosophical thinking through of religion
(which is representational). Human reasoning requires representation; crea-
tion itself is a representation made such that human beings might know God.
The determinations ex Deo are the determinations whereby God is made known
to us. For Hegel insists upon the radical independence of God in Godself.
Favourably, this would then read creation as a deepening of that ‘play of love’
towards us, a deepening of God’s freedom to act – for creation as this other is
‘released as something free and independent’ (p. 292): a development of the
self-externalization and self-expression of the Logos. In a passage from
Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean, we find: ‘For God is rational and Reason existed
first with Him, and from him extended to all things. That Reason is his own
consciousness of himself. The Greeks call it Logos . . . Reason . . . is the ground
of [God’s] being. Yet even so there is no real difference. For although God had
not yet uttered his Discourse, he had it in his own being, with and in his Reason,
and he silently pondered and arranged his thought and thus made Reason into
Discourse by dealing with it discursively.’28
Two lines of argument can then be made. What is evident is that Hegel is
wrestling with a genuine theological problem: the relationship of Creator to
creation and the Logos or divine Reason to human beings made in the image
and likeness of God. ‘Humanity must be grasped in the divine or in God as this
human being; but only as a moment, as one of the persons of God, in such a way
that this actually existing human being is posited in God, but as taken up into
infinitude’ (The Early Christian Fathers, p. 348). Tertullian is very close to Hegel
here. He even, in the text I previously quoted, makes the comparison between
reasoning in human beings and reasoning in God – as both Origen and
Augustine will do after him. The decisive divine move comes from thinking the
Word to expressing it. In expressing it there is creation. Furthermore, this
expression is viewed as, in some sense by Tertullian, a completion of the divine
act: ‘When God first willed to create . . . he first produced the Word, which had
within it its own inseparable Reason and Wisdom, so that all things might come
to be through that by which they had been pondered and arranged, yes, and
already made, in God’s consciousness; all they lacked was to be openly appre-
hended and grasped in their own forms and concrete existences [hoc enim eis
deerat, ut coram quoque in suis speciebus atque substantiis cognoscerentur et
tenerentur.]’ (p. 119). Hegel could have written this himself. The ‘lack’
Tertullian describes in the verb de-esse [not to be present] is not a lack in the
Godhead but God not being present for us. God is Spirit, He does not need the
utterance to conceive the creation – like a conductor who does not need the
orchestra to read the score. Hegel insists, like the Early Church Fathers, that, in
God, to be and to think are the same.
To return to what I said above: for Hegel the truth lies in its ideality; as time
translates into eternity and our subjectivity is realized (as dependent upon and
yet distinct from God’s subjectivity, even in the fully realized Kingdom)29 the
utterance is a disappearing moment. But without the utterance God would not
be known as God for us – and that is what he willed in his love, that there would
be an us, a humanity, a distinct order of creation in which the glory of God
might be made known.
Theologically, then, a relation must exist between the generation of the
Logos, the creation of the world, the incarnation and the salvation wrought by
human beings working cooperatively with the Spirit of Christ. Hegel, after
Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen is wrestling with the
logic, the divine rationality, within this relationship. To create finitude and tem-
porality, must not finitude and temporality be posited in that which is infinite
and eternal? This is, for all of them, a speculative inference made on the basis
of God’s self-revelation in Christ. To be image and likeness infers a relation to
what is original and prototypical even while admitting a distinction; otherwise
Christianity comes close to a theological voluntarism that renders acts of God
arbitrary if not whimsical.
This relation between intra-Trinitarian generation and creation crosses what
the Cappodocian Fathers termed a diastema – an ontological, and therefore
epistemic, distance – just as, with the incarnation, the diastema is crossed again
insofar as Christ cannot be identified with creation. To some extent, the
Christian tradition has concerned itself with this relationship in developing the
doctrine of kenosis. Hegel’s notion of divine and human diremption is a reading
of this doctrine. Hegel doesn’t explicate kenosis in either psychological or
historicist directions (as those who will follow him). He extends Luther’s under-
standing of the communicatio idiomata [the communication of properties], which
is simply an operation of God with respect to the incarnation, backwards in
time: to creation itself and that which made creation possible, the begetting in
God of the Logos. As Brito and O’Regan observe, the kenotic disposition in the
Logos with regard to creation (not just incarnation) is evident in the tradition.
In fact, Luther’s separation of creation from incarnation would make it difficult
for the early Church Fathers (and for Hegel) to speak of God’s providence
throughout history. The incarnation, in Luther’s theology, becomes a punctil-
iar event, whereas for the Church Fathers, it was part of an unfolding economy
that allowed them to speak of God’s Christic theophanies in the Hebrew Bible.
Kenosis must then relate to both the act of creation by the Logos and the incar-
nation. It must also relate to the crucifixion. As the Letter to the Philippians
states, the kenotic emptying finds its nadir in ‘humbling himself even onto
death, the death of the cross’ (Phil. 2.8). Hence the doctrine of kenosis expounds
the logic of why ‘from the foundations of the world’ Christ was crucified.
The question is then how this kenosis in creation, incarnation and crucifixion
is related to the begetting of the Logos by the Father? The logic of the relation
can be found in a distinction between the act and what is expressed in the act.
Kenotic self-abandonment is the act, but it is not abandonment for its own sake,
descent for its own sake; for what is expressed in the act, what is the dynamic
behind the act, is love towards the other. ‘[L]ove means precisely the giving up
of particularity, of particular personality, and its extension to universality . . .
The truth of personality is found precisely in winning back through this immer-
sion, this being immersed in the other’, Hegel writes (Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion, p. 428). This ‘giving up’ is primordially located in Trinitarian rela-
tions, then in creation, incarnation and crucifixion. It subsequently forms the
basis for ethical and religious life in Hegel. In fact, though he critiques the
Father–Son language of tradition Trinitarian theology, he himself has to rely
upon representational models of loving relations to describe the intra-Trinitar-
ian one.30 One might even suggest a deepening of love and therefore kenosis
takes place when the Logos mediates the externality of the immanent Trinity in
the economic Trinity – a movement towards that which is genuinely other, in its
finitude and createdness, a genuine ‘extension to universality’. The plenitudi-
nous love of God, in God, necessitating creation as the extension to universality
is particularized in the creation of the world. Once more, a logic between imma-
nent and economic Trinitarian operations can be found. For what characterizes
creation is not just its finitude and temporality, but its independence and free-
dom. As we saw above, this independence, like the nature of its otherness and
difference is not absolute; it cannot be if creation is maintained in its being by
God. The first determination in God’s love in the generation of the Son must
make possible the condition for this freedom and independence of the Logos’
relation to creation. In the generation of the Son, therefore, the Father’s love
loves the freedom and independence of the Son. There is a plenitude of love
here in which the kenotic ‘giving up’ is exercised. One recalls, as Paul under-
stood, kenotic emptying is dialectically related to the plenitude of the pleroma,
descent to ascent; what in the tradition of Trinitarian thinking was considered
to be the nature of Trinitarian processions and perichoresis.
And so there is no reason why kenosis cannot be attributed to Trinitarian rela-
tions in the pure act of their loving and the first determination within the
Godhead.31 Nor why creation cannot be seen as an extended expression of that
loving and related directly to that second determination within the Godhead.
Hegel certainly struggles to define that relationship between the first and the
second determination of the Logos, not always successfully avoiding the appear-
ance of a conflation of the Son and creation. For our own exposition of the
messianic Kingdom of God, such a conflation only heightens the relation
between Christ and the development of the Kingdom of the Spirit in history.
Nevertheless, a case can be argued for a much clearer exposition and, for Hegel,
expounding that relationship is both the very heart of his messianic philo-sophia
and the very source of his dialectical method.
A word here on ‘thought’, raised by speaking of ‘philo-sophia’. Hegel includes
under thought the technical involvement of perception in cognition, the mak-
ing of judgements, consciousness, self-consciousness, memory and meditation.
Thinking, then, embraces a wide range of acts that Hegel further divides into
those acts which belong to understanding and those acts which belong to rea-
son. Understanding cannot grasp anything of God because it is bound to the
limits of what is natural and empirical.32 Reasoning, as I said earlier, is always
and only Christic reasoning or, from our point of view, participating in the
mind of Christ. (See Paul’s exhortation to the church in Letter to the Philippians
2.5: ‘Having this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus’.)
Philosophy, for Hegel, participates in Christic reasoning, which is absolute
reason, the rationality intrinsic to God’s being as such. Hence it would follow
that thinking philosophically is a form of worship. As Hegel observes, it is a
loving of wisdom in the tradition of Hellenic notions of theoria (a participative
contemplation which involves an elevation) (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,
1, p. 153). Thinking in God relates (I’ll explicate what I mean by ‘relates’ in a
moment) to human thinking which finds its most exalted form in dialectical
logic (the syllogism), though not number and not in abstraction. To the extent
that philosophy exhibits the truth of religion, and participates in the unfolding
of divine reconciliation, then philosophy is theology, as Hegel states (Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion, 3, p. 347).
Now: the relation between God’s thinking (the economy of Trinitarian con-
templation) and human thinking. It would follow from what I have said that
human thinking does not participate naturally in divine thinking; there is no
immediate relation. Human thinking, unaided by divine mediation, can only
produce understanding. In the same way, Holy Spirit and divine Spirit (Hegel
views divine reflection as Spirit whilst also holding to the Holy Spirit as the
third person in the Godhead) are not the same as human natural spirit (which
is self-serving and reactive only to what is sensuous and immediate). If the
same word Geist is used it is because there is a relation that Christ reveals. ‘The
Holy Spirit is equally (ebenso) the subject’s spirit to the extent that the subject
has faith’, Hegel writes (p. 337). Ebenso is a measuring term here with the sense
of ‘to the extent that’. The relationship between divine and human thinking is
a mediated relation through the Spirit of God that negates the natural and
ultimately, post mortuum, the finite. ‘If the distinction were permanent, then
finitude would persist’, he writes (p. 278).33 Christ comes not just to show us,
reveal to us, what true reasoning is; as true reason he inaugurates through His
Spirit a practice of true reasoning that enables us to participate in it. The
Community of the Spirit is composed of those practicing, and participating in,
true reasoning. The dialectic of human appropriation, a movement Hegel
calls ‘elevation’, is akin to what the Cappadocian Fathers called ‘anagogy’ [rais-
ing up or exaultation].34
The Community of the Spirit is the Kingdom of God in its appropriation of
the Logos, its movement towards the unio mystica. This appropriation is indi-
vidual but also in terms of generic humanity. In fact, humanity only comes into
what it truly should be, what it was destined to be, when it is conformed to
being human as Christ reveals that condition. In the Christian revelation,
‘Here Man [sic.], too, finds himself comprehended in his true nature, given in
the specific conception of the “Son”’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 333).
As I said at the beginning of this essay, the Kingdom unfolds in a new way with
Protestantism and the birth of the nation state. The freedom that is in God
manifests itself in human freedom in a more complete manner. Hegel calls
this a ‘form of secular freedom’ (p. 335), but for Hegel ‘secular’ is understood
as ‘belonging to this world as distinct from the intra-divine’; it does not mean
a condition that is godless and independently neutral of all religious affilia-
tion. The latter notion of the secular is a purely immanent reality that excludes
the transits of finitude and infinitude of which Hegel speaks. For Hegel, there
is no ‘secular’ condition in the modern sense of that term that is not illusory
or naïve and the whole movement of the Kingdom is towards the dissolving of
a distinction between sacred and secular, such that ‘[s]ecular life is the positive
and definite embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom’ (p. 442). Hence he will
emphasize that the political (as one aspect of cultural ethics or Sittlichkeit) is
rooted in the religious. What is initiated in the antithesis of church (with its
theocratic polity) and state (with its monarchy), when the state breaks free of
the tutelage of the Mediaeval ecclesia, must itself receive a final reconciliation
as political life is increasingly ‘regulated by [Christic] reason’ (p. 345). This
reconciliation is the work of the Spirit in the Kingdom and it is this work that
can be understood as the messianic direction of history. In examining this
work, in its modern development, we have to examine the relationship between
the Kingdom and the modern State.
The Kingdom and the State

For Hegel, the political body can only be understood in terms of a thinking about
and a reasoning concerning that body.35 The body politic is for Hegel inseparable
from ‘concepts of truth and the laws of ethics’ (Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
p. 19) and ‘we must understand the state to be founded upon religion’ (Lectures
on the Philosophy of History, p. 417). The state is then a metaphysical entity because
it is an ‘inherently rational entity’ (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 21), that
is, its form and content, its soul and body, participate in the great dialectical
reasoning of Geist as it moves towards the actualization of the Absolute:
The states, nations [Völker], and the individuals involved in this business of
the world spirit emerge with their own particular and determinate principle,
which has its interpretations and actuality in their constitution and throughout
the whole extent of their condition. In their consciousness of this actuality and
in their preoccupation with its interests, they are at the same time the uncon-
scious instruments and organs of that inner activity in which the shapes which
they themselves assume pass away, while the spirit in and for itself prepares
and works its way towards the transition to its next and higher stage. (p. 373)
A nation, composed of individuals in families, particular estates organized into

corporations, and a governing class of professional civil servants, becomes a
state. A group of individualized states, freely consenting to an international law
code and under the sovereignty not of any single ruler but governed by the dia-
lectic of the ‘universal spirit, the spirit of the world’ (p. 371), gives way to the
final state which is the actualization of that universal spirit. In terms of feeling
and the ethical life, this final state is the embodiment of faith, love and hope.
And it is at this point that the metaphysics of body politic is inseparable from
theology. For the final embodiment of faith, love and hope, a triad Hegel takes
from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13.13), is the kingdom of God. In
this condition, which is the ultimate political expression of the spiritual and the
rational, ‘heaven [is brought] down to earth in this world, to the ordinary secu-
larity of actuality and representational thought’ (Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
p. 380). This is the telos of history and, as Hegel reminds us in the final lines of
Philosophy of History ‘what was happening and is happening every day, is not only
“without God”, but is essentially His work’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of History,
p. 457). This concluding statement should remind us that we are not yet at the
end. The Kingdom is still to come. Three observations need to be made here.
First, the nation state under monarchic rule establishes itself in contradistinc-
tion to other nation states. As such, the Kingdom is divided against itself. In
view of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, the working of the universal spirit beyond
the particularities of nationhood, constitutional monarchy would find its con-
summation in a Messianic rule; enfolded within the Logos. ‘[T]he usual sense
in which the term “popular sovereignty” has begun to be used in recent times is
to denote the opposite of that sovereignty which exists in the monarch. In this opposi-
tional sense, popular sovereignty is one of those confused thoughts which are
based on a garbled notion [Vorstellung] of the people. Without its monarch and
that articulation of the whole which is necessarily and immediately associated
with monarchy, the people are a formless mass. The latter is no longer a state’
(p. 319). The constitutional monarchs of nations must give way, in the final
actualization of Geist, to the absolute monarch; the realization of the kingdom
of God is the realization of the rule of Christ whose Spirit was given totally to
the world following the death of God on the Cross.36 In the final reconciliation
of the church with the state, then monarchy would be sublated into theocracy.
Secondly, and as a corollary, Hegel reminds us in Philosophy of History that in
the current condition of the modern world (in Hegel’s time) the ‘harmony
between the State and the Church has now attained an immediate realization’
and, as the English editor rightly notes, what this ‘immediate realization’ means
is that ‘the harmony in question simply exists; its development and results have
not yet manifested themselves’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 424). We
remain part of an ongoing operation. The Protestant state marks a certain polit-
ical manifestation of divine reasoning for Hegel, but as he describes in the 1831
extension to his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, in a discussion of religion
and the state that followed the fall of the Bourbon monarchy in 1830, tensions
between religion and the state continue. The principle of freedom has been
announced, but it has two forms. The first lies in the private nature of religious
conviction and the second in the public formality of the constitution. ‘[I]n
modern times there has come to prominence the one-sided view according to
which the constitution is supposed to be self-sustaining on the one hand, while
conviction, religion, and conscience should on the other hand be set aside as
matters of indifference because it is of no concern to the political constitution
what conviction and religion individuals commit themselves to’ (Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion, 1, p. 459). The monarchic state is not the end of history,
for divine freedom is yet to be fully embodied. Neither is the liberal state the
end of history – despite those interpreters of Hegel who view the crucifixion as
a representation of the point at which the transcendent God abandoned all
transcendence to become the fully immanent Spirit of the Community. But, as
I have shown, with respect to the role the Trinity and Christ play in Hegel that
is a mistaken reading. The crucifixion is not a representation for Hegel but a
concrete historical and revelatory event by God. Christ, then, both is resur-
rected and ascends into heaven; kenosis completes itself in elevation. And those
who are governing by the rational Spirit of Christ are elevated likewise to the
vision of God – ‘a purely theoretical contemplation, the supreme repose of
thought’ (p. 425). Hegel cannot easily be secularized in the way Francis
Fukuyama,37 after Alexander Kojève, makes him.
Because finitude is continually negating itself, and because ‘modern times’
are still a moment in the movement of Absolute Reason (since the evidence of
tensions is evidence also of what has not yet been reconciled, and, similarly, the
formalism of the constitution is an abstraction that has yet to be actualized),

then neither Protestantism nor monarchy can be the last word on religion and
the state. As Peter Hodgson reminds us, for Hegel ‘Modern agnosticism and
atheism have their roots in the divided consciousness of Protestantism, the
attempt to carve out a realm of faith immune from the critiques of autonomous
reason’(Hegel and Christian Theology, p. 58). Hegel can only bring us to the point
at which, and the culture in which, he himself stands. Governed by a messianic
reason, Hegel is committed politically to a condition approaching Lenin’s
notion of the permanent revolution. Absolute spirit working in and as the
human spirit continually transforms the cultural given. Hegel notes that mod-
ern society and its prevailing polity is an outworking of the Reformation and
the French Revolution. But this modern politics will also give way to what has
yet to appear, though it remains concealed in the present as a potential. Again,
the overriding polity is a theocracy, only there is no direct rule by God; the
operations of the Absolute are always and only mediations through concrete
circumstance. The content of the state, its incarnation of the divine freedom
and truth, can never be fixed – only always sublatable. It has no essential form
– liberal democratic, communist, monarchic, fascist or oligarchic; and yet
potentially it is all these polities and more. For the political evolution of the
state in any of its guises is guided by the actualization of the freedom it affords;
the political freedom that incarnates God’s own absolute freedom. Hegel did
not celebrate the French Revolution because it was a move from absolute mon-
archy to democracy. He celebrated it because ‘the human spirit has outgrown
like the shoes of a child’ the ancien regime (Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
p. 397). While any state has specific content, then, it is continually subject to the
ongoing work of the negative in the finite.
This leads to us a third point and a further corollary of the previous two
points: we have entered, with the advent of Christ, ‘upon a period of Spirit con-
sciousness that is free, inasmuch as it wills the True and Eternal’ (Lectures on the
Philosophy of History, p. 412). But this world is not eternal. It is finite and tempo-
ral. Certainly, to the extent that the state labours, in the Spirit of Christ, to bring
about that rationality in which faith, hope and love abound, then ‘the worldly
realm is justified in and for itself, for its foundation is the divine will, the law of
right and freedom’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3, p. 342). But Christian
faith, hope and love look to a future that is beyond this world and truth, for
Hegel, lies not in the sensible, immediate and finite world, but is rather with the
infinite (p. 330). There is a return to God, for the finitude in its immediate
state. This return is profoundly related to what I spoke of above as ‘elevation’
– a further development of the Kingdom that follows death; death is the final
sublation of the natural and the finite as that which is mortal puts on immortal-
ity.38 In this world, the Kingdom can attain a certain determinate being, but as
I pointed out earlier, this being is subsistent; the Kingdom comes to its consum-
mation only with the eschaton. Creation, as Hegel observes, is a religious repre-
sentation (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3, pp. 148–149), a Vorstellung that
must ultimately be sublated. In the earliest form of the Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion, in 1821, the final section discusses the ‘passing away’ of the commu-
nity. In those remarks made in 1831 on religion and the state, Hegel speaks of
two forms of wisdom. The first form is divine Wisdom, which first is the Logos
and the Spirit (Sophia) and then, in religion, the ‘knowledge that human beings
have of God and of themselves in God’ (p. 451). The second form is the wisdom
of the world. These two forms of wisdom lead human beings, on the one side,
to ‘the vocation [Bestimmung] . . . for eternity’ while, on the other, to a commit-
ment to the temporal and temporal well-being’.39 While the human condition
continues, then each person will have to come to their own subjectivity in Christ
and so history continues. But they are destined for eternity. This, as I suggested
earlier, is where human beings come to know God even as they are known by
Him (to cite Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13.12)): Hegel’s absolute
knowing. Here the Kingdom is established in a way that sublates both religion
and politics; there will be, that is, Geist without Gestalt. There is no need for
either religion or politics; for all is consummated in the love of Wisdom.
Dialectics come to an end. The finite is ‘not true in itself . . . the world . . . is not
regarded as something permanent on this side’, Hegel writes (Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion, 3, p. 424).
Nevertheless, there must be a final state of freedom and wisdom that this
world attains if Hegel is not to fall foul of his ‘bad infinite’ – the infinite that
goes on indeterminately. A culmination of history is presupposed and under-
stood to be the coming of Christ’s Kingdom (even though in Elements of the
Philosophy of Right such a Kingdom is not directly related to Christ). It is worth
noting that in the early Church Fathers, Irenaeus, committed to the resurrec-
tion of the body, expounded a millenarian view that creation did not end with
the coming of the Kingdom, but was ‘renewed and liberated’ – ‘the fashion of
this world has passed away, and man [sic.] has been renewed and grown ripe of
immortality’ (The Early Christian Fathers, pp. 99–100). Hegel makes no comment
on such a condition for it is beyond representation and religion; though the
condition would be reconciliation of his two wisdoms and the eschatological
sublation of the finite by the infinite. But if, as I am suggesting, we read his
thoughts on the development of the state alongside his Christology, then the
former is governed by the messianic logics of the latter; and as such the state
can never finally be a secular product – it always remains a profoundly theolog-
ical and metaphysical entity.
One might ask, if my argument is valid, what are the consequences that fol-
low from it for an examination of the messianism that haunts modern poli-
tics? I would claim that reading Hegel’s politics of the state Christologically
opens up new possibilities for comparison with the political messianisms in
the work of Gillian Rose and Jacques Derrida, both of whom engage with
Hegel. A critical reading is also made possible of Giorgio Agamben’s explora-
tion of messianic time which, while seeking the subversion of ‘postdemocratic
counterfeit’ in the hope of establishing democracy as a community of
dispute,40 has actually nothing to say about the church St. Paul was referring
to and its relation to the state. Furthermore, Agamben confuses apocalyptic
with eschatology, and has no room for either in his concentration upon the
messianic ‘now’ (The Time That Remains, p. 77). A return to Hegel, in a new
light, offers another theological and political perspective in our current
enthrallment with the messianic.
Notes
1
For Adorno, see his Aesthetic Theory trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and ed. Gretel
Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 423. For Karl Löwith,
see his From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 32.
2
This is a central thesis of Alexander Kojève’s famous Marxist/Heideggerian read-
ing of Hegel in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel trans. James H. Nichols Jr.
(New York: Basic Books, 1969).
3
This is certainly there in Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonists with their goal of
‘progress des lumières et l’amélioration du sort de l’humanité’ as J.A. Talmon has pointed
out, quoting Saint-Simon in his exploration of Political Messianism: The Romantic
Phrase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), p. 63. Saint-Simon did see himself as
the Messiah bringing history to its conclusion.
4
Although this is not an adjective Hegel employed himself – in fact the term was
coined later. The term has a French origin in the nineteenth century among Saint-
Simon and the Saint-Simonists with respect to both the leaders (Saint-Simon and
later Enfantine) and a Mère-Messie who they believed would partner the leader and
who, in the words of Enfantine, would become God’s ‘nouvelle parole . . . la douce
voix tu m’as promise se tait’ (cited in J.A. Talmon, Political Messianism, p. 121). Saint-
Simon’s proclamation of a coming grand epoch that in the past had been named
the Messiah’s Kingdom found an analogue in the apocalyptic and utopian procla-
mations of Charles Fourier’s. The Simonists were far less apocalyptic in their
eschatology.
5
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 380 All further references will be given in
the text.
6
See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Peter
Hodgson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 40–41, 215–217,
442–446 for interpretations of the Fall and original sin and pp. 194, 478–479 for
repentance and penance. All further references will be given in the text.
7
In G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History trans. J. Sibree (New York:
Dover Publications, 1956), Hegel speaks of ‘the Human Will’ which has retreated
into the privacy of its selfish interests, in ‘a revolt of the Good Spirit’, much in the
way Luther, after Paul, speaks of sin as a working against the goodness of God
(p. 21). In fact, Hegel will go on to call this revolt ‘the panorama of sin’ that
history unfolds (p. 23). All further references will be given in the text.
8
See his letter to Schelling dated January 1794 in which he exhorts: ‘Let the king-
dom of God come, and let our hands not lie idle in our laps!’ G.W.F. Hegel, Briefe
von und zu Hegel ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952–1960) I,
p. 18. The Kingdom at this point is explicitly related to the ‘invisible church’.
9
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, p. 318. Hegel does associ-
ate the Kingdom with the Church in a way that is not quite accurate. The Kingdom
of God is a far older notion than Christianity. It is found in the Hebrew Bible and
although linked to specific territory and a specific ethnic religion (specificities
that Hegel would see needed to be sublated), it develops in a more universal
direction as Jewish messianism develops.
10
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 380. Once more, this is where
he differs from the political messianism of Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonists
who saw not the Reformation but the French Revolution as a new revelation of
God’s purpose in history.
11
See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in
Medieval and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements
(London: Mercury Books, 1962).
12
See William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T.&T. Clark,
2002).
13
G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the
Complete Range of Its Forms as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philosophy trans. Walter
Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY press, 1977), p. 191.
14
See Hans Küng, An Introduction to Hegel’s Theological Thought as a Prolegomenon to a
Future Christology trans. J.R.Stephenson (New York: Crossroad, 1987).
15
See Emil Brito, Hegel et la tâche actuelle de la christologie trans. H. Dejond S.J. (Paris:
Dessain et Tolra, 1979) and La christologie de Hegel: Verbum Crucis trans. B. Pottier
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1983).
16
See James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983).
17
See Andrew Shanks, Hegel’s Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
18
See Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
19
He is of course not alone in doing that at that time: for Schleiermacher, Christ is
the embodiment of perfected God consciousness.
20
See Peter G. Hodgson, ‘Hegel’s Christology: Shifting Nuances in the Berlin
Lectures,’ Journal of American Academy of Religion, 53 (1985), pp. 23–40.
21
These others would include myself who, in Graham Ward, Cities of God (London:
Routledge, 2001) and The Politics of Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic Press, 2009), while trying to pay attention to the subtlety of Hegel’s
thought still returned to the univocity of Geist, which led to the collapse of any
distinction between immanence and transcendence.
22
Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, pp. 241–242. There is, in fact, scant attention
paid to the Eastern Orthodox roots in Neo-Platonized Christianity in Hegel’s
Lecture on the Philosophy of History .
23
One might then develop a dynamic model for analogy on the basis of Hegelian
dialectic. If in analogy that which is good and perfect (for us) participates in, but
is not identical with, the absolute Good, the Perfection that is God, then we could
say, along Hegelian lines, that what we name good and perfect finds their con-
summate truth in God. The natural, immediate and empirical perception of
goodness and perfection is overcome because, in Hegel’s language, it is
spiritualized, but in that overcoming we recognize the divine in creation itself.
And so we can concur that the language of ‘Father’ and Sonship’ is confusing (if
understood literally, that is, univocally), whilst also affirming with Paul that
human fatherhood can only be truly identified if brought into relation with the
fatherhood of God.
24
From the 1831 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: ‘the world is made out of noth-
ing . . . Within its nothing, the world has arisen out of the absolute fullness of the
power of the good. It has been created out of its own “nothing” which (its other)
is God’, G.W.F. Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol.1, p. 359. I say ‘Hegel’s
interpretation’ because of his emphasis on nothing as being God’s own nothing.
This could suggest, as William Desmond points out, that the ‘nothing’ is inter-
preted as the negation in God the Father that takes place in the generation of the
Son. (See William Desmond, Hegel and God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot:
Ashgate Press, 2003), pp. 123–124.) This would not be the radical nothing of the
traditional interpretation of nihilo in creatio ex nihilo whereby God creates by
divine fiat. In fact, this would be a form of creation ex deo read in terms of creatio ex
nihilo. The language of God’s own nothing does suggest that nothing is not noth-
ing but rather a something that abides in the Godhead. Is there a tarrying with
the negative in the immanent Trinity, for Hegel, related to the subjectivity Hegel
posits in God as absolute subject? If so, how does this relate to Hegel’s insistence
on the eternal oneness and unity of God? Negativity is related to ‘becoming’, so
how would such a divine ‘becoming’ in the immanent Trinity correlate with its
eternal condition? The notion then of God’s own nothing is an area where there
is a lack of clarity in Hegel’s thinking. See Peter Hodgson, Hegel and Christian
Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) for an interesting rebut-
tal of William Desmond’s claim that the nihil has to be something outside God:
‘Rather the nihil is the pure possibility of being that subsists within God as the
inexhaustible source out of which God releases otherness to become something
free and independent, yet still connected’, p. 257. For another ambiguity about
creation in Hegel, see also G.W.F. Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, p. 360
which seems to suggest some inert and formless Matter (like the Neo-Platonic
concept of hyle) over which God exerts his power. All further references will be
given in the text.
25
‘God’s creating is very different from procession, wherein the world goes forth
from God’, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, p. 360. This, then, would rule out
Desmond’s judgement that for Hegel ‘Creation and the Son are the same and
included in God’s holistic immanence’ (Desmond, p. 124). It is true that Hegel
appears to give more attention to the second determination (creation by the
Logos) rather than the first (the generation of the Logos by the Father), but we
can see this as a necessary consequence of his philosophy of religion; that is, reli-
gion treats God as He is present in religious belief and practice. The immanent
trinity and its operations are the condition for this presence, as Hegel makes
plain, but in treating of religion we can only make transcendental inferences on
the basis of the economic workings of the Trinity about the intra-Trinitarian life.
‘The doctrine of God can be grasped and taught only as the doctrine of religion’,
he writes (G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1, p. 116). In a similar
way, Hegel says very little about ‘absolute knowing’ – briefly in the closing chap-
ter of Phenomenology of Spirit, because this too is beyond representation and
religion. Only God has such knowledge and we can only enter it post mortuum.
26
This is the radical otherness of equivocation that gives us no knowledge at all
because there can never be a relation that mediates such knowledge. The other
remains what is totally external and unapproachable. Some forms of the post-
modern reification of alterity announce such an otherness; in Levinas, for
example.
27
As Peter Hodgson puts it: ‘The world remains the world, not-God within God’,
Hegel and Christian Theology, p. 131.
28
Henry Betterson, The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1956), p. 118. All further references will be given in the text.
29
I John 3.2 reads, ‘Beloved, now we are the children of God, and it doth not yet
appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like
him [omoioi autō]; for we shall see him as [kathōs] he is.’ Origen, in wishing to
distinguish between ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ viewed that we were each made in the
image of God but we had to grow into His likeness through time and in grace.
Hegel does not, to my knowledge, draw such a distinction himself but if God is
perfect subjectivity then human beings, by participating in Christic reasoning,
must enter more deeply that subjectivity which is their own, both individually and
collectively. ‘Likeness’ is not identity. We do not become Christs. For Hegel, iden-
tity is not equivalence, it is ‘recognition’ – a spiritual witnessing; identification.
30
One might, with William Desmond, insert a forensic knife here and argue that
Hegel’s Trinitarian model is erotic rather than agapeic. See William Desmond,
Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double, pp. 103–119. But Desmond makes too much of a
binarism out of the categories erotic and agapeic, a binarism that the tradition
that follows the Cappadocian Fathers would reject.
31
In fact, taking up Desmond’s distinction between erotic and agapeic loving, one
could argue that positing a kenotic moment in the immanent Trinity and its
pleroma of love is necessary for that love to avoid being simply self-serving in its
circularity.
32
Cyril O’Regan points to the lack in Hegel’s philosophy of any traditional notion
of apophasis with respect to the knowledge of God. I think this is right, but has to
be qualified. Hegel is well aware of human finitude and the limitations that places
upon us when thinking about God. We cannot think outside of representation
and the categories for such representation necessarily are drawn from the world
around us, its culture, its dominant ideas, and so on. Logic attempts to purify
such thinking, sharing in divine reason; but this side of eternity, our knowledge
of God, is incomplete. On this reading of Hegel, the mystery of God, though fully
revealed, cannot be fully appropriated until the post mortuum condition, where
the human being can know even as he or she is known. Hegel’s absolute knowl-
edge would therefore be an inference drawn from an exposition of the logic of
Trinitarian relations with creation alongside the presupposition of the immortal-
ity of the soul. In absolute knowledge is the telos where the speculative comes into
itself, because what is known correlates completely with the act of knowing.
33
Human beings are immortal for Hegel and just as they pass away, trumping self-
denial or obedience with the submission to death, so creation too will pass away.
Creation is not eternal for Hegel, as it would be for Aristotle or the emanation-
ists. The world, he tells us, is not and cannot be permanent because ‘the infinite
alone is; the finite has no genuine being, whereas God has genuine being’ (G.W.F.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1, p. 424). The finitude of creation, like
human finitude, is destined to be sublated – not to disappear as if it were merely

appearance (this would be either Gnosticism or pantheism), but to return to its
true ideality in God. Ultimately, the world when returned to God, and the
Kingdom are one.
34
See my essay ‘Allegoria Amoris’ in Christ and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
pp. 183–218.
35
In the Preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues polemically for the
role philosophy has to play in understanding the state and the political. He coun-
ters contemporary suggestions about the secularity of the state and the denigration
of metaphysics in political science, speaking of the need to establish any thinking
about the state in terms of ‘universal principles’ (p. 18). For such people ‘the
claims of the concept constitute an embarrassment’, but, Hegel adds, this is an
embarrassment ‘from which they are nevertheless unable to escape’ (p. 19).
36
A similar reading of Hegel, though not one based upon a theological point, was
made by E. Weil in his book Hegel et L’Etat (Paris, 1953). In Weil’s secular reading,
the establishment of state is a stage for further transformations that will bring
about a world state. Charles Taylor does not think such a reading can be sus-
tained (see Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 426), though
he points to both the contradictions between civil society and the state in Hegel’s
thought and demonstrates how Hegel’s three political orders (family, civil soci-
ety, state) with the sovereign at the pinnacle are fundamentally related to the
development of the Concept. But Weil’s point is that the realization of the ratio-
nal state in one country, and its concomitant Sittlichkeit, would be vying with other
similarly realized states elsewhere. Hegel was no relativist and the logic of Absolute
Geist is unity. Neither Taylor nor Weil relates Hegel’s political to his theological
thinking. While Taylor recognizes the way political hierarchy reflects cosmic order
(p. 451), he does not develop an account of the way the political participates in the
cosmic ordering. The coming of the Kingdom of God at the end of Elements of
Philosophy of Right means the ushering in of a universal state that can only be a
world state.
37
See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1992).
38
See here Hegel’s affirmation on human mortality and the immortality of the
soul, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1, p. 188.
39
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1, p. 455. Hegel asks how the
two forms are related and proceeds to sketch his dialectic of freedom, but, as I
suggested above, his dialectics can be viewed as a dynamic mode of analogy.
40
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans
trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 58. All
Chapter 7
Before the Anti-Christ is Revealed:

On the Katechontic Structure of
Messianic Time
Michael Hoelzl
University of Manchester
Introduction
In the second letter to the Christians in Thessalonica, the apostle Paul, or the
author that claims to write in the name of the apostle, gives a clear description
of what will happen when the messiah returns:
[. . .] when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in
flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on
those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the pun-
ishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from
the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints,
and to be marvelled at among all who have believed, because our testimony
to you was believed. (2 Thessalonians 1, 7–9)1
Messianism, as the belief in the return of Christ, implies the belief in the day of
judgement. Therefore, in Christianity a time span opens up between the first
and the second coming of Christ at which end our acts of faith will be judged.
Thus, what we do in the meantime does matter. Although the word ‘messia-
nism’ did not occur with regularity in the English language before the second
half of the nineteenth century, the understanding of history as progressing
time which will come to a definitive end is essential to Christian faith. Messianism
has both theological and political consequences. Theologically, human life is
always of a temporary and provisional nature and ultimately the coming of the
Lord is to be desired. Politically, the messianic understanding of time makes
On the Katechontic Structure of Messianic Time 99
action a necessity and forces decisions. Even non-action is a political decision.

In this sense, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a truly political book.
In this essay, I will concentrate on the structure of the time in-between created
by messianism and its political, rather than theological, consequences. How do
we conceive the advent of the messiah? And what does this conception tell us
about political action? I will argue that the concept of messianic time is an
example of a theologico-political category of history that became prominent
again in the first half of the twentieth century, when the question about the
right form of government was asked again.
As we will see in the first part of this essay, messianism or messianic time has
a more complex structure than just the bipolar meaning of a past arrival, that
is, the time of the Lord’s presence and its implied promise of his return. Time
is not just like a string of events with a beginning and that is orientated towards
an end. At the heart of messianic time lies the concept of the katechon which,
following its theological origin, can be translated as what restrains, and the one
who restrains, namely, the Anti-Christ. In the second part, I will concentrate on
the work of the eminent twentieth century jurist Carl Schmitt and what role the
idea of the katechon plays in his political theory. Finally, the heuristic value of the
category of the katechon for understanding the nature of history will be explored.
The Apostle Paul’s Understanding of the Katechon

The idea of the katechon originates in the second letter of the apostle Paul to the
community in Thessalonica. The apostle Paul is explaining why the Lord has
not come yet. Among biblical scholars, it has been agreed that verses 6–7 are
the central part of the letter, ‘they constitute the most important point’. 2 These
two verses, in their wider context, read as follows:
5 οὐ μνημονεύετε ὅτι ἔτι ὢν πρὸς ὑμᾶς ταῦτα ἔλεγον ὑμῖν

6 καὶ νῦν τὸ κατέχον οἴδατε εἰς τὸ ἀποκαλυφθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ ἑαυτοῦ καιρῷ
7 τὸ γὰρ μυστήριον ἤδη ἐνεργεῖται τῆς ἀνομίας μόνον ὁ κατέχων ἄρτι ἕως ἐκ μέσου
γένηται
8 καὶ τότε ἀποκαλυφθήσεται ὁ ἄνομος ὃν ὁ κύριος Ἰησοῦς ἀνελεῖ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ
στόματος αὐτοῦ καὶ καταργήσει τῇ ἐπιφανείᾳ τῆς παρουσίας αὐτοῦ;
5 Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?
6 And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when
his time comes.
7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who
now restrains it is removed.
8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy
with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his
coming.
What precedes the second coming of the Lord? According to the apostle Paul,
the ‘lawless one’, ὁ ἄνομος, has to be revealed and this is the precondition for
the second coming of the Lord. We are also told that the mystery of the lawless
one is already at work, but has not been fully revealed yet.3 The reason for this
is ambivalent. Paul refers to another occasion when he has told the community
in Thessalonica before, and therefore they should already know, that someone
or something is restraining the appearance of the lawless one.
Thus the structure of messianism comprises three elements. First, the second
coming of the messiah; secondly, the revelation of the lawless one whose
ungodly work is already visibly and which precedes the second coming of Christ,
who then will finally destroy the lawless one ‘with the breath of his mouth’;
thirdly, something or someone (το' κατε′ χον / ο' κατε′ χωνο) that hinders the full
outbreak of lawlessness. Indirectly, the katechon therefore also restrains the sec-
ond coming of the Lord and the crucial question is whether the katechon is good
or bad, whether it should be desired and supported or not. It can be, and has
been argued, that the katechon, on the one hand, is good because it is restrain-
ing the absolute state of lawlessness, but, on the other hand, it is bad because it
also restrains the second coming of the Lord and therefore delays the fulfil-
ment of history (Heilsgeschichte). It is the postponement of the ultimate salvation
(Heil) and, consequently, it creates history; the time in-between (Geschichte).
Before discussing the question of the moral quality of the katechon and the
interpretation of the lawless one, some grammatical peculiarities of the text
should be noticed. The idea of the katechon only appears in the second letter to
the Thessalonians. In 2 Thessalonians 2 it appears in the form of two hapaxle-
gomena. In verse 6 it is mentioned in an objective, de-personalized form: τὸ
κατέχον, spelled with an omicron. Whereas in verse 7, the one who restrains is per-
sonalized: ὁ κατέχων, spelled with an omega. The same ambiguity is true for the
idea of lawlessness. Lawlessness (τῆς ἀνομίας) as a condition is mentioned in
verse 7 and referred to in a personalized form in verse 8 (ὁ ἄνομος). Despite the
fact that the authorship of 2 Thessalonians is a matter of dispute among biblical
scholars, it has also been suggested that the verses 6 and 7 of the second chapter
are later insertions which deliberately want to keep the question of the exact
time of the second coming of Christ vague. The intention of the different spell-
ing and the grammatical imprecision4 is to evade the pressing problem of the
parousia at the time when it was written. Kampen, for example, argues, that
[. . .] the author of 2 Thessalonians has tried to formulate an answer to the

question of the delay of the parousia. His answer takes the form of an exten-
sive eschatological scenario in which the coming of an eschatological oppo-
nent must precede the parousia. Apparently ‘Paul’ was aware that stressing
this necessity did not really give an answer. It would simply transform the ques-
tion as to why the parousia has not yet come, into a new version of the same
question, viz.: why has the eschatological opponent not yet come? It is this
question that Paul answers by introducing the κατε′ χον/κατε′ χων? (p. 149)
Regardless of whether Kampen’s argument is acceptable on exegetical grounds

or not, the lawless one as he is portrayed in 2 Thessalonians 2, 8 is the necessary
condition, the sine qua non, or philosophically speaking, the transcendental of
the second coming of the ‘Lord’ Jesus Christ. Chaos will precede the end of
time; it is the condition for the possibility of the fulfilment of history. In early
Christianity up until the Reformation, the lawless one has been identified as the
Anti-Christ portrayed in the epistles of John. This interpretation was supported
by the text of the verses 3–4 of the letter where Paul states:
[. . .] unless the apostasy comes firstly and the man of lawlessness is revealed –
the son of perdition, the one setting against and exalting himself over everything
being called God or object of worship, so as him in the shrine – of God to sit,
showing himself that he is a god.
In these verses, the man of lawlessness, the son of perdition, the outbreak of
apostasy and false worship, that is, the unrighteous occupation of God’s throne,
are paralleled. This parallelism resulted in the tradition of identifying the law-
less one with the Anti-Christ. In ‘Paul’s letter’ we can read that the lawless one
is the great opponent of God. He occupies God’s place, the throne of God. The idea
of the occupation of God’s throne by the Anti-Christ is a common idea during
the Middle Ages, as the play Ludus de Antichristo5 impressively demonstrates.6
Although the idea of the unrighteous occupation of God’s place is the most
prominent association with the work of the Anti-Christ, and summarizes there-
fore the nature of the Anti-Christ; at least 13 other functions of the Anti-Christ
in 2 Thessalonians 2 can be identified. Among those functions, which are
important for the context of this essay, are that he is the ‘wicked human end-
time ruler, opposing himself to all divine powers, usurps God’s place in the temple,
serving unwittingly God’s sovereign purposes and is possibly associated with the
Roman Empire’.7
In the aftermath of the Reformation the topos of the usurpation of God’s
place has been used in Protestant rhetoric to identify the pope with the Anti-
Christ, as the one who unjustly occupies God’s place.8 The office of the pope
as the vicarious Christi, in its literal sense, is the predicted apostasy of 2
Thessalonians 2, 3–4. ‘During the confessional disputes of the 16th and 17th
centuries’, finally, as Grossheutschi states:
there was no one single person or issue of importance which was not labelled
the ‘Anti-Christ’. [. . .] Such an excessive use [of the term] necessarily led to
its devaluation and therefore it is not surprising that this concept lost its [ana-
lytical strength] for describing the current political situation.9
This statement suggests that the Anti-Christ myth has lost its value after the con-
fessional controversies. The (over-)excessive use of the Anti-Christ motif caused
an inflation of the value of its meaning.
This is not the case with the problem of the katechon as the restraining power.
Who or what is the katechon? The question still remains. The interpretation of
the lawless one as the Anti-Christ, mentioned above, introduced the Roman
Empire as a possible candidate. Throughout early Christianity, a reinterpre-
tation of the role of the Roman Empire took place. After Tertullian, the Empire
was no longer seen as the Anti-Christ. Moreover, the Empire became the kate-
chon. As Grossheutschi has shown, the mainstream understanding of the kate-
chon in the Early Church was that of the Roman Empire (Carl Schmitt und die
Lehre vom Katechon, p. 25). It was the Empire that restrained the outbreak of law-
lessness. It restored, guaranteed and maintained order and thus fought the
inchoate state of lawlessness. This subsequent change of roles after Tertullian –
that is, the changing attitude towards the Roman Empire from being the Anti-
Christ and now becoming the restraining power – is only understandable if we
keep Tertullian’s political agenda, that is to say, the pro-Roman attitudes of the
young Tertullian, in mind.10 Tertullian, a lawyer by training, was the first and
foremost advocate of the identification of the Roman Empire with the katechon.
In his Apologeticum he seeks to demonstrate, on the one hand, that the Christians
are the better citizens and that Christianity is the only religion supportive of the
Empire. Thereby he also claims, on the other hand, that the katechontic function
of the Empire guarantees stability and order and thus is welcomed by Christians.11
With Tertullian, who sometimes seems to be more of a sophist than a Christian
dogmatic, the seeds are spread for a positive attitude towards an institutional-
ized form of religion. What later became the dualism between auctoritas and
potestas, between the sacred and the secular, between the dual nature of the
Church as visible society and invisible community, and vice versa the dual nature
of the Empire in its religio-political qualities, is already expressed in Tertullian’s
Apologeticum.
For Christians, Tertullian’s standpoint raises the crucial problem of loyalty.12
Should Christians support the ‘Empire’ and therefore work against the second
coming of the Lord? Or should Christians pray for the coming of the kingdom
of God as the Lord’s Prayer teaches? Both positions have been defended. It is
the ambivalent division between mysticism and politics that has marked
Christendom. Despite the Janus-faced nature of the katechon, its spiritual-politi-
cal dimension, with modernity, the concept of the katechon mainly remained a
problem for biblical scholars until the legal theorist Carl Schmitt referred to it.
This is the figure to whom we shall now turn.
Carl Schmitt’s Recourse to the Katechon

Carl Schmitt’s recourse to the concept of the katechon becomes evident for the
first time in his writings during the Second World War (particularly 1942–1944).
It is frequently referred to in his postwar work between 1950 and 1957 and from
then on seems to play no significant role in his thinking.13 This is important
because it explains the apologetic and defensive tone in his writings whenever
the katechon is mentioned. In the context of this essay, it is not necessary to enter
the well-known debate about Schmitt’s engagement with the Nazi regime, the
change of his interests after 1936 when he was offended by the regime (in an
article published by the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps) and his personal situa-
tion after his release from prison (without charges) in 1947.14 Despite the late
appearance of the term katechon in Schmitt’s work, I would like to argue that the
idea of a ‘katechontic structure of history’ plays a role in his thought as early as
his Political Romanticism of 1919 and his Political Theology of 1922. Although, the
katechon has been used by him apologetically with reference to his engagement
of Nazi Germany, he makes clear in his later work that he was more concerned
with the katechon and its implied structure for a Christian understanding of
history. For Schmitt, the katechon is an analytical category for understanding
history properly as a Christian.15 This, I would say, can be most clearly seen in
his Political Theology of 1922 where a theory of metaphysical transpositions is
introduced. Before I outline this argument, I briefly want to give an apt exam-
ple of how the katechon has been deployed to justify Schmitt’s past. That is to
illustrate how the concept of the katechon is used by Schmitt and is associated
with a certain strategy of apology to excuse a dismissive, biographical, political
engagement.
Rather than quoting Schmitt himself, I want to refer to the words of Jacob
Taubes. He defended Schmitt’s ‘flirt with the Nazis’, as he calls it, by referring
to Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon. In the posthumously published lec-
ture series on the political theology of the apostle Paul, Taubes says:
Schmitt had only one interest: that the party, that the chaos did not come
(up) to power – that the state remains. At any costs [. . .] for the jurist every-
thing depends on whether a juridical form can be found, however sophisti-
cated, it needs to be found, otherwise the chaos reigns. That is what he later
calls the Kat-echon: the restrainer, who suppresses [niederhält] the chaos that
seeks to emerge [das von unten drängt].16
Taubes, who made this remarks in 1987, only a few weeks before his death, con-
cludes with a glimpse of self-irony: ‘This is not my worldview, that is not my
experience. I, as an apocalyptic, can imagine: it [the world] should disappear
[zugrunde gehen]. I have no spiritual investment in this world as it is’ (Die Politische
Theologie des Paulus, p. 139) [italics in English in the original].
In a very subtle way, Taubes juxtaposes Christian messianism with a Jewish
view of the end of all things. For Taubes, and a Jewish understanding of history
in general, the apocalypse is still possible. But, for Schmitt, as a Catholic, history
follows its own grammar and concentrates on the time-in-between. In this mean-
time politics takes place and institutions are legitimated. The katechon is used
here as a political and existential category to explain and justify Schmitt’s option
for a total state in order to prevent the chaos that threatened the Weimar
republic. The option for an authoritative and total state, seemed to Schmitt, as
Taubes suggests, the only alternative to the threats of civil war.17
Taubes even goes so far to claim that Schmitt has chosen the lesser evil – that
is, the authoritative state to restrain the outbreak of the Nazi regime.18 This is
not undisputed, since Schmitt joined the Nazi party, and while Taubes’ phrase
‘flirt with the Nazis’ intends to downplay that fact, it is not really convincing.
What remains questionable, and Taubes also admits this, is why Schmitt joined
the Nazi party and, moreover, never seemed to have regretted it. Nevertheless,
the katechon in this apologetic use is portrayed as an act of suppressing evil; an
evil that seeks to surface and to dominate. It is not surprising that Rabbi Taubes’
interpretation of Schmitt’s ‘understanding’ katechon was much welcomed by
the latter.
The idea that the concept of the katechon is genuinely a category for under-
standing history in Christian terms is evident in Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth,
where he says:
I don’t believe that for a genuine Christian faith another understanding of

history is possible at all than that of the Kat-echon. The belief that someone
or something restrains the end of the world is the only explanation which
reconciles the eschatological paralysis of all human efforts with the historical
greatness like that of the Christian Empire of the German kings. The author-
ity of the Church fathers and literati like Tertullian, Jerome and Lactantius
Firmianus and the Christian continuation of the Sibylline prophesies [ora-
cles] are united in the conviction, that only the Roman Empire and its
Christian continuation can explain the existence of the aeon and maintain it
against the overwhelming power of the Evil.19
The central observation is the tension that arises for a Christian believer between
the desire for the coming of the Lord which, according to Schmitt, would result
inevitably in a ‘paralysis of all human efforts’ and the ‘historical greatness’ of
both the Roman and the Christian Empire. In other words, only the katechon
can bridge the gap between purely transcendent spirituality and purely imma-
nent politics. Moreover, the katechon is conceived as the criterion to qualify the
genuine [ursprünglichen] Christian faith. This also means that an understanding
of history without belief in the katechon is not genuinely Christian. Therefore
the katechon, according to Schmitt, is the watershed between heterodoxy and
orthodoxy as far as the Christian understanding of history is concerned. For
Schmitt, any conception of history after the Reformation, which inflated the
meaning of the katechon, necessarily appears to be heterodox.
The above quotation is not only a very strong statement but also a very prob-
lematic one. First, bearing in mind the exegetical controversies about the
authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, and 2 Thessalonians 2, 6–7 in particular, exe-
getical concerns can be raised. If Kampen, whom we already mentioned, is right,
then the orthographical and grammatical ambiguity of τὸ κατέχον / ὁ κατέχων
are deliberate later insertions to counterbalance the belief in the near coming
of the Lord. In other words, verses 6 and 7 should dilute the strong expectation
of parousia; the second coming of the Lord or the advent of the messiah. They
are an example of the politics of letters in their own right. Secondly, it is still not
clear who or what restrains. This is like an under-defined equation: an equation
with two variables but only one line of their numerical relation. That is to say,
the value of one variable always depends on what is taken as the value for the
other. And Schmitt himself has named different katechons, including concrete
persons, political entities, countries, emperors or the Jesuits (Carl Schmitt und
die Lehre vom Katechon, pp. 103–105).
Despite the difficulties of such a radical and at the same time under-defined
interpretation of the katechon, I would like to suggest that the concept of the
katechon has, at least, a heuristic value for the Christian understanding of history
and also for an understanding of history which does not claim to be Christian
per se but is the offspring of a Western culture infused by Christianity. This
should become clear by an examination of the theory of metaphysical transpo-
sition in Schmitt’s Political Theology and Political Romanticism.
Secularization as Metaphysical Transposition

Political Romanticism and Political Theology were written before Schmitt began to
use and refer to the term katechon. In order to justify an interpretation in retro-
spect, we have to return to one of the main characteristics and descriptions of
the nature of the Anti-Christ. That is the mythical idea that the Anti-Christ
usurps God’s place. The Anti-Christ is the unrighteous King on God’s throne
(see p. 101 in this book). How is this now related to Political Theology and Political
Romanticism? First of all, both treatises have similar titles. In the 1919 publica-
tion, it is romanticism which is political and in the 1922 treatise it is theology.
This indicates that the subject of both treatises is related. Both texts argue, that,
as far as Political Romanticism is concerned, romanticism is a wrong and selfish
worldview, whereas Political Theology suggests an answer to this romantic world-
view. In Political Theology, only political realism, following Thomas Hobbes and
Niccoló Macchiavelli provides an answer to Romanticism’s political naïveté.
Contrary to the endless self-reflexion of the romantic subject, what is needed in
Realpolitik is a strong leader who makes a decision.
In Political Romanticism, the Decisionist Schmitt criticizes romanticism because
of its inherent occasionalism and preoccupation with the romantic subject, that
is, the self-stylization of the individual. ‘Romanticism’, says Schmitt, ‘is subjectiv-
ized occasionalism, that is, the romantic or the romantic subject considers the
world as occasion and opportunity for its romantic productivity’.20 But more
important for the characterization of romanticism are the changes of meta-
physical ideas concerning the idea of God and the absolute that took place
from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century:
The highest and most certain reality of traditional metaphysics, the transcen-
dent God, was eliminated. More important than the controversy of the
philosophers was the question of who assumed his functions as the highest
and most certain reality, and thus as the ultimate point of legitimation in
historical reality. Two new worldly realities appeared and carried through
a new ontology without waiting for the conclusion of the epistemological
discussion: humanity and history.21
The occupation of God’s place by humanity and history indicates a dynamic

transformation of the metaphysical structure. The most prominent place, the
highest instance, was eliminated and the void was then reoccupied. This mech-
anism of transforming the system of metaphysics is what Schmitt calls
secularization.
In the preface to the second edition to Political Romanticism, written in 1924,
and thus after Political Theology, he writes:
Today, many varieties of metaphysical attitudes exist in a secularized form. To

a great extent, it holds true that different and, indeed, mundane factors have
taken the place of God: humanity, the nation, the individual, historical devel-
opment, or even life as life for its own sake, in its complete spiritual emptiness
and mere dynamic. This does not mean that the attitude is no longer meta-
physical. The thought and feeling of every person always retain a certain
metaphysical character. [. . .] What human beings regard as the ultimate,
absolute authority, however, certainly can change, and God can be replaced
by mundane and worldly factors. I call this secularization. (Political Romanticism,
pp. 17–18)
Secularization as the occupation of the place of the absolute instance within a

metaphysical system by mundane factors is identical with the secularization
thesis proposed in Political Theology, which is best illustrated by Schmitt’s famous
dictum: ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secular-
ized theological concepts.’ This is the opening line of the chapter on Political
Theology.22 Political Theology and Political Romanticism are, thus, similar in the
sense that both treatises provide a theory of secularization. Secularization is
defined as the changing occupation of God’s place within a metaphysical struc-
ture. God as the central and organizing instance is no longer taken for granted
and other instances or metaphysical entities can fulfil his role.
In Political Theology the process of the elimination of God and re-occupation
of the place of the highest instance is elaborated in terms of ‘Umbesetzung’ which
can be best translated with ‘re-allocation’ or ‘transposition’.
The process of transposition is the kernel of Schmitt’s secularization thesis,
which links theological/metaphysical discourse with political discourse. The
question now is, whether ideas, that is, a change within the system of ideas,
consequently leads to a change of its corresponding social reality or form of
political organization. Schmitt rejects the dualistic opposition of a system of

ideas and social reality, because neither a materialistic nor a theoretical
explanation of the interdependence of social reality and system of ideas leads
to a scientific result.23 In Schmitt’s theory of transposition the discourse of a
certain form of political organization with its implied genuine theological
discourse is compared. The question is what kind of theological/metaphysical
discourse is the most adequate for the form of political organization at stake. As
a result of this question, the kind of theological/metaphysical discourse which
is the clearest expression of a certain epoch is the political theology at stake.24
In order to illustrate this kind of correspondence between political theology
(metaphysic) and form of political organization, he gives an example of differ-
ent forms of democracy:
Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic

thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as
God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point
from which everything emanates and to which everything returns. Today, on
the contrary, such a well-known legal and political philosopher of the state as
Kelsen can conceive of democracy as the expression of a relativistic and
impersonal scientism. This notion is in accord with the development of
political theology and metaphysics in the nineteenth century. (Politische
Theologie, p. 49)
As a consequence of this development, the theistic notion of transcendence is no

longer credible and an immanent pantheism or positivist indifference towards
metaphysics seems to be the possible alternatives (Politische Theologie, p. 50).
Schmitt’s dynamic theory of secularization as the historical process of the
changing occupation of ‘God’s throne’, the metaphysical absolute, is a theory
of decay. All alien instances like history, mankind, the individual, technology or
economy have unrighteously usurped God’s place. In contrast to Auguste
Comte’s law of the three stages, according to which the mythical epoch is
replaced by the theological and the theological by the sociological, Schmitt’s
sequence of false absolute entities results in a pessimistic and sceptical view of
modernity.25 Moreover, the economic stage has replaced all previous systems.
The Antagonism of the ‘Anti-Christ’ and the Katechon
As mentioned above, Schmitt reintroduced the concept of the katechon to non-

theological discourse. Since Schmitt, the katechon has become an issue for con-
temporary debates in political theory again. To summarize Schmitt’s position
we can say: on the one hand, the katechon served as apology for his political
engagement during the Nazi regime, and, on the other, it is introduced as an
essential category for the right Christian understanding of history. The katechon
is the only possible explanation to bridge the gap between the paralysis of all
human efforts and innerworldly ambition. The katechon defines the space
between the radically spiritual and the purely political. It is the time window,
the mean-time, the in-between of the first and the second coming of the Lord;
the latter being preceded by the arrival of the Anti-Christ whom the katechon is
restraining. If we also take into account Schmitt’s understanding of seculariza-
tion as a process of transpositions in his earlier writings, then the similarity
between the characterization of the Anti-Christ and mundane factors occupying
the supreme place within a metaphysical system becomes evident. Does this
mean, that in the process of secularization, these mundane factors like the
romantic subject, humanity, technology or economy are the ‘Anti-Christ’
because they have usurped God’s place? And if so, who or what is the katechon
that seeks to hold back the emergence of the ‘Anti-Christ’?
In fact, with Schmitt, the logic of messianism is no longer stable but becomes
dynamic. Let me explain: in the tradition of early Christianity, up to the
Reformation, the Anti-Christ was a well-defined entity. He is the negation of
Christ and therefore the negation of all attributes of Christ. It is true, that the
notion of the katechon was interpreted in different ways. The mainstream under-
standing, as mentioned above, was that of the Roman Empire. Despite the dif-
ferent interpretations of the meaning of the katechon, the function of the
katechon was unquestionable. The katechon is the restrainer or that which
restrains the coming of the Anti-Christ. The difference between the classical
understanding of messianism – in other words, the interaction of the katechon,
the Anti-Christ and the return of the Lord – and the modern understanding is
the changing meaning of the ‘Anti-Christ’. Now, the ‘Anti-Christ’ is a structural
principle. It is the central and organizing space in the metaphysical matrix that
can be occupied by different mundane factors. And, the occupation of the cen-
tral space of the metaphysical matrix changes the form of political organiza-
tion, as illustrated by the example of Tocqueville and democracy.
In contrast to classical messianism, in modern messianism the katechon is
defined by the changing nature of the ‘Anti-Christ’. The basic, restraining func-
tion of the katechon remains the same, but it changes according to the changing
nature of its object, that is, the particular Anti-Christ at a certain time. Every
epoch, one might say, has its Anti-Christ and generates its appropriate katechon.
The old antagonism of Christ and Anti-Christ has been replaced by the antago-
nism of the Anti-Christ and the katechon.
Notes
1
I am using the New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament (NRSV) and the
Nestle-Aland edition of the New Testament in Greek.
2
See Maarten J.J. Menken, 2 Thessalonians (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 108, and
also L. Kampen, ‘The KATÉCHON/KATÉΩN of 2 Thess. 2:6–7’ in Novum Testa-
mentum, vol. 39, Fasc. 2, (1997), pp. 138–150. All further references will be given
in the text.
3
In verse 7, Paul suggests, that the work of the lawlessness one, the state of lawless-
ness is already operating. Thereby a structural analogy is made. Augustine’s
‘kingdom of God’, which has already begun but has not fully been realized is
structurally identical to the reign of lawlessness. It is already at work but some-
thing (verse 6) or someone (verse 7) is restraining the outbreak of lawlessness
(verse 7) or the complete revelation of the lawless one (verse 8).
4
For a detailed discussion of the grammatical forms see: George Milligan, St. Paul’s
Epistle to The Thessalonians (New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908),
pp. 100–103.
5
The play Ludus de Antichristo was written between 1140 and 1190. It even refers
to an earlier play by Adso of Toul of 954 called De ortu et tempore Antichristo. See
R. Engelsing, Ludus de Antichristo. Das Spiel vom Antichrist ed. and trans. Rolf
Engelsing (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), pp. 55–58.
6
R. Engelsing, Ludus de Antichristo. Das Spiel vom Antichrist, pp. 45, 47. Another
interesting example of this tradition can also be found in Vladimir Soloviev’s
dialogue ‘Christ and War’ of 1900 which ends with a ‘play’ called ‘The Anti-
christ’. See Vladimir Soloviev, The Antichrist (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1982).
7
G.C. Jenks, The Origins and Early Development of the Antichrist Myth (Berlin, New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p. 216. Jenks lists as the other functions: ‘obscure
name (indicating character rather than identity), appears on the world scene
unannounced, claims divine honours, assisted by satanic powers, seeks to deceive
people, false signs and spurious miracles, sudden demise at parousia of Jesus and
internal church troubles linked with endtyrant’s influence’ p. 216. Italics mine.
8
See the entries on ‘Antichrist’ and ‘The Man of Sin’ in G. Sydney Carter,
G.E. Alison Weeks, eds. The Protestant Dictionary (London: The Harrison Trust,
1933), pp. 38–41, 400–402.
9
F. Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 1996), p. 56. All translations are mine except stated otherwise. All
10
See B. Altaner and A. Stuiber, Patrologie (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1980), pp. 148–
163. And for a more detailed study see Eric Osborn, Tertullian: First Theologian of
the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
11
‘In the strict sense of the word, [in Tertullian] can be found two katechons: First,
there is the genuine restrainer, i.e. the Roman Empire and secondly, like a kind
of sub-katechon, there is the prayer of the Church’, Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt
und die Lehre vom Katechon, pp. 50–51.
12
Jean-Jacques Rousseau discusses this problem of split-loyalty in his final chapter
of his Du contrat social; du droit politique. His solution is the well-known concept of
a civil religion with no room for any dogmatic theology. See J.J. Rousseau, Gesell-
schaftsvertrag (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977), pp. 140–153.
13
According to Grossheutschi, Schmitt mentions the katechon in: ‘Beschleuniger
wider Willen’ (1942); Land und Meer (1942); Die Lage der europäischen Rechtswissen-
schaft (1943/44); Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951, Ex Captivitate
Salus (1950); ‘Drei Stufen historischer Sinngebung’ (1950); Der Nomos der Erde im
Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) and ‘Die andere Hegel-Linie’ (1957).
14
The literature on Schmitt’s political orientation, and its conservative, catholic or
antisemitic background, is vast and controversial. A profound and detailed study
offers Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1995). For a comprehensive overview, see the introduction to
Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology II. The Myth of the Closure of any Political Theology
trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 1–29.
15
Here I differ from Grossheutschi. See his Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon,
p. 57.
16
Jacob Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus (Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
1993), p. 139. All further references will be given in the text.
17
Given the more anecdotal and rather unsystematic account of Schmitt’s work by
Taubes, it is quite difficult to judge whether Taubes agrees with Schmitt’s inter-
pretation of Thomas Hobbes and whether he, Taubes, would subscribe to the
notion of civil war experienced by Hobbes as an inspiration, or even motivation
for Schmitt. See also: Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Lehre des Thomas Hobbes
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1936)
18
An intriguing discussion of the moral dilemma faced by many of those who had
to make the decision whether to accept the Nazi party in order to prevent civil
war or even to dismantle the party by recognizing them as a parliamentary party
can be found in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s biography of Karl von Hammer-
stein. See H.M. Enzensberger, Hammerstein oder der Eigensinn. Eine Deutsche
Geschichte (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), esp. pp. 107–110.
19
Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), pp. 29–30.
Italics are mine.
20
Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998), p. 18.
21
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1986), pp. 58–59. All further references will be given in the text.
22
For the complex editorial and compositional history of the treatise Political
Theology, see the introduction to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II, pp. 1–29.
23
Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), pp. 47–51.
All further references will be given in the text.
24
The assumption of a correspondence between metaphysical idea and political
organization is already outspoken in Politische Romantik, when Schmitt examines
the counter-revolutionary thoughts of Louis-Gabriel, Vicomte de Bonald: ‘From
the standpoint of his Christian political philosophy, Bonald saw the Jacobinism of
1793 precisely as the eruption of an atheistic philosophy. He had worked out an
analogy between the theological and philosophical idea of God and the idea of
the political order of society. It led to the conclusion that the monarchist principle
corresponds to the theistic idea of a personal God because it requires a personal
monarch as a visible providence. A monarchist-democratic constitution is sup-
posed to conform to the deist assumption of a transcendent God. An example is
the Constitution of 1791, according to which the king was just as powerless in the
state as the God of deism was in the world. For Bonald, that is crypto-antiroyalism,
just as deism is crypto-atheism’, Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 60.
25
See the critique by Hans Blumenberg, Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. Main:
Suhrkamp, 1999) and Schmitt’s response to Blumenberg in Political Theology II
(Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 117–125.
Chapter 8
The Weakness of Our ‘Messianic Power’:

Kristeva on Sacrifice1
Pamela Sue Anderson
University of Oxford
Introduction: The Power of Sacrifice

Sacrifice remains a major feminist issue, especially in the form of self-sacrifice
which women have traditionally assumed.2 I say this knowing that feminists do
not agree on most issues, and sacrifice is no exception.3 Feminists disagree on
the seriousness of sacrifice, even when it means ‘a violent taking of a life’. In the
present context I will not assume fixed gendered types in sacrifice’s relation to
Walter Benjamin’s claim about a ‘weak’ power:
Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak
Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.4
But I will assume that self-sacrifice treated as a ‘moral virtue’ exhibits perhaps
the greatest danger for western women who suffer under the dominance of sys-
tems of male-privileged gender hierarchies.5 This is especially problematic
when the messianic power of Jesus Christ is misappropriated: the danger for
women is their victimization by another or themselves due to associations of the
maternal body with Christ’s sacrifice, death and melancholia.
Julia Kristeva helps to explain how the sacrificial power of Christ’s death can
be used to magnify the victimization in the ‘offering’ or taking of a life. A dis-
tortion of this power persists, even if the messianic offering should have ended
any repetition of violence and victimization. The negative dimension of sacri-
fice in suffering, pain and death at the hands of another often unwittingly
plagues Christian ritual practices. Here Kristeva develops a psycholinguistic
account of how the rite of the Eucharist struggles to ensure that recollection of
Christ’s expiation changes a victim of sacrifice into an offering of love:
[T]he only rite that Christ handed down to his disciples and faithful on the
basis of the last supper is the oral one of the Eucharist. Through it, sacrifice
(and concomitantly death and melancholia) is aufgehoben – destroyed and
superseded . . . one [can] see in the Christian expiatory ‘sacrifice’ the offer-
ing of an acceptable and accepted gift rather than the violence of shed blood.
The generous change of the ‘victim’ into a saving, mediating ‘offering’ under
the sway of a loving God is without doubt, in its essence, specifically
Christian.
. . . Nevertheless, one should not forget that a whole ascetic, martyrizing, and
sacrificial Christian tradition has magnified the victimized aspect of that
offering by eroticizing both pain and suffering, physical as well as mental, as
much as possible.6
From my perspective, the most insidious dimension of this tradition is the

manner in which anti-sacrificial discourse and spiritual practices disguise the
enduring nature of a deathly sacrificial logic: the violence of sacrifice is still at
play in rituals which claim that the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ – that is, the
power of the messianic figure – is adequate for atonement of past, present and
future suffering. The problem with this messianic claim is that religious moral-
ity and patriarchal thinking continue to require – as I will describe in more
detail below – an implicit if not explicit mimetic mechanism in gratuitous acts
of self-sacrifice by the poor, the marginalized and/or oppressed. The assump-
tion of the unequivocal moral goodness of sacrificing oneself for the sake of
another is one of the most resistant forces in the west to the alleviation of the
oppression which has been generated by patriarchal forms of westernized
Christianity. So how is this oppression manifested? When is a situation oppres-
sive? What is oppression? To begin to answer such questions it is helpful to
return to the writings of feminist philosophers in the 1960s and 1970s.7 I have
in mind those feminists who recognize the challenge in trying to raise the
consciousness of women and men about what is wrong in relations between a
woman and others. The challenge is to confront this dilemma: women and the
marginalized poor, especially, continue to require the raising of their awareness
both to recognize forms of oppression in their relations with others and to
achieve change, while at the same time change is required before recognition
of one’s oppression.
As Kathryn Pyne Parsons observed in the 1970s: ‘People come to recognize
that they are oppressed and that they have certain needs in and through
the process of social change, and that to regard as legitimate only felt and arti-
culated dissatisfactions is to ignore the deepest problems, the ones which are
felt, if they are felt at all, as natural and inevitable’ (Women and Philosophy,
Kristeva on Sacrifice 113
p. 247, n40). I continue to think that initiating transformation is required in

order to see what is not natural but pernicious. Failing to be able to recognize
what is pernicious, but under the guise of ‘natural’ remains the most significant
obstacle to the alleviation of oppression; for elucidating this dilemma, I am
indebted to politicized thinkers, including feminist philosophers who write on
sacrifice in the second half of the twentieth century.8
This chapter focuses on Kristeva as one of these twentieth-century thinkers.
Kristeva’s theoretical writings are a rich source for understanding the politics of
feminism since the late 1960s in Paris. But Kristeva is also the theorist who I read
on sacrifice as the result of inspiration received from Paul Fletcher.9 Can we the-
orize the violence of separation which ends in death? The question is poignant.
Kristeva writes on the role of sacrifice in moments of violent separation in the
lives of women and men, while in theory and in practice Paul Fletcher’s own
death leads me to question the role of sacrifice in ‘the Politics to Come’.
As a post-Lacanian, Kristeva assumes that the symbolic order of patriarchy is
founded on a pre-signifying imaginary space.10 This pre-signifying space is, argu-
ably, similar to the state of nature: from which individuals emerge. In rough
Freudian terms, the patriarchal ordering of western societies presupposes that
the social contract is premised on the fiction of the state of nature which has
assumed, prior to a social agreement, a different, ‘sexual’ contract; that is, a pact
is made by brothers after their murder of the father to gain access to women.
This sexual contract recalls the transition of the male infant in particular into
the patriarchal order. In the process of the male infant’s separating from his
mother, conflict emerges with the father, even while the child successfully
acquires the language of patriarchy. This conflict is at the moment of sacrifice.
Yet feminist psycholinguists seem to reverse the roles of father and mother so
that the victim of murder is the mother: she is the unwittingly sacrificed life.
Imagined and repeated, a symbolic killing of the mother fuels violent acts
against women. Recognition of this ‘matricide’ is also associated with what a
Kristevan feminist calls the ‘death-work’ of sacrifice.11 Briefly stated, Kristeva’s
psycholinguistic reading of the psychic development of the infant exposes ‘the
death of the mother’ which marks entry into the patriarchal order of language
and so constitutes the symbolic order; that is, patriarchal terms ground all
meaning and values as masculine. The female space constituted by the original
unity with the mother is, so to speak, ‘left behind’ in a violent break but recalled,
for example, when men gain sexual access to women in place of their mother.
As a result of this symbolic death, the meaning of the maternal – or, female
existence – remains separated from social and public life.12 The nature of this
psychic process of subject-formation, in violently separating from the mother,
is supposedly reflected in conceptions of ritual sacrifice which recall and
re-enforce matricide
Post-Lacanian feminists who follow Kristeva, then, assume that the scapegoat
who becomes the victim of violence is the mother: she is the ritually sacrificed
life which founds the social contract. Understanding – so, too, potentially
overcoming – this sexually specific violence against women requires recognizing

that the pact of the brothers and the contract of the society are both ultimately
founded on a ritual killing.13 The killing of the mother is decisive in Kristeva but
not, for a notable alternative, in René Girard. As a result, Girard and those who
follow him are unable to explain why violence towards the victim has to end in
death (see Black Sun). Moreover, he is not aware of sexually specific violence.
We might also criticize him for failing to see that the sexually specific violence of
this death should give each of us at least a psychoanalytic reason to think in
feminist terms.
Hegelian Conceptions of Sacrificial Practices

Before turning to explicitly feminist issues, it is important for Kristeva’s account
of sacrificial violence to consider further background in post-Hegelian theories
of sacrifice. Given more space and knowledge it would be extremely helpful to
explore in detail Hegel’s conception of sacrifice as taught by Alexandre Kojève
in his 1933–1939 Paris lectures on Hegel. Not only did Kojève’s lectures have a
highly significant influence on the intellectuals who originally heard them,
including Marcel Mauss, George Bataille and Jacques Lacan, but Kojève’s view
of Hegel had a huge impact on the intellectuals in 1950–1960s Paris who were
taught by, or studied that earlier generation. Each of these thinkers informs
Kristeva; but, as already seen, it is Lacan who helps to shape her account of
subject-formation and the patriarchal order, while the idea of matricide reflects
a feminist intervention into Lacanian psycholinguistics. At this point, I would
like to introduce Girard’s scapegoat theory and then, go back further to
Bataille’s influence on Kristeva (and presumably Girard).
According to Girard, religion is a way to regulate social violence and create
social cohesion. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard connects violence and the role
of religion. He argues that (1) a society by its very nature is threatened by
self-destructive violence; (2) all societies are based on a founding sacrifice;
(3) through sacrifice as a public offering, the violence that threatens any
community is ritually cast out, turned outwards rather than inwards on to the
members of that community. He, then, asserts that the role of religion is to
keep violence out of the community by means of ritual sacrifice, that is, of a
scapegoat, or a ritual which substitutes for it. For Girard, the social contract or
pact is between brothers (men) and does not lead to harmony, since brothers
have the same desire and so conflict. In order to negotiate, the brothers in their
pact must have a third party: this is the scapegoat. Violence is temporally
expelled from the community, ensuring the pact, with the mediating sacrifice
of the scapegoat. Is this violence addressed by a messianic power of expiation?
And have we been endowed with this power to which the past has a claim
(‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 254)? Kristeva reads Girard at least,
in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, in the context of Christ’s role in expia-
tion and reconciliation (pp. 130–131).
Although Kristeva’s reading of Girard on the violence of Christian sacrifice

reveals her own distinctive understanding of sacred practices, she is still more
fundamentally shaped by Bataille. Kristeva’s intellectual formation in 1960s
Paris included discussions of Bataille with Phillipe Sollers, Roland Barthes and
all of those intellectuals associated with the journal Tel Quel. This context of
intellectual exchange on, for instance, Bataille’s theory of sacrifice remains fun-
damental to Kristeva’s early and later views. But Bataille himself would have
been influenced by Mauss’ work on ritual sacrifice and the notion of gift (again
I do not have the space to explore this richly debated notion). Instead, consider
Bataille’s use of productive and non-productive expenditure to interpret sacri-
fice in terms of counting and the nature of the economy.
Within Bataille’s theoretical account of economic relations the idea of
‘means’ as an end-in-itself becomes ‘a non-productive expenditure’; but to
grasp the significance of this expenditure, it is necessary to recall his reading of
the economy of twentieth-century capitalism in western societies. Economic,
material and social relations shape how societies understand and so reproduce
sacrificial relations. Bataille’s theory of expenditure assumes that the sole aim
of the human species is the optimal means of survival and reproduction. Bataille
sees humanity seeking to conserve itself through utilitarian activities. A prudent
economy of expenditure would ensure the reproduction of the human species
in all its facets, including the individual, the social, cultural and political. Within
such an economy, actions are justified in terms of the end; productive expendi-
ture expresses social responsibility by expressing the interests of the Father –
whose is the only pleasure allowed. In contrast to the productive expenditure,
the ‘non-productive expenditure’ focuses on loss: neither the danger of death,
nor the horror arising from this expenditure, can be avoided. However, within
western societies, the full realization of non-productive expenditure is hidden
by activities such as living in luxury, mourning, war, sport, perverse sexual prac-
tices, etc. With this concealment, non-productive expenditure gives full reign to
the pleasure principle, but is governed by the logic of destruction. Yet, crucially,
non-productive expenditure and its relation to destructiveness is also the
basis of true poetry! In other words, intellectualized forms of the state of loss
become synonymous with this expenditure and signify the creation by means of
loss – which is sacrifice. Thus, sacrifice is the crucial term in Bataille’s theory of
social life, but it also introduces a crucial dimension into Kristeva’s thinking:
‘poetry’.
Part of Bataille’s fascination for Kristeva is the implicit assumption that ‘the
death of God’ is not the end of the sacrificial (human) story either philosophi-
cally or historically. Instead the story continues without bypassing the horror of the
abject and death. The problem is that certain forms, at least, of Christianity mask
the ongoing horror and violence of the sacred. Social life is posed on a knife
edge in a struggle between the sacred transgression of sacrifice and the law as
the basis of the social contract (and repression of the prior ‘sexual’ pact).
Highly significant in the development of Kristeva’s account of a pre-signifying
imaginary space, or ‘semiotic’, is the role of poetry: the poet can find words, or
signs, for communicating loss which is inexpressible in the symbolic order.

Kristeva argues that poetry can disrupt the symbolic order (of patriarchy) which
grounds all meaning and values. The notion of poetry and its relation to loss –
and not only to disruption – opens up the pre-patriarchal space of the semiotic.
Bataille is Kristeva’s key support here: the concept of sacrifice, as creativity by
means of loss, is intimately bound up with the sacred. Sacrifice is the sacred
transgression of the law insofar as it transgresses the productive expenditure of
the utilitarian economy. It follows, then, that the sacred world is the world of
non-productive expenditure. The sacred and profane meet in sacrifice. Sacrifice
signifies both murder and the interdiction of murder. Kristeva’s rereading of
Freud’s Totem and Taboo also re-enforces the belief that the constitution of society
can only be understood with reference to a murder at the basis of law. Again, this
must be, according to Kristeva, the murder of the mother beyond the semiotic.
Bataille’s Visions of Excess, poetry, negativity, violence and sacrifice feed into
Kristeva’s conception of the semiotic and abjection.14 However, as John Lechte
notes, Bataille insists upon the profoundly ambivalent nature of all social life:
‘His principles of productive and non-productive expenditure imply that with
the greatest restraint comes the possibility of an excess without limits; that the
interdiction is bound up with violence; that purity is tied to horror; that good is
bound to evil, life bound to death: the pleasure of expenditure leads to death’
(Julia Kristeva, pp. 74–75). As Lechte goes on to explain, Bataille’s logic should
not be read in terms of binary oppositions. Instead this logic of excess is pre-
cisely what is beyond the means-ends reasoning; at stake are domains which are
heterogeneous and disruptive of each other. Eventually this sort of ‘logic’
enables Kristeva to formulate Freud’s death-drive in terms of Hegel’s concep-
tion of negativity:15 this negativity becomes crucial to the relationships between
Kristeva’s conceptions of the semiotic as embodied in poetic language and of
the symbolic as embodied in ‘the Law of the Father’.16 But it is Bataille who
opens up for her the possibility of linking individual excess and social order.
The result of the above is significant for Kristeva. An ambivalence exists ren-
dering it difficult to interpret her on sacrifice and identity. There are two main
interpretations of her account of identity: (1) that she has a sacrificial model of
identity, a defender of libidinal drives and of the maternal space, or chora, out-
side (patriarchal) language. According to this first interpretation, she defends
a Lacanian phallus on the basis of a need to maintain the identity of the given
patriarchal socio-symbolic order against the encroachments of negativity and
psychosis. Then, in contrast, (2) that she develops a theory of identity which
can encompass difference and heterogeneity with openness to change. In this
second interpretation, it is assumed that Kristeva understands language in a
dialectic between structure and practice; that is, structure is produced through,
and always open to change by human spiritual practice at the apex – in the
imaginary – where the semiotic and symbolic meet. This would allow for the
formation of self-identity as the development of a capacity for social symbolic
interaction, rather than as an acceptance of repression.17 Yet the most positive
constructive interpretation of Kristeva’s model of self-identity would still have to

address the problem of the socio-symbolic order as founded on a sacrificial logic: that
is, the patriarchal logic in a sacrificial model of identity would have to be
refused. And this is my critical concern – about which I will seek a conclusion.
Christ’s Sacrifice and Our Mimetic Practices
Does Kristeva have the means to achieve a refusal of the logic of sacrifice in
order to create something new without the sacrifice of the mother, or without
Girard’s theory of the mimetic violence in the sacrificial father-figure? The
mimetic mechanism is problematic: mimetic violence is based upon one man
desiring whatever another man desires; his desire is the same as that of another,
as ‘the other of the same’. Violence is imitated in mimetic conflict but, accord-
ing to Girard, resolved in once-for-all violence put onto the scapegoat. Kristeva
herself seems to suggest a positive answer to this question of refusal of matricide
in her revised and augmented publication in 1995; but working this out is left
to another generation who discover ‘another space’. 18
There is an additional use to which Kristeva’s theory of sacrificial logic can be
put. It helps us to read those figures in the history of western Christianity who
have sacrificed their corporate lives, notably the ascetic women mystics who sac-
rifice their bodies in ritual and spiritual practices.19 Individually and collectively
their bodies withstand the threats of disorder and violence waged against them
and/or the church from outside by identifying with Christ’s suffering and sacri-
fice in the holy feast which is their ultimate focus, while otherwise practicing a
holy fast in daily practices. The result is tragic or so it seems.20 At this point, I
turn to Kristeva’s Black Sun as the psycholinguistic study of melancholia which
turns to sacrifice in the Eucharist as an ambivalent expression of a living/dying
offering. Ambivalence remains whether this expresses a communion or separa-
tion. Melancholia represents the state which refuses to accept the matricide
and so the separation required for entering the socio-symbolic order of
Christianity.
In Black Sun, Kristeva connects Christ’s death with the ritual of a meal, of eat-
ing, serving, offering, and ultimately the sacrifice of food, of the body, blood
and life. Consider additional lines from Kristeva’s psycholinguistic account of
the process of (ritual) sacrifice:
A depressive moment: everything is dying. God is dying, I am dying. But how

is it possible for God to die? . . .
There are words of Christ that foretell his violent death without referring
to salvation; others, however, seem at once to be pointing to, hence serving,
the Resurrection.
‘Serving,’ which is Luke’s context refers to ‘serving at the table’, shifts to
‘giving his life’, a life that is a ‘ransom’ (lytron) in Mark’s gospel. Such a
semantic shift clearly sheds light on the status of the Christly ‘sacrifice’. He
who provides food is the one who sacrifices himself and disappears so that
others might live. . . .
Through [this rite], sacrifice (and concomitantly death and melancholia)
is aufgehoben – destroyed and superseded . . .
Expiate is in keeping with such a supersession. . . ‘to be favourably disposed
toward someone, to let God be reconciled with oneself’. . . [this is more of a
reconciliation] than the fact of undergoing punishment. . .
Nevertheless, one should not forget that a whole ascetic, martyrising and
sacrificial Christian tradition has magnified the victimized aspect of the offer-
ing by eroticizing both pain and suffering, physical as well as mental, as much
as possible. (Black Sun, pp. 130–131, 132, emphasis added)
More could be said about how to deal with the depressive and melancholic posi-
tion which anticipates death and recalls the initial break with the maternal –
and so life. A question remains about whether expiation results in separation or
communion, or possibly, both, depending how sacrifice is understood (see Jay,
Throughout Your Generation Forever, pp. 17–29). The danger (for the other) is
‘communion’ in suffering mimetically as Christ did, in the above terms, ‘on the
altar of the same’.
In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva presents an original argu-
ment concerning the hatred towards the figure of the mother; this becomes
evident in the abjection – that is, expulsion – of all traces of her body, individu-
ally and collectively.21 Kristeva argues that this apparent hatred of femininity is
in truth evidence of the more fundamental struggle which emerges at the
moment when a boundary is being constituted between subjects inside and out-
side; the boundary created between infant and mother begins in the initial
separation that is, in the process of psychic (and physical) separation in the
material and linguistic process of forming subjectivity from the unity with the
maternal body. To portray more fully this process and the ongoing metamor-
phosis of subjectivity from infant to adult, Kristeva turns to the imagination. In
Kristeva’s material and linguistic account of the subject in process the imagina-
tion functions to signify sexual difference, notably between the maternal and
paternal functions.
In her account of mimetic desire, Kristeva connects the imagination to
instinctive drives: in other words, to the biological energies of the semiotic. The
work of the imagination becomes evident in the imaginary stage of psychic
development where, however, dubious possibilities of a narrative of love or
promise emerge in the story of a transition to a patriarchal order. Consider how
this develops.
First of all, the infant creates a form for or before an object. So in learning to
conceive of an independent object the infant creates the form of breast to dis-
tinguish the mother’s milk from itself. In separating itself from the maternal
body the nascent subject must, next, prepare for the eventual identification
with non-objects – eventually with language; the infant must be able to identify
with words in order to survive as a subject. But before the complete identifica-
tion with language, there must be a privileged founding moment for the forma-
tion of the subject’s identity. Therefore, the figure of the imaginary father is
created as the crucial third term between mother and infant. This figure of the
imaginary (stage/transition/narrative) provides a mysterious externality which
allows the nascent subject’s initial distinction between inside and outside to be
established. At the same time, this mysterious figure in taking on, according to
Kristeva, both maternal and paternal functions, destabilizes the boundary work,
including acts of repression. This works not only at the boundary between
mother and infant, but also between semiotic and symbolic, enables the transi-
tion from identification to another. Admittedly, a tension exists between a rad-
ical break and a transition, involving a forward movement which retains traces
of the bodily drives, sounds, rhythms, and generally, the attentiveness of mater-
nal relations.
From this, it is true that Kristeva, like Girard, recognizes that the primary
identification of the infant is not with an object but with what offers itself to the
infant as a model. This identification is with, what Kristeva calls, ‘an imaginary
figure’, or, in places, ‘the individual “father” of prehistory’.22 Mimetic desire is
mediated by this model. But the pattern of mimetic desire offers both possibil-
ity and danger. The subject emerges in the world to learn that the other does
not want it, but another. The nascent subject necessarily confronts the radical
emptiness of being. Violence literally shadows the subject who approaches
either the boundary failure, that is, when repression fails and the subject
remains melancholic or the break with the semiotic. In Black Sun, only the latter
break is successful; and it appears successful precisely because it is founded on
a symbolic murder of the mother which is repeated in rituals of sacrifice.23
In Kristeva’s analysis of boundary work, the triangular form of primary iden-
tification is retained and recalled. So, too, the maternal abject does not disap-
pear from view. Whenever access to the subject-creating space promised by the
play of imaginary pleasure within an original triangle escapes the infant, vio-
lence haunts the threefold structure of mimetic desire. The potential for bound-
ary failure exists because of the essential fragility of the work of repression
undertaken by the subject in its formative stages. When boundary work takes
place it evokes violence which tends to be sexually differentiated. Thus, for
Kristeva a violent struggle with the abject in hatred for the mother ensues, until
ultimately at the point of representation – at the threshold of the symbolic – the
violence of sacrifice enacts matricide.24 At this point, we could again recall the
quotation from Kristeva’s Black Sun (pp. 130–135; cf. pp. 112, 117–118 above).
The story of Christ’s sacrifice, including the Eucharist narrative when prac-
ticed as a ritual sacrifice, recalls the imaginary stage of subject formation; that
is, the process of separating from the mother. Moreover, it can be contrasted to
Kristeva’s more recent reflections on sacrifice in The Feminine and the Sacred.25
The latter helps raise the (feminist) question of an alternative between
separation (from the impure) and communion (of pure and impure). Is Christ’s
self-sacrifice a form of expiation aimed at reconciliation – somehow both sepa-
ration and communion – between humanity and God, between profane-defiled
and sacred-purity? To question the possibility of overcoming violence, consider
Kristeva’s The Feminine and the Sacred:
The devotees of the sacred are careful not to emphasize the violence that this
sacredness or sacrifice or prohibition [thou shalt not kill thy father; thou
shalt not have sex with thy mother] conceals and imposes (p. 15).
Yet this sort of concealment of violence is, according to Black Sun, imposed by
the Christian initiation rite:
A true initiation is thus elaborated, at the very heart of Christian thought

which it takes up again the deep intra-psychic meaning of initiatory rites that
were anterior or alien to its domain, and gives them new meaning. Here as
elsewhere, death – that of the old body making room for the new, death to one-
self for the sake of glory, death of the old man for the sake of the spiritual
body – lies at the center of experience. But, if there be a Christian initiation it
belongs first and entirely within the imaginary realm. . . . Beyond and above
that, the implicitness of love and consequently of reconciliation and forgive-
ness completely transforms the scope of Christian initiation by giving it an
aura of glory and unwavering hope for those who believe. (Black Sun, p. 134)
The question is whether subjects can find possibilities for renewal as subjects in
crisis, that is, in the violence of separation. Renewal seems possible in ‘the crisis
of representation’ insofar as the initial crisis at the zero degree of subjectivity is
recalled. But this crisis appears in the imaginary space at the threshold of the
symbolic. In other words, this is at the apex of the imaginary before subject for-
mation within the symbolic. But do we locate the politics of transformation in
psychic development? Is the Christian story merely a narrative of promise for a
particular reading of our psychic development? Kristeva clearly reads possibility
of a love story at the very splitting that constitutes subjectivity. Within the tran-
sitional stage of the imaginary, the subject emerges in an open space and as an
open system supported in being between the one and another. Love promises
that for the One there is the Other; hence, love promises being in difference.
This is not apparent in the words of the symbolic that seek to master space, but
in the sounds and rhythms of the semiotic. At the borders of the semiotic, the
imaginary emerges as the preverbal site of the imagination. As Kristeva asserts,
‘[a]s for the image making up this “imagination”, it should not be conceived as
simply visual but as a representation activating various facilitations correspond-
ing to the entire gamut of perceptions, especially the sonorous ones . . .’26
Echoing Kristeva, Martha J. Reineke asserts that ‘[w]here the Symbolic order
will read the perceived difference as an interdiction . . . the Imaginary suggests
a metaphorical reading of this space that balances the interdictory Law of desire
with the gift of love.’27 The point for ‘a feminist of sexual difference’ (which is
another name for a feminist critically shaped by post-Lacanian psycholinguis-
tics) is that sexual difference initially emerges in the imaginary stage of psychic
development and not within the unities of the symbolic. The symbolic order
depends upon repression of this difference. In its representation of order, the
symbolic requires the violence of sacrifice; but the imaginary begins (and will
bring to end) a process which has the potential to generate a narrative of love.
At this point feminists who advocate an ethics of sexual difference will bring in
the feminist psycholinguist Luce Irigaray who has her own distinctive reading
of matricide carried out by a masculine imaginary and its reversal by a feminine
imaginary.28
From my critical readings of sacrifice, I would like to draw a significant con-
clusion. Not only does Kristeva insist upon a more adequate theory of sacrifice
which would expose a sexually specific violence against women and those who
bare the sign of the mother, but she suggests that the crisis of representation is
the point within the imaginary at which the sacrificial contract of patriarchy can
be transformed by welcoming another. It might be that Kristeva and such femi-
nists of sexual difference as Irigaray agree that the critical task for the imaginary
would be to transform the nature of our desires so that one can imagine how
the other – whoever the ‘figure of individual prehistory’ – might be welcomed.
The aim of this transformation would be that mimetic desire no longer neces-
sitates the immolation of the ‘other’, whether (virgin) mother or Christ, on the
altar of the ‘same’.29 However, an ethic which aims to reconcile the inextricable
bond of violence and love in our corporeal identities with the exigency for a
mutual recognition without the sacrifice of sexual difference has yet to be imag-
ined by Kristeva. Admittedly, it might be argued that Irigaray has had success
with an ethics of sexual difference. However, I am not persuaded that Irigaray
ever moves out of the imaginary stage of psychic development, and so ultimately
she fails to change the symbolic order. Nevertheless, I would like to confirm a
distinctive need for the productive activity of the imagination to generate a
reconfiguration of mimetic desire in an ethic and politics of mutual love and
mercy beyond patriarchy.
Mutually Cultivated Care for One Another

Before coming to my conclusion, I would like to propose an alternative to self-
sacrificial forms of ethics, including what has been upheld by some women as
‘an ethics of care’. The latter has been construed, by some, as a feminine ethics;
this is not far from an ethics of sexual difference. Yet I insist that an essentialist
feminine ethics will always fall short of either a feminist politics or a feminist
ethics. Instead I would like to propose an epistemologically and ethically
informed politics of ‘care-knowing’. This would aim to avoid, in particular, the
absolute altruism of patriarchal metaphysics. The danger of this sort of altruism

is captured by Le Doeuff: in her words, it is ‘becoming a kind of nothingness . . .’
(Hipparchia’s Choice, p. 280). To understand this reference to an absolute
altruism it is useful to turn to Le Doeuff’s account of how ‘self-presence’, in
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, is constructed on ‘the annihilation of
the other’ (‘Mastering a Woman’, p. 62, also pp. 61–65). Le Doeuff discerns a
pattern whereby ‘mastering a woman’ is ‘the imaginary foundation of a certain
metaphysical order’: woman as the other makes possible the ontological
primacy of the relation to the self. But she is aware of how ‘the great philoso-
pher’ conceals this act of subordination as if natural. Le Doeuff explains how
the (self)-sacrifice of a woman’s self-knowledge for that of a man’s mastery can
be made apparent in scrutinizing Sartre’s accounts of ‘bad faith’. It is always the
woman or a socially inferior being who is self-deceived:
Why is it that bad faith cannot be described in the phenomenological ‘I’ and
always requires the arrival on stage of another person, not the universal ‘I’, but
a particularized person, generally of the opposite sex, a ‘you’ or a ‘she’ whose
bad faith and ignorance will be dissected by a superior gaze? This is doubtless
because the relation of power with others precedes or is contemporary with
the constitution of the ‘I’. The doctrine is supposed to give an account of the
history of the subject but there is a prehistory of consciousness, a prehistory
that consists of the radical defeat of the other, who is condemned to under-
stand that she (seldom he) does not control the truth of her (seldom his)
own actions or thought. It is in contrast with this other, through the mastery
of this other, that the subject lays down the possibility of his own authenticity,
that is, the acknowledgement of his mastery over (hence responsibility for)
whatever happens to him. (p. 65)
This mastery over the other is the basis on which a woman’s sacrifice of her
knowledge, her freedom and her very selfhood is assumed – indeed, expected.
Her sacrifice is much more likely to mime or imitate that of Christ as we find in
Simone Weil. It is this Christological pattern of self-immolation which shapes a
traditional form of self-sacrifice for Christian women.
In 2004, I argued that feminist philosophers of religion must be careful about
terminology when attempting to develop certain feminist virtues. I had in mind
avoiding the dangers of traditionally understood feminine virtues; for instance,
self-sacrifice in the form of ‘care’ which means caring exclusively for another.
Extreme readings of care-ethics blatantly promote self-sacrifice as a feminine
virtue.30 Noddings argues that the ‘one-caring’ becomes engrossed in the
‘cared-for’, moving out of her own self and into the experience of the other’s
desires, fears, or suffering.31 As seen, twentieth-century philosophers, like
Sartre, place the other in a role of self-humiliation in support of their own
greatness; female ‘virtue’ is imposed by the necessity of male mastery. On these
grounds, Le Doeuff might criticize not only Sartre, but her own contemporary
Jacques Derrida as influenced by Vladimir Jankélévitch, insofar as they each

promote an asymmetry of other-self relations, on the basis of the self’s mastery
over others, that is, of ‘immediate domination producing the humiliation or
degradation of the other’ (‘Mastering a Woman’, p. 62; Hipparchia’s Choice,
pp. 280, 320–321). The critical question will be whether promoting self-
sacrificing care from the position of either the privileged or the non-privileged
avoids the dangers of perpetuating violence and oppression.
There is no easy answer to this question: the most anti-sacrificial discourse
can still promote personal practices of self-sacrifice and social practices of ritual
sacrifice which reinforce the violence of domination – and the silencing of any
criticism as the basis of a superior moral gaze. The analogy between man and
God in their respective levels of mastery over others has produced much rich
theological insight into the gift of life and love in divine relations. However, this
man-God parallel justifies, in a violent manner, the lack of mutuality in human
sacrificial practices. Do the (feminist) politics-to-come have the capacity to
reveal the oppressive nature of our most intimate relations?
The proper understanding of what is wrong in women’s relations remains
crucial whether talking explicitly about self-sacrifice or implicitly about altruism
and caring-for another. As already mentioned, ‘care’ is often employed to stand
for much of what is today called a feminine ethics of care, whose meaning is
often not clear; or if clear, it can have negative associations with a violent taking
of a life on behalf of another. Equally, the ideal of the carer can have negative
associations in the all too clear stereotype of a woman bound up with an oppres-
sive construction of femininity: as in Sartre, female figures of bad faith. There
is the self-destructive stereotype of the overly self-sacrificing woman whose care
allows her to be clearly exploited by her husband, or by other men with whom
she may have a social or personal relationship. We cannot deny that religious
ethics have reinforced the exploitative, stereotypical case of the selfless, caring
woman. Nevertheless self-critical reflection – what might be described as ‘caring
about caring’ – intends to ensure a necessary assessment of the relationships
governing the lives of both the carer and the cared for.32 More generally, this sort
of critical reflection on our emotions would aim to be mutually empowering.33
Previously conceived, ‘care-knowing’ is a cognitive disposition which requires
for its development a process of self-revelation and self-making. At the same
time, this disposition is shaped intellectually by imaginatively listening to and
reflexively registering the perspectives of others, especially as developed by
one’s interactive practices with these others. I am indebted to Vrinda Dalmiya’s
account of caring as a five-facet disposition which establishes the possibility of
an interactive, cognitive practice between the one caring and the cared for.34
The five-facets include caring about, caring for, taking care, care reception and caring
about caring. Once acquired through an imaginative-reflexive-interactive pro-
cess, care-knowing as a cognitive disposition becomes a virtue suited to the fem-
inist agenda of effectively challenging traditional stereotypes which have been
oppressive to women. Critical analysis of the nature and practice of caring
means change in the sense of social-historical transformation; this transforma-

tion would be the way to avoid the oppressive constructions of what has been
inadequate or pernicious forms of care as in absolute altruism, that is, in a sac-
rificial economy. Critical reflection upon the political knowledge gained from
mutually transformative caring would seek not sacrifice, but mercy in the
context of learning to create, with help from the imagination and self-other-
interaction, new mutual relations between the carer and the cared for.
Le Doeuff offers a cogent challenge to ‘moral’ norms of self-sacrifice for
women, or men:
This doctrine of absolute altruism may be a welcome antidote to the depres-

sion which overcomes us when we have seen selfishness and egocentrism
reign for too long; it may even have validity as a superb and dialectical way to
go beyond the problem of justice. But it is a theory of mad passion, or its
aesthetics, and not an ethics, for at least one reason: if I posit that ‘everyone
has rights except me’, since every other person is also a ‘me’, should I, if
‘everyone has rights except me’? Never! I have to say to my fellow: ‘Please
take care of yourself and look after the interests of humanity, in others and in
yourself.’ Many, if not all, women have been moulded by altruism to the point
where they have indeed become ‘a kind of nothingness in the eyes of the
other’. Not any old other, of course, but in the first instance someone in the
sphere of the family, attitudes towards other ‘others’ being later derived from
the first person. (Hipparchia’s Choice, p. 280)
This imagery of ‘becoming a kind of nothingness in the eyes of the other’ reso-
nates profoundly with the picture of the failure of the medieval woman mystic
who literally – physically and socially – becomes nothing (see Sacrificed Lives,
pp. 116–117). But the picture would include twentieth- and twenty-first-century
practices of ‘becoming nothingness’ as represented, for example, by the sacrifi-
cial logic of Simone Weil.
My conclusion is to advocate an alternative to self-sacrificial forms of moral
virtue urging that we seek to change our philosophical and messianic think-
ing, and so our self-other relations. This alternative would require the transfor-
mation of the past, present and future. A motto is helpful: ‘not sacrifice, but
mercy in the politics to come’. This politics, insofar as feminist, would seek the
ethical knowledge required for mutual relations between women and men,
especially the relations of carer and cared for. Thus, ‘the Politics to Come’
would replace that logic of sacrifice, which has determined the false ‘strength’
of our messianic power to act on behalf of others, with a new politics of mutu-
ally cultivated care. The question remains whether this feminist politics can
give us the power to act in order to address a claim which the past has on us,
without losing a grip on the present and future. Confidence in the power to
act can be generated by affirming, not taking life and specifically approving
the lives of one another.
Notes
1
My thinking on sacrifice and politics began when Paul Fletcher first asked me to
contribute to a conference on the work of René Girard at the University of
Lancaster. For papers from that conference, see Journal of Cultural Values, 4 (April
2000).
2
I assume that a ‘feminist standpoint’ is an achievement of any woman or man
who struggles to think (which includes reflexive, imaginative and interactive
thinking) from the lives of those women who have been marginalized by those
others whose material and social positionings have determined the status quo.
See Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Standpoint: Its Proper Place in A Realist Epistemology’,
Journal of Philosophical Research, xxvi (2001), pp.131–153, p.132.
3
Women, like men, come in all sorts of shapes with all kinds of different natures,
customs, beliefs, ethnicities, sexual, ethical and political orientations. It follows
that we cannot generalize any more about women’s feminist perspectives than we
can about men’s masculinist perspectives on sacrifice as a spiritual practice and/
or self-sacrifice as a virtue for an individual (agent’s) moral and spiritual prac-
tices. I take a strongly anti-essentialist view of women and men, even if agreeing
that there are stereotypical forms of femininity and masculinity, especially in
hyper-traditional societies (see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
(London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 142–155). For further background, see the four
different political-philosophical feminist positions described in Pamela Sue
Anderson, ‘Myth and Feminist Philosophy’, in Kevin Schilbrack, ed. Thinking
Through Myth: Philosophical Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2002,
pp. 101–122), pp. 103–112.
4
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History: Thesis II’, in Illuminations
ed. and intr. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 254. All further
references will be given in the text.
5
See Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generation Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. xxiii–xxvii, 128–146; Michèle
Le Doeuff, ‘Mastering a Woman: The Imaginary Foundation of a Metaphysical
Order’ trans. Tamara Parker, in Arleen B. Dallery and Stephen H. Watson with
E. Marya Bower, eds. Transitions in Continental Philosophy: Selected Studies in
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 18. (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1994),
pp. 59–70. All further references will be given in the text.
6
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press 1989), pp. 130–131. All further references
will be given in the text.
7
See Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds. Women and Philosophy (New York:
Perigree Books, 1976); Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice trans. Trista Selous
(Columbia University Press, [1991] 2006). All further references will be given in
the text.
8
I have begun to carve out three distinct positions on sacrifice reflected in Kristeva,
Luce Irigaray and Michèle Le Doeuff, but only have space to mention briefly
Irigaray and Le Doeuff in this chapter.
9
Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Sacrificed Lives: Mimetic Desire, Sexual Difference and
Murder’, Journal of Cultural Values, 4 (April 2000), pp. 216–227.
10
I will return to this pre-signifying space in discussion of poetry below. See Jacques
Lacan, Ecrits trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977); John Lechte,
Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1991). All further references will be given in
the text.
11
See Martha J. Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (Bloomington
and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p.26.
12
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. Margaret Waller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984). See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 185–191.
13
See Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul trans. Ross Guberman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).
14
For this theory of expenditure and excess, see George Bataille, ‘The Notion of
Expenditure’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1929 trans. Allan Stoekl,
with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota 1986), pp.116–129; see also Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press 1982);
Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘“Abjection . . . the Most Propitious Place for
Communication”: Celebrating the Death of the Unitary Subject’, in Kathleen
O’Grady, Ann Gilroy and Janette Gray, eds. Bodies, Lives, Voices: Gender in Theology
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1998), pp. 189–230.
15
See Drucilla Cornwell and Adam Thurschwell, ‘Feminism, Negativity,
Intersubjectivity’, in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds. Feminism as Critique
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987; reprinted Oxford: Blackwell 1994), pp. 143–162,
185–189; Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 132–136.
16
See Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror, pp.103–105; Black Sun, pp. 132–135.
17
Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (London
and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 146f.
18
See Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, which is revised and augmented in New
Maladies of the Soul, pp. 201–224.
19
See Reineke, Sacrificed Lives; Claire Wolfteich, ‘Attention or Destruction: Simone
Weil and the Paradox of the Eucharist’, The Journal of Religion, 81: 3 (2001),
pp. 359–376.
20
See the examples in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1987); Reineke, Sacrificed Lives, pp. 110–127.
21
Kristeva, Powers of Horror. For more by Kristeva on the maternal body, see ‘Stabat
Mater’, in Toril Moi, ed. The Kristeva Reader trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake
(Oxford: Blackwell 1986; French original, 1976), pp. 160–186.
22
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University
Press 1987), pp. 25–26.
23
Kristeva describes the failure of this boundary-work resulting in melancholy
(Black Sun, pp. 27–30, 106–109 and 130–132).
24
Reineke, Sacrificed Lives, p.84. The dynamic movement towards murder, expul-
sion or abjection is a process beginning with an initial tearing away from, splitting
with, repulsion of the defiled matter, fluids, of the maternal body to the murder
of ‘the mother’ as the ultimate violence of abjection.
25
Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred trans. Jane
Marie Todd (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 14–16, 91–105. All further refer-
26
Kristeva, Tales of Love, ‘Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents’ p. 40; see
also Kristeva, ‘Exterrestrials Suffering For Want of Love’, pp. 372–373, 379–381.
27
Reineke, Sacrificed Lives p. 83; see also Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language,
p. 22.
28
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; and London: The Athlone Press, 1993).
29
For an argument concerning the transformation of the myths (of the other) in
philosophy of religion, see Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘A Case for a Feminist
Philosophy of Religion: Transforming Philosophy’s Imagery and Myths’, Ars
Disputandi: The Online Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1 (2001), pp. 1–35.
30
See Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
31
For an incisive criticism of Noddings significant work on ‘care’, see Lisa Tessman,
Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. 66–68f. But altruism in the form of a woman’s self-sacrifice has
been one of the main topics of debate in the literature on feminist philosophy
and oppression for the past 30 years; see: Larry Blum, Marcia Homiak, Judy
Housman and Naomi Scheman, ‘Altruism and Women’s Oppression’, in Carol C.
Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds. Women and Philosophy: Towards a Theory of
Liberation (New York: Pedigree Books, 1976), pp. 222–247.
32
Vrinda Dalmiya, ‘Why Should a Knower Care?’ Hypatia, 17: 1 (2002), pp. 34–52.
33
See Robert Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 203–231 .
34
Dalmiya, ‘Why Should a Knower Care?’; see Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘An
Epistemological-Ethical Approach to Philosophy of Religion: Learning to Listen’
in P.S. Anderson and B. Clack, eds. Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings
(London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 87–102, pp. 92–94, 100n11.
Part Three
Futures
Chapter 9
The Holocaust and the Messianic

Robert Eaglestone
Royal Holloway, University of London
Invoking the Holocaust

The Holocaust is frequently and repeatedly invoked in a vast range of very differ-
ent contexts and settings: in political situations, principally in the Middle East,
but elsewhere, too; in relation to issues of race; in the light of scientific advances;
or, simply, as a question about or reminder of what humans can do to each other.
Whenever this memory is seized, whether in a time of danger or not, whether in
good faith or bad, there is usually a public fuss about this invocation: can the
Holocaust be invoked in such a way? (This usually ignores the plain fact that any-
thing can be compared to anything else and that the right questions to be asked
are: first, should it? And second, what light, if any, does the comparison shed on
the issue?) But what is of interest here to me now is not so much an analysis of
the particular and different ways in which these public discussions turn to the
Holocaust, but the more deep-seated reasons behind this that lead people to
turn constantly to the Holocaust as a point of orientation.
One reason for this is, of course, the sheer immensity of this awful event –
awful cluster of events, in fact – and the unanswerable questions it puts to us: as
Hannah Arendt asks, does it mean that morality is no more than a custom, like
table manners? Another reason is that it is generally taken to mark, especially
in the context of the Second World War, a defining moment in human affairs,
certainly in the West, and we live, and perhaps (more worryingly) feel culturally
secure living, in the shadow of these sorts of moments. And a third, less palat-
able, reason is, of course, that it becomes a self-fulfilling ‘touchstone’ of evil,
evacuated of content or historical specificity, but useful as a theoretical or
aesthetic experiment for thinking through – or just exhibiting – questions
about evil and the nature of the human. However, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, the Holocaust is also inescapable and constantly invoked because it is
interwoven with a range of the very deepest discourses and patterns of thought
of the West, and it is one of those interweavings, between the discourse of the
Holocaust and the discourse of the messianic, on which I want to focus.
I argue here that the Holocaust has become deeply interwoven with messi-
anic discourse and that this is a complex and worrying phenomena, and one
about which we should be on our guard. I am not alone in this. There are a
number of discussions about the problematic ways in which the Holocaust is
figured as sublime, or beyond comment.1 However, these often end up arguing
that the Holocaust, while a ‘limit event’, is still within the possibilities of human
discourse. In contrast, the link between the Holocaust and the messianic –
especially the Messianic in the Benjaminian and more latterly Agambeninan
sense – is more insidious and, oddly, more widespread. I will conclude by look-
ing at what I take to be one of the keenest critiques of this movement, but first
I want to turn to highlight three tropes of thought that illuminate this inter-
weaving. The tropes are: epoch, epiphany and redemption. I want to stress that
I do not think that the Holocaust was a messianic event, but that the modes of
comprehension of the Holocaust, especially in these categories, are overwhelm-
ingly and rather oddly messianic.
Messianic Time
The Holocaust is taken to mark a new epoch. In the words of historian
Christopher Browning, voicing a widely held view, it was ‘a watershed event in
human history’.2 Adorno argues that it marks a point where ‘a new categorical
imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind’.3 It shows, as
Agamben states, that ‘almost none of the ethical principles our age believed it
could recognize as valid have stood the decisive test, that of an Ethics more
Auschwitz demonstrata’ and has led to the need to map new ethical territory.4
These sorts of claims have been made almost universally. There are cavils, of
course: one can notice that the Holocaust marks an especially Western water-
shed (which is to say that a sense of epoch and a sense of location are inextrica-
bly interlinked); one can say that just after the War, the two atomic detonations
were seen as more significant world-changing events (which is to say that first,
much of the detail of the Nazi genocide was yet to emerge, and second, that the
immediate imminence of the cold war dominated thought), but generally, I
find myself in sympathy with this feeling. But this sense of a changing epoch is
not a messianic sense of time.
Messianic time is not just the arrival of a new epoch: it is (as Agamben and
others argue) both an irruption into historical time and somehow always there.
And the Holocaust is discussed in terms that sound like this. Most beautifully, if
this is the right adverb, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz
voices this in describing how
Auschwitz had been hanging around in the air since long ago, who knows,
perhaps for centuries, like a dark fruit ripening in the sparkling rays of
The Holocaust and the Messianic 133
innumerable disgraces, waiting for the moment when it may at last drop
on mankind’s head.5
Less poetic versions of this exist too: Raul Hilberg, the sober historian of the
genocide, writes with his characteristic savage irony of how, in
August 1944, when 20,000 corpses had to be burned on some days, the open
pits broke the bottleneck. Thus the capacity for destruction was approaching
the point of being unlimited. Simple as this system was it took years to work
out in the constant application of administrative techniques. It took millen-
nia in the development of Western culture.6
This sense, that the Holocaust was interwoven with something both within and
without western history appears in different ways. Two examples: first, while
anti-Semitism clearly drove the Nazis, many accounts foreground or posits an
almost a-historical anti-Semitism that has existed throughout western history:
for example, Robert Wistrichs’s Antisemitism: the Longest Hatred finds the geno-
cide at the end of over 2 millennia of anti-Semitic thought and action, as does
Lucy Davidowitz’s The War against the Jews. This is also apparent in Daniel
Goldhagen’s contentious Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where he suggests that the
genocide is the result of a specific German ‘Eliminationist anti-Semitism’ which
seems to evaporate at the end of the war. Analogously, second, a sense of some
long-term shadow of history echoes in the thought of Adorno, and later,
Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust, who both find Enlightenment
rationality, and modernity itself as deeply implicated in, if not the source for,
‘polishing off’ the Jews.
On the one hand, these two forms of explanation seem to offer a teleological
history which seems to end, or reach its apotheosis in the Holocaust, just as,
more conventionally, one might find the origins of the Reformation in earlier
cultural developments: like any historical event, the tree from which the dark
fruit of the Holocaust fell had complex and deep roots. Yet these two explana-
tions contrast with more conventional historical accounts: for example, now
rather dated, Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s account of the rise of Nazism based on the
German ‘special path’ to modernity, does not rely on the eruption of a counter-
time or hidden stream into the normal passage of history (although this may
only be to say that the implicit philosophy of history in these accounts is more
easily graspable).7 More significantly still, the interweaving of messianic time
and the Holocaust also surpass its historical moment. One example of this is the
feeling, often voiced, that the Holocaust is still going on, is not simply a histori-
cal event to be ‘worked through’. Kertesz again decries
any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or

unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed
mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as
such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust.8
This too underlies Adorno’s claim that the Holocaust could not be worked
through until ‘the causes of what happened have been eliminated’.9 By ‘causes’,
he did not just mean the Nazi party, or (to give this quotation its context) the
forces that led to the failure of denazifiation in the 1940s and 1950s: he means
also the very forms of thought that gave rise to it in the first place, that are still
with us. Like messianic thought, then, the Holocaust has an uncanny relation
to chronological time: its causes and meaning can be seen as both outside and
inside chronological time.
Epiphany
Linked, of course, to the idea of epoch and messianic time is the idea of what
the Holocaust shows: just as the messiah is a ‘showing’, so is the Holocaust. For
example, one leading survivor resident in the United Kingdom, the remarkable
and courageous Kitty Hart-Moxon, writes that she finds ‘the features and rou-
tines of Auschwitz everywhere’: while, after the war, some firms (like Ansells,
the brewers) were fair to deal with, others
profit from slave labour. The more prosperous they are, the more the demand
from those who do the real creative work, and for a smaller fee. Just as the SS
would demand so many gold rings from the ghetto inhabitants . . . so there are
great organizations in the so-called free world demanding your soul and life-
blood for the most meagre rations . . . How do men get and hold the most
coveted jobs in big firms? By starting as ‘trusties’ . . . from Unterkapo to Kapo
to Oberkapo . . . to camp executive and even higher if you’re ruthless
enough.10
This parallels Zygmunt Bauman’s Adorno-influenced arguments concerning

what the Holocaust shows us about the modern world, and Agamben argues
that the camps mark a world different from the past showing for the first time
the incipient ‘radical transformation of politics into the realm of bare life’
which ‘legitimated and necessitated total domination’: thus the ‘biopolitical
paradigm of the modern’.11
A less bleak view of what the Holocaust shows is offered by Sara Kofman,
who argued that Antelme’s The Human Condition showed that ‘the abject
dispossession suffered by the deportees signifies the indestructibility of alter-
ity, its absolute character, by establishing the possibility of a new kind of “we”’:
indeed, she says that ‘he founds without founding – for this “we” is always
already undone, destabilized – the possibility of a new ethics’.12 But, in
contrast, my reading of his text only shows a misplaced faith in communism
and an oddly strong belief in national character. For example, the French,
non-Jewish, inmates are cheered by seeing the SNCF logo on the side of the
trucks: Antelme concludes the testimony in sharing a cigarette with a Red

Army soldier and contemplating the revolution to come.
However, the strongest sense of an ‘epiphany’ comes, very often from politi-
cians and from interventions in the public sphere generally. The British Minister
Ruth Kelly gave a speech at Holocaust Memorial Day in 2007 that, as well as any,
illustrates this. She argues that
the memory of the Holocaust should spur us all to stand up for the civilized
values we share . . . Remembering the Holocaust should spur us to fight against
the apathy and cynicism that let intolerance flourish. We are lucky to live in a
better world. But the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Never again was our
vow. We must turn together to today’s challenges, and tomorrow’s, with
renewed commitment, and renewed hope, that a better world can prevail.13
Here, the Holocaust is invoked to show us what happens when we are intoler-
ant, or apathetic. In fact, politicians constantly do this – invoke the Holocaust
as a warning – and this in turn reveals a third messianic feature of discourse
about the Holocaust, the idea of redemption.
Redemption
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has these words from Bill Clinton’s
speech at the dedication ceremony on 22 April 1993 carved into its wall: this
museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone for-
ever changed – a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope; an ally
of education against ignorance, of humility against arrogance, an investment
in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead. If this museum can
mobilize morality, then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure
of immortality.
The American President, here, is offering to redeem the dead – give them a
measure of immortality, give their deaths a meaning – if, through the museum,
they mobilize morality (did they not while alive? mobilize morality which way?).
But this is not to criticize the speech – after all, public speeches are not usually
works of rigorous thought – but to illustrate a common idea, the ‘weak messianic
power’ of the present to redeem the past, however futilely, of which Benjamin
wrote. Here Clinton takes on this power, and grants it the ability to give mean-
ing to the deaths. But this power is made manifest in many more subtle ways.
This ‘weak messianic power’ which invokes redemption is certainly recog-
nized by survivors: at the end of Fateless, by Holocaust Survivor and Nobel
Laurate Imre Kertesz, the protagonist Georg meets a journalist, who, with the
best aims in mind, wants to know about the camps. Georg tells him about the
passage of time in the camps and the journalist ‘covered his face with his hands
. . . then said “No, you can’t imagine it”. I for my part, thought to myself: “That’s
why they probably say ‘hell’ instead”’.14 The journalist wants to turn Georg’s
story into precisely that, a story, to ‘mobilize public opinion’, another form of
redemption (Fateless, p. 183). Georg shows by his actions – throwing away the
journalist’s contact details – that he thinks this is impossible, and that the expe-
rience cannot simply be reduced to propaganda. Indeed, the most demanding
and excoriating Holocaust writing exists in the agonizing interplay between the
idea of redemption – that there was some point to the genocide, or that some
point can be made of it – and the idea that there is no point, that it is, as
Emmanuel Levinas calls it, just ‘Useless Suffering’, beyond theodicy. This is the
core of the work of Elie Wiesel, whose writing is often unfairly pilloried as
lachrymose: in fact, it represents, in a religious/unreligious idiom exactly this
conflict. Again, Primo Levi writes at length, but lets the reader know that this is
but the tip of an iceberg, and the real horror is beyond comprehension.
The ‘weak messianic power’ for redemption is also present in the work of
Holocaust historians: Agamben, wary of the ‘temptation to bend Benjamin’s
categories in the direction of historiographic practice’ argues that he ‘has in
mind a relation to the past that would both shake off the past and bring it into
the hands of humanity’.15 The redemption of the past can mean its explana-
tion: that is, giving it meaning or sense, making it graspable, the role of much
history. Holocaust historians themselves often act with this in mind in ‘redeem-
ing the dead’ by telling their story, by explaining the events. A historical text
‘normalizes’ the events, turns them into pieces of evidence for history and strips
from them both their singularity, in Derrida’s terms, and, perhaps, our sense of
shock at, say, a mass murder.16 The historian asks properly historical questions
about where and how, and so becomes an ‘administrator of the past’, yet, as the
historian Raul Hilberg asks (after Adorno), are ‘footnotes . . . less barbaric?’.17
People working in this field are aware of this, and some take a firmly anti-
redemptive line. Lawrence Langer writes against ‘pre-empting’ the Holocaust.
By this he means
using – and perhaps abusing – its grim details to fortify a prior commitment
to an ideal of moral reality, community responsibility or religious belief that
leaves us with space to retain faith in their pristine value in a post-Holocaust
world.18
Langer has been criticized for the extremity of his position and for his ‘deeply
pessimistic view’ that ‘survivors – and a fortiori those who read their accounts –
cannot learn anything even from the most terrible experiences, so devoid was
the Holocaust of meaning Any attempt to deny this, even by survivors, Langer
treats as ideologically suspect’.19
If survivors have been aware of this ‘weak messianic power’, and maintained
a difficult relationship to it, and if historians have perforce simultaneously
taken it on and critiqued it, some thinkers have seemingly embraced this power.
One very striking example of this is the work of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider.
In ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan
Memory’, they note the globalization of memory through the technologies of
modernity. However, in order to ground a global community they suggest that
the shared memories of the Holocaust . . .a formative event of the twentieth

century, provide the foundation for a new cosmopolitan memory . . . tran-
scending ethnic and national boundaries.20
The importance of the Holocaust is not merely due to its enormity, but, they
argue,
what has pushed the Holocaust to such prominence in public thinking relates
to the need for a moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and the absence
of master ideological narratives. It has become a moral certainty that now
stretches across national borders and unites Europe and other parts of the
world. (‘Memory Unbound’, p. 93)
This is not simply an abstract move. They suggest that the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum led to the NATO intervention in Bosnia, and so ‘helped
establish the link and thus the centrality of the Holocaust as a measuring stick
for international politics and a transnational value system’.21 The Holocaust,
they argue, is the fulcrum of ‘mutual recognition of the history of the “Other”’
and this ‘diffuses the distinction between memories of victims and perpetrators:
what remains is the memory of a shared past’ (‘Memory Unbound’, p. 103).
Here, in an expansion of the words from Bill Clinton, the Holocaust has taken
on a messianic redemptive role. There are a number of difficulties with their
position, it seems to me: for example, it does not take into account disparate
national histories; it ignores non-Western cultures in which the Holocaust does
not have the same weight; in its very mythmaking it passes over the complica-
tions and dangers of mythmaking and of the mythmaking force of this very
gesture; philosophically, it begs the question of the criteria by which we might
judge the Holocaust (or any historical event) as good or bad (and then begs the
question of which came first, the event or the criteria). But the issue in this con-
text is its messianic claim: that the Holocaust can be a universal touchstone.
The Holocaust and the Messianic

These three quickly touched on tropes of thought, tropes of Messianic time, of
epiphany and of redemption, mark the links between Holocaust discourse
and messianic discourse. I think that this linkage, perhaps to some degree
unavoidable, needs to be approached carefully. In my view, one of the keenest
moments of critique of this complex intertwining between understandings of
the Holocaust and the Messianic occurs in the ‘Post-scriptum’ to Derrida’s essay
‘Force of Law’. Here, Derrida ventures to describe how Walter Benjamin might
have responded to the Final Solution and this makes up, it seems to me, a very
delicate and perhaps rather attenuated attack on Benjamin’s thought. Derrida
imagines, as it were, two different fictional versions of how Benjamin might
respond to the Holocaust. The first is more conventionally a commentary on
Nazism, on its language use, on its ‘logic’ and on corruption of democratic
institutions – especially those of the law – and on its violence. But this, Derrida
argues, is to think through Nazism from the point of view of the Nazis. The
second is, in contrast, a counter-commentary, based on what the Nazis aimed
to exclude. This counter-commentary aims to analyse the Final Solution from
the point of view of Nazism’s other, ‘that which haunted it at once from without
and within’.22 This view is to be thought from the ‘possibility of singularity’,
from the view of the victims of the Final Solution, ‘human lives by the millions’
and also a more universal ‘demand for justice’. For Derrida’s Benjamin, the
‘Final Solution’ must be thought of as a ‘project of destruction of the name’,
meaning, the destruction of each singular individual as a singularity and the
more general naming that which binds and creates communities.23 From this
point of view, Derrida writes,
Benjamin would have judged vain and without pertinence . . . any juridical
trial of Nazism . . . any judgmental apparatus, any historiography still homog-
enous with the space in which Nazism developed . . . any interpretation draw-
ing on philosophical, moral, sociological, psychological or psychoanalytic
concepts. (‘Force of Law’, p. 60)
The implication is that only that which is truly outside Nazism and the final
solution could judge it or measure its significance. But, at this point, Derrida
bridles with his imagined Benjamin, finding something ‘intolerable’ in this
interpretation. If the Final Solution can only be measured by what is outside all
these concepts, then this means that the Holocaust is ‘an uninterpretable man-
ifestation of divine violence’ and Derrida writes that one ‘is terrified at the idea
of an interpretation that would make of the holocaust an expiation and an
indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God’ (pp. 61–62).
Derrida is not alone in this, or in seeing how a path might be followed to this
conclusion. It was in response to both Christians and Jews suggesting just this
that Richard Rubenstein wrote his influential After Auschwitz (at least, the first
edition in 1966). This is one of the terrible ideas, terrible in its proper sense,
with which Elie Wiesel wrestles, too. It is here that Derrida finds Benjamin, and
these alternatives, ‘too Heideggerian, too messianico-marxist or too archeo-
eschatological for me’ (p. 62).
Neither of these paths, then, is enough of a response in the present to the
past, or can ‘take the measure of the event’ (p. 59). One is too complicit,
describing the Holocaust through the logic of Nazism (nothing post-Holocaust
about that, just the Holocaust written); the other – dismissing the first – is too
much the opposite, in which no ‘anthropology, no humanism, no discourse of
man on man, even on human rights’ could ‘be proportionate’ (the Holocaust
has consumed everything: nothing post-Holocaust here, either) (p. 61). Neither
is an opening and both correspond in a way to Nazism, to its false logic and
science, and to its appeals to myth beyond reason. For Derrida, this leaves us
with the task of thinking about the complicity of the discourses we still have, of
rights, of ethics, of identity, or race, with the Holocaust: ‘Nazism was not born
in the desert . . . it had grown in the shadow of big trees . . . In their bushy tax-
onomy, they would bear the names of religions, philosophies, political regimes,
economic structures, religious or academic institutions. In short, what is just as
confusedly called culture, or the world of the spirit.’24 For Derrida, in this self-
conscious Heideggerian metaphor, the forest that philosophy inhabits (that is
culture, spirit), is the sign of a continuing and unavoidable contiguity with the
Nazi genocide. The task, as we inhabit the forest, is to examine how these are
complicit. Messianic thought here, or even the idea, with Agamben, that we can
draw new maps that are not already representations of what has occurred seems
to suggest that the Holocaust can be passed over or gone beyond.
This is not to say that the Holocaust does not call for revaluations, for new
ways of thinking: I believe it did and it does. But it also calls for careful and
concernful division between what invocations of thought might be valid and
which might not: the stream of thought that is messianic – which is deeply
interwoven in the tapestry of Western thought – often, it seems, works to
mislead and misdirect our thought about the Holocaust.
Notes
1
See, for some sense of the debate, Zachary Braiterman, ‘Against Holocaust-
Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory’, History & Memory, 12:2
(2001), pp. 7–28, and Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit (London: Cornell
University Press, 2004).
2
Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 32.
3
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973),
p. 365.
4
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York:
Zone Books, 1999), p. 13.
5
Imre Kertész, Kaddish for a Child not Born trans. Christopher C. Wilson and
Katharina M. Wilson (Evanston, Il;: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 28.
6
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (London: Holmes and Meier,
1985), p. 251.
7
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington
Spa: Berg, 1985). For a celebrated attack on this, see David Blackbourn and Geoff
Eley, The Peculiarities of German History : Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-
Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
8
Imre Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’ trans. John MacKay The Yale Journal of
Criticism, 14:1 (2001), pp. 267–272, p. 270.
9
Theodor Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’ in Critical Models;
Interventions and Catchwords trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia
10
Kitty Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: Panther, 1983), p. 214.
11
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 120, 117.
12
Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words trans. Madeleine Dobere (Evanston, IL: North
Western University Press, 1998), p. 73.
13
Currently available on www.communities.gov.uk/speeches/corporate/holocaust-
memorial.
14
Imre Kertész, Fateless trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), p. 182. All further refer-
15
Giorgio, Agamben, Potentialities trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 152, 153.
16
I discuss this at length in my The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford
17
Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 138.
18
Lawrence Langer, Pre-empting the Holocaust (London: Yale University Press, 1998),
p. 1.
19
Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust trans. Patrick Camiler (London:
Continuum, 2000), p. 3.
20
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the
Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, in European Journal of Social Theory, 5: 1
(2002), pp. 87–106, p. 88. All further references will be given in the text.
21
Levy and Sznaider, ‘Memory Unbound’, p. 98. This claim is developed in no
small part from Edwaard Linethal’s Preserving Memory (London: Penguin, 1995)
which is a history of the creation and early years of the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum. While identifying its impact on public policy debates, Linethal is much
more circumspect about the impact of the museum – and of the memory of the
Holocaust – on actual public policy: see especially pp. 250–272 where he dis-
cusses precisely the ‘lures of redemption’.
22
Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ trans.
Mary Quaintance, in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson,
eds. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992),
pp. 3–67, p. 60. All further references will be given in the text.
23
‘Name’ is not just a metaphor: on ‘August 17 another decree prepared by Hans
Globke, announced that from January 1, 1939, Jews who did not bare the first
names indicated on an appended list were to add the first names Israel or Sara to
their names’, Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (London: Phoenix
Giant, 1998), p. 254.
24
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 109–110.
Chapter 10
Economies of Promise:
On Caesar and Christ
Philip Goodchild
University of Nottingham
The Insistence of the Theologico-Political

Our era is one of the resurgence of religion: one of the most significant and
enduring transformations of the twentieth century has been the rapid growth
of religion – specifically Pentecostalism, Roman Catholicism, indigenous
Christianities and Sunni Islam – throughout the Two Thirds World.1 This great
transformation has perhaps more lasting significance than the rise of fascism
and communism to replace an earlier era of globalization based on a combina-
tion of liberal market economy2 and empire.3 Yet the passing of the century
has also been characterized by a fresh engagement with religion by some of
the most radical, critical and secular of European philosophers: one thinks
primarily of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Alain
Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Michel Henry, François Laruelle, and
perhaps even Antonio Negri.4 While this emergence of a ‘religion without
religion’5 may seem surprising for those educated into a secular culture for
whom traditional religious faith amounts to self-deception, superstition and
servitude, such an interest in and attraction to religion follows in a long line of
modern philosophers from Pascal and Descartes, through Kant, Schelling and
Hegel, to Bergson, Heidegger and Jaspers. Indeed, what may require explain-
ing is less the ‘return of the religious’ in critical thought so much as our very
element of surprise itself: the assumption of a secular modernity, against much
evidence, that it is due to replace earlier religious forms of life throughout
the globe.6
A secular age maintains its confidence in its superiority on the basis of the
achievements of the free and relevant application of reason: one may consider
the benefits of progress measured by mortality and literacy rates; the advance of
medicine against formerly invincible diseases; the rise in wealth and levels of
consumption; the success of science in explaining and predicting events; the
management of a productive economy through state-regulated capitalism; the
replacement of warfare by diplomacy and negotiation; and the replacement of
custom by rational planning. Our age has become secular insofar as politics has
become the art of management of all these benefits,7 where the guiding criteria
are their augmentation alone, apart from religious faith. Secular thought
focuses on the real world. Modern philosophy has paved the way for such a sec-
ular age by constructing itself out of a rational critique of a religious faith that
had formed the basis for morals, customs and practices. For a defining charac-
teristic of a secular age is self-determination, autonomy, or the capacity to regu-
late our lives by our own promises: this is manifest in the progressive restructuring
of all aspects of life, from the landscape, through technology, to forms of
employment, the arts, social relations, sexual practices, therapies and even
genetic codes. Human freedom, necessary for self-determination, finds its liber-
ation and perpetual renewal in freedom of thought.
Religious thought, constructed so often as an agent of preservation of a cul-
ture and way of life, may have little to offer to pragmatic problems of recon-
struction and self-determination. Christianity may have meaning within the
self-enclosed frames of reference provided by Neoplatonic or Aristotelian meta-
physics or the narratives of scriptures. In relation to contemporary politics it
experiences a crisis of relevance.8 For even if, according to Carl Schmitt, politi-
cal concepts are merely secularized theological concepts,9 then one response is
to regard political theology as thus a part of political thought, and not a part of
theology.10 Nevertheless, we do indeed see the emergence of a whole spectrum
of political theologies, from conservative Catholicism, through liberation theol-
ogies, political Islam, to engaged Buddhism. Religions have sought to recon-
struct their own meaning and relevance within the field of the political. Here
they encounter strange allies: in a thoroughly secular age, our late modern
philosophers have applied the force of radical critique to modern reason itself,
exposing its irrationalities, oversights and ongoing pieties.11 The element of
surprise arises when such critical thinkers turn to the resources of religion to
aid in the critique of modern reason. While philosophers mine the religious for
its conceptual resources and its collective heritage, political theologians borrow
from critical philosophy the tools to question the autonomy of our secular age.
We have here the latest stage in an enduring phenomenon: philosophers have
recourse to religion in order to do philosophy, while theologians turn to philos-
ophy in order to make theology credible.
Now, instead of mapping existing formulations of the theologico-political
from either philosophy or theology, I propose to elaborate a distinctive approach
by sketching a genealogy of the secular: not a full historical explanation, but
one that treats problems of memory and promise as decisive.12 In the first place,
the return of the religious in critical thought is a fin-de-siècle phenomenon symp-
tomatic of the encroaching end of secular modernity. For the modern global
Economies of Promise: On Caesar and Christ 143
project of self-determination faces insuperable external limits in the form of

the finitude of energy supplies, fresh water, fertile soils, minerals, forests and
pollution sinks. Where economic growth is exponential, ecological cycles have
finite ranges of stability. In the twenty-first century, the limits of human self-
determination are encountered in the looming catastrophes of abrupt climate
change and peak oil. In addition to such external limits, however, the history of
financial crises, of which the global credit crunch is merely one in a long series,
witnesses to the impotence of human beings to control even their own eco-
nomic behaviour. There is no rational or natural reason why opportunities for
growth should be more limited in 2009 than in 2007; there is merely a problem
of confidence or credit. To the extent that modern politics concerns itself solely
with human self-determination, then its blindness to obvious external and
internal limits is something of a ‘log in its own eye’ (Matt. 7.3), and it becomes
a matter of the blind leading the blind. The religious may be invoked as a
critical voice that appeals beyond self-determination.
In the second place, there is also the question of the enduring religious her-
itage of modern secular thought. It has frequently been noted that seculariza-
tion has been the result of an internal dynamic and dialectic within the Christian
faith.13 The full explanation of the origins of our secular age provided by Charles
Taylor gives a prominent role to the Reformation in removing the sacred from
the broad experience of life, and confining it to scripture, preaching and indi-
vidual conscience (A Secular Age). Only subsequently can the rest of life become
subject to human rational self-determination. Where, for the Greeks, the logos
became thinkable by being projected onto the order of the cosmos,14 so that the
aim of reason was to live life in accordance with nature, for the Reformers the
divine logos was encountered in the text of scripture itself, and the aim of reli-
gion was to live life in accordance with the will of God. It is important to note
the significance, here, of the means for recording, memory and repetition. For
the Greeks, the movement of the heavens exhibited the regularity of nature,
of the reason underlying the universe. The sacred was present in the cosmos.
For the Reformers, the printing press enabled the repetition, recording and
distribution of scripture: the sacred is present solely in word and thought.
Modern reason has combined both means of recording: the powers of printing,
enabling a science that can be recorded, distributed, repeated and tested, with
the regularity of nature, as the object of enquiry and modification. In addition
to the technologies of recording and memory, however, the subsequent stage is
to use such a logos as a basis for self-determination. The power of self-determi-
nation first emerged in the West as an individual virtue among those philoso-
phers who sought to live life in accordance with reason.15 It was preserved and
developed in the Christian monastic tradition. Freedom of thought and ratio-
nal critique began with philosophy as a spiritual exercise,16 before becoming a
collective political engagement (Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim’). It may
therefore be possible to view modern self-determination as a collective ascetic
practice – one no longer driven by the Stoic goal of self-mastery or the attempt
to live according to nature,17 but driven by the collective goal of the production
of wealth. One may thus observe how our secular age is heir to the religious.
Self-determination requires certain preconditions: the rituals and technologies
that allow us to record, repeat and remember the spiritual practices through
which life is perpetually reconstructed, and the collective goals of human
endeavour – each of these were formerly developed in religious life. Each of
these requires a certain kind of cultural expression, whether in a specific
medium such as writing, or in an actual life and character, or in a pure idea.
What has contemporary relevance, here, are not religious origins but the endur-
ing force of cultural expression.18
It is therefore necessary to situate the work of self-determination through
reason within a wider context of modes of cultural memory.19 Self-determination
requires that a meaning must first be condensed into a symbol, sign or medium.
The external material, here, has a dual function: if it is first an expression of a
preserved meaning, it must then become a criterion that gives shape and form
to subsequent conduct. One thinks in and through and with this material of
expression. At the most material level, the genetic code records the phenotype
of a successful life-form, while providing the means by which it may be repro-
duced. At the cultural level, bodily markings, speech, religious rituals, chants
and astronomical movements may all function as forms of what we might call
‘writing’. Nevertheless, while writing may organize life, and grammar may orga-
nize writing, the advent of the written word has made possible the sedimenta-
tion of a ‘writing within writing’, a mode of ordering the consistent determination
of written signs as concepts. Metaphysics, the order of being, is a ‘writing within
writing’, enabling philosophical reason as the ordering of life in line with the
idea. Parmenides’ Being, Plato’s Idea, Plotinus’ One, and the Christian God
became fundamental organizing categories of experience insofar as they dupli-
cated both the recording of life in metaphysics and the ultimate criterion
according to which what is real can be judged.20 Moreover, even if modern
thought has become oblivious to its grounding in metaphysics as an objective
philosophical presupposition, this does not mean that its grounding is any less
firm: subjective presuppositions, embedded in assumptions about what it means
to think and know,21 become inscribed within cultural institutions such as the
university and in the literary form of the scientific paper. Our ‘writing within
writing’ is embedded in genres and practices, as well as in concepts and prac-
tices of truth: it is what we call ‘reason’.
The history of reason may therefore be situated within a broader history of
cultural memory. There is no reason to privilege reason as such, nor even the
written word itself, as the sole vehicles of cultural self-determination. For some,
the new predominance of the moving image, of popular music, and of the dig-
ital media age seals the fate of a modernity where critical reason was founded
on the printing press.22 Critical thought, as found in the pamphlet or treatise,
gives way to subjective opinion expressed in the blog. In popular culture, a mar-
ket place ruled by subjective gratification takes precedence over the tribunals of
critical reason, while the university as an institution is transformed into a multi-

national corporation. Nevertheless, in addition to the external failures and lim-
its to reason, it is also necessary to observe its internal limits: reason struggles to
provide a full, final and definitive account of itself. If the structural revolution
disclosed the varied structural forms such as myth that acted as precursors to
writing, and thus to reason itself, then the poststructuralist philosophers have
pushed reason towards its own autocritique, identifying moments of blockage,
aporia, decision or encounter that are beyond reason, or without reason.23
Concepts of difference, the other, the sublime, the event and the flesh are well-
known examples. It is hardly surprising that such a dimension, exterior to rea-
son’s self-description, should evoke pre-rational forms of cultural memory, even
without direct appeals to negative theology or an enduring god of the gaps. For
what is at stake here is the difference between reason as a complete system,
capable of giving a full account of itself, and that which exceeds reason while
being presupposed by it. The task of critical thought is to raise reason to an
encounter with its other. Then the significance of our phenomena may be
explained by an engagement with the other determinant writing of modernity,
apart from reason.
The Promise of Money

To breed an animal which is able to make promises – is that not precisely the para-
doxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? is it not the real
problem of humankind? . . .24
When Nietzsche raised the problem of humankind as that of forming an animal

who makes promises, he was concerned primarily with the sovereign individual
(On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 40). Forms of cruelty and punishment were
devised, on his account, for the purpose of enforcing a memory (pp. 41–42), as
if a form of writing upon the soul. Only by reminding oneself of one’s promises
can one consistently determine oneself and enact one’s will. Yet there remains
something of an incongruence between promise and memory: where memory
records what has been, a promise records what will have been. Where a memory
is grounded in the facts, a promise may be grounded in a free invention. Where
a memory has simply to be recollected, a promise has to be believed. The
human being is the animal who discerns the difference between what is and
what may be: it has the capacity to believe promises. If Nietzsche relates punish-
ment back to the primary phenomena of credit and debt, or the ability to keep
one’s word (p. 43), the capacity to make promises is itself dependent on the
belief that counterparties will keep their own promises. It is one thing to record
a promise, in memory or in writing; it is quite another to record the credibility
attached to a promise. Here we reach the fundamental insufficiency of an
immanent system of reason: where reason is linked to recollection, or looking

backwards, life, as Kierkegaard remarked, must be lived forwards. Indeed, the
problem of living and thinking forwards in time is the essential problem that
exposes the insufficiency of pure reason, as has been shown by Schelling,
Bergson and Heidegger. Where a proposition projects an enduring relation
into the timeless space of true facts, a promise projects an enduring relation
through time.
The persistence of the religious in forms of cultural memory marks the
enduring need to preserve and transmit credibility. Trust in promises is the
basis of human cooperation and civilization. To breed an animal that is capable
of trusting promises – this is the task that nature has set herself with regard to
humankind, and this is where nature employs the services of religion. If human
civilization began with the distribution of food, then the rituals of animal sacri-
fice, including offerings to the gods and distribution among the members of
the group, were means of ensuring continuity of memory, membership and
entitlement. A sacred economy is one of allocation, where the gods apportion
shares and fates.25 Piety is the basis for promise. To be a member of a group is
to be promised an allocated share. The problem posed by human civilization is
not that of a primal herd, from which Nietzsche drew so many inferences, but
that of the basis for allocation of resources, cooperation, the division of labour,
and the measuring of contracts and agreements. Humans are hunter-gatherers,
not grazers.
One may distinguish fundamentally different social phenomena: the religio-
economic trust in promised allocations differs from the sovereign political
power that extracts tribute before deciding privileged allocations. It is the dif-
ference between believing promises and making promises. It is the difference
between pietas and ratio, between faith and reason. Each has different modes of
cultural memory or ‘writing’. Perishable offerings to the gods, as a means of
recording piety, could be replaced by votive offerings, usually of metal sacrifi-
cial tools and vessels, to be stored permanently in temples. Here we find some
of the earliest examples of writing as dedicatory inscriptions, where public dis-
play and the perpetuation of memory were the explicit goal (Seaford, Money
and the Early Greek Mind, p. 59). The power of gods was demonstrated by the
wealth of the treasures devoted to their temples. At the same time, the alloca-
tions made by sovereign powers were recorded in decrees, covenants and laws,
while the authority or credibility of such powers could be inscribed by the royal
seal. The theological and the political are reunited when the sovereign himself
becomes an object of trust, and power is expressed less through the memno-
technics of cruelty and military conquest, and more through tribute and patron-
age. Nevertheless, it is one thing to have this unity embodied in the institution
of monarchy, and in its customs and practices; it is quite another for this unity
to be achieved in an actual technology of writing. A pivotal stage in the evolu-
tion of forms of cultural memory occurred when these separate functions were
merged: when the metal of the temple treasury was minted with a royal seal.26
The invention of stamped coinage by the Lydian tyrants of the sixth century
BC solved the problem of recording and allocating credibility. Money embodies
a theological-political unity: it records both trust and sovereign freedom. For
the insistence, centrality, and, indeed dominance of the theologico-political in
the contemporary world we need search no further than money.
Money itself is a promise. Whether money appears as stamped coinage, as
paper currency recording value, as an accounting record or as an electronic
bank record, its promise consists in its acceptability by an issuing authority.27
Money is acceptable in our banks because it is the unit they use to record cred-
its and debits. Just as food distribution could be centralized by animal sacrifice
or tithes of grain to temples, so also can the power to make promises be central-
ized in the authority that issues money. In the contemporary global economy,
the money base of notes and coins in circulation is expanded many times over
by the capacity of banks to lend in excess of reserves; yet even the notes and
coins themselves are mere promises of value. Every monetary transaction, there-
fore, consists in a flow of promises – both promises made by central issuing
authorities and promises made by those who take out loans, and whose prom-
ises themselves then bear the promise of value.
Our modern world is built upon promises. It was not built upon the rational
power of self-determination alone. Markings on coins, paper currency, account
books, bank statements, credit ratings, performance indicators and price charts
have been essential because they record temporal expectations and promises.
Human civilization has been constructed on the basis of faith in promises, that
is, in terms of powers that are not demonstrable and cannot be subjected to
reason. Whether these powers take the form of ancestors, spirits, fates, gods,
providence, human authorities, sovereign powers or even the national debt,
human conduct is made predictable when it can rely on the blessings of unseen
powers. And human conduct itself becomes worthy of trust when it can become
predictable.
The modern world is no exception. The basis for all our cooperation, our
contracts and exchanges, is faith in the value of money: money will be accept-
able in exchange by others because it is acceptable in exchange by some issuing
authority. Money is the mode of writing through which we promise value. Where
the meaning of being is central to all rational metaphysical systems as well as
to subjective presuppositions, habits and institutions that guide reason, the
value of money is central to all economic transactions as well as to all contracts
and agreements. The single principle that unites the conduct and cooperation
of the contemporary globalized world is the creation of wealth. While there
may be little agreement, and perhaps even less reflection on what constitutes
the good life, or the true nature of wealth, there is at least agreement on how
wealth should be counted. Economic growth is regarded as the promise of
wealth. The price of any good, service or asset is determined by expectations
about what others may be willing to pay for it in future or distant markets. A
representation of value, price, takes precedence over value itself. Evaluation is
performed from the perspective of the other. It is such a formal structuring of

evaluation through money that constitutes the basis for our economic coopera-
tion. Economic growth is counted in terms of an increase in monetary transac-
tions. Yet the value of assets is their exchange value or promise of money, and
the value of money is its effective purchasing power: each of these is a promise
of wealth.
There is, as we now know all too well, a significant difference between the
rational order studied by economics and the chaotic realities of financial mar-
kets. The failure of economic predictions is explained by the difference between
reason and promise. While the tendency in economic thought is to reduce eco-
nomic transactions to the paradigm of barter exchange in a village market,28
composed of a series of instantaneous swaps or exchanges that are settled by
the end of the market day, more prominent in real economic life are enduring
contractual obligations where payments are made over time. Rents, wages,
interest and taxes are ongoing temporal payments that have to be paid in the
form of money. Economic life is not simply the production and consumption of
wealth, for it is driven by the creation, acquisition and spending of money.
Money is far more than a ‘wheel of circulation’29: we work for promises and we
spend promises. As Schumpeter noted, the entrepreneur is typically a debtor.30
New money is required for investment before there can be a growth in produc-
tion, so there is always more debt in the system than fresh value produced.
When banks issue credit into an account, that credit consists in a promise by the
individual or corporation to acquire money to repay the loan as well as a prom-
ise by the bank to pay the amount credited when it is transferred to others.
Moreover, when the debtor eventually repays the loan with interest, the debt is
cancelled, withdrawing the money – hence the system is dependent on others
elsewhere taking out further debts to maintain economic growth. In short, the
economy of credit capitalism is an extraordinary pyramid scheme, always depen-
dent on an increase in debt to fuel growth.31 In periods of growth, such a debt-
based economy can appear to increase indefinitely in a virtuous circle. In
periods of decline, such a debt-based economy can contract indefinitely until
sufficient confidence is present to induce fresh debts and promises that restart
the cycle of growth. For without debt there is no increase in effective demand.
Moreover, if the global economy is bounded by ecological finitude, then there
will come a point where global economic collapse is terminal for most of the
economy, apart from a parasitic remainder that feeds off the destruction.
Since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, leading to the emer-
gence of a stable economy based on debt-money, the nascent global economy
has been enslaved to a cycle of perpetual growth driven by debt. Money, in such
an economy, takes on a theologico-political significance.32 First, since money is
both the measure of prices and the means of payment, it becomes effective
demand, the means for the realization of all other values. Whatever is valued in
principle, the acquisition of money, or simply preserving the health of a fragile
economic system, must come first. Hence, one can compare the resources
directed towards resolving the credit crisis with the resources directed towards
averting the far more serious problem of abrupt climate change. Money
becomes the supreme value, since it is that which must be sought first, so that
all other values may be obtained. It gives value to all other values.
Second, since money is merely a promise, the value of money is nowhere evi-
dent. Its value is transcendent, taken on faith; money is a sign of a value that is
never seen.
Third, money measures the prices of assets, and the value of assets are based
on speculative projections about their future value. Even when the value of
assets crashes, the new value is no more real than the old since it depends on
new expectations about the future. Value is composed essentially of speculative
projections about the future, faith in the promise of what is to come.
Fourth, if money is created as a debt, then it includes an obligation to expand
economic activity to repay the debt. Where common sense tells us that the goal
of modern political life is the creation of wealth to improve standards of living,
experience tells us that the goal of modern economic life is making profits. It is
not a question of greed. All of us are dependent on individuals, corporations
and governments who are in debt, and there is a universal obligation to repay
debts, and take out more debts, in order to prevent our fragile financial system
from collapsing any further. The obligations of debt are the ultimate political
obligations.
It is worth pausing to explore the theologico-political significance of this
momentous occurrence in human history. Money has displaced religion as the
measure of the value of values. Where religion decrees absolute values, money
measures all values in terms of a potential rate of profit, and thus in terms of a
production of more money. Money substitutes itself for all evaluation, produc-
ing a perspective of evaluation used by all in accounting, but which belongs to
no one. The highest values are devalued.
Moreover, in place of the promises made by the gods, money is composed of
promises made by people. This is the fundamental gesture of secularization.
Where science gives an ordered account of nature as an immanent ordered sys-
tem, and where philosophy has sought an account for all things in an imma-
nent system of reason, economics constructs an immanent system in the
autonomous workings of the free market. Although the free market is an ideo-
logical construct that barely exists in practice, having to be propagated and
maintained by state intervention (Polanyi, The Great Transformation), its ideal is
trust in the sovereignty of human promises. The promises upon which we base
our existence are the promises of others, and no longer hopes for blessing by
the gods. One consequence is the liberation of those with wealth from mutual
obligations in society. Wealth brings power to make one’s desires effective, as
well as freedom to choose which desires to exercise. Yet, in reciprocal relations
of trade, goods and services are always provided by others. The one with wealth
to spend has the power to command the promises of others. Where most peo-
ple conform their work to the desires of others in order to obtain money, the
power of complete self-determination belongs to those with wealth alone. The

secular ideal of individual freedom is an ideal facilitated by money. Nevertheless,
the freedom conferred by wealth remains an ideological illusion since it is
dependent on others to produce and maintain it.33 Money easily replaces God
as the supreme value, the source of all values, the object of trust and the source
of universal obligation. Where God offers himself as grace, money offers itself
as a loan; where God offers a spiritual reward, money offers a tangible reward;
where God requires repentance and true belief, money may be accepted by all
who trust its acceptance by others; where God requires conversion of the soul,
money lends itself to effecting the heart’s deepest desires. While such tangible
benefits have led to an extraordinary creation of wealth, when credit falls into
crisis, then a civilization based upon money is a house built upon sand.
It is important to analyse the spiritual power of money and observe how it
operates on the human soul. While the way in which one spends money
expresses and records one’s desires, as if a mere tool of self-determination, its
temporal nature as a promise conditions and shapes human thought and desire.
While possessions are what one already has, and work is what one does, value
measured by money is what one is promised. While obtaining money may
depend on oneself, as does the way one spends money, the value of money – the
fulfilment of its promise – does not. One can only wait and see. The promise of
money evokes the passive experience of waiting. It places one in the position of
a helpless infant whose cries for attention are embodied in money: for those
with money to spend, society itself fulfils the maternal function by providing for
one’s needs for those with money to spend, yet society becomes an absent or
withdrawn parent for those without.34 The promise offered by money concerns
each person intimately: it is hard to remain indifferent to the fulfilment of
one’s deepest desires. Indeed, the possibilities afforded by money evoke the
imagination. For money can only be spent, given or invested. With regard to
spending, money evokes the question, ‘What do I desire?’ With regard to giv-
ing, money evokes the question, ‘Where are my sympathies?’ With regard to
investment, money evokes the question, ‘How can I ensure secure growth?’ The
experience of waiting, while the value of money remains to be realized, focuses
attention on pleasures, sympathies and anxieties. An individual self is called
into being which consists in imagination and desire.
Thus, on the one hand, money is that which gives mastery, and has the power
of making demands effective. On the other hand, money is that which places
one in a position of helpless expectation. On the one hand, money is the con-
dition for entrepreneurial innovation, enabling true activity; on the other hand,
money works on one’s behalf in and through the labour of others. On the one
hand, debt is freely created through entering a contract; on the other hand,
credit is offered as an advance or opportunity, existing independently of
whether the offer is accepted. The power of money, therefore, while it appears
to be entirely subject to the human will, is that which calls into being the human
will. It emerges from the imagination to become an obligation. Its power
consists in a promise of a vision of prosperity combined with the threat of exclu-

sion from a share in society for those without wealth. The one who believes
money can do anything for them is the one who may be suspected of doing
anything for money.35 In imagination, money promises all things; in reality,
money delivers itself. The promise of money counts as money, and money itself
is the promise of money. If money promises all things, this is only because all
things can be exchanged for money.36 Money is an evaluative perspective
through which all reality may be seen; as a promise, this perspective imposes
itself upon the world. We have a religious name for the structure of such a
promise that imposes itself in the present at the same time as it announces a
future that is radically other than our present: it is the ‘messianic’.37
It is credit-based capitalism itself that exhibits a messianic structure. Since the
promise of money and its kingdom of prosperity may satisfy any desire, it
includes all desires. It is a messianism without intrinsic content, a pure messia-
nicity without a messiah. It is the obverse yet necessary supplement to modern
reason, a time of waiting in which the order of the world is suspended yet recon-
structed apart from human self-determination. Yet since it is a pure structure of
credibility without content, where credibility is built on credibility to compose
a universal faith, it fails to address the fundamental problem of human civiliza-
tion: on what conditions can a promise prove to be credible?
The Messianic
The promise of money attempts to solve the theologico-political synthesis by
offering everyone the imaginary prospect of becoming Caesar. Those who par-
ticipate in a money economy render under Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.
What possibilities are there for an alternative theologico-political synthesis? For
this, it may be fruitful to observe a promise that has a rather different economy.
A messianism with a messiah may be found in a radical Christian understanding
of the messianic, as recorded in the teachings attached to the names of Paul
and Jesus.
Paul’s proclamation of the messiah, which ostensibly gives so little emphasis
to the actual person of Jesus, may help to disclose the logic of the messianic at
stake here. Paul ended his account of his gospel to the Romans with the follow-
ing messianic promise, an ostensible quotation from Isaiah: ‘The root of Jesse
shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall
hope.’38 One is immediately struck by the scandalous inversion: Paul addresses
Rome, the seat of Caesar, the Gentile ruler over Jews, and announces a Jewish
ruler over the Gentiles. This summative quotation confirms a reading of the
opening of the epistle as a heraldic announcement of Jesus as a new ruler, the
Christ or messiah, and the call of the Gentiles to loyalty or the ‘obedience of
faith’.39 Yet if Paul’s messiah differs from both the Isaianic prophecy and a
benign Caesar, because no direct conquest of Caesar is expected, this is because
the rule of God differs from the rule of Caesar: the shoot from the stump of
Jesse has a different character to David, his ancestor ‘according to the flesh’,
because he is declared ‘according to the spirit’ to be ‘son of God’ (Rom. 1.3–4).
‘Son of God’ means that the roots of Paul’s messiah are believed to be found in
God. When one poses the question of the roots or essence of a phenomenon,
such an inquiry may be either historical, locating the essence at the origins,
conceptual, locating the essence in logically required presuppositions, physical,
locating the essence in causal process, political, locating the essence in deter-
mining powers, or theological, locating the essence in a spiritual or divine signif-
icance. For Paul, the essence of the messiah is primarily theological, and that
essence is fully revealed only at the end. So if Jesus is declared the messiah by
his resurrection as the firstborn from the dead, Paul still awaits the revelation of
the power or essence of the messiah in glory. At the coming of the messiah,
those who belong to the messiah are raised from the dead, and then comes the
end, when the messiah hands the kingdom over to God the Father, after he has
destroyed every ruler and every authority and every power (1 Cor. 15.24). Paul’s
messiah remains inescapably political: as in the prophecy from Isaiah, he does
destroy all other rulers. Yet Paul’s messiah is inescapably theological, since all
things are eventually subjected to God, so that God may be all in all – that is, all
is judged theologically. Jesus, the messiah, announces and initiates the eschato-
logical rule of God.
I wish to draw out a few radical characteristics of a Christian messianism from
this somewhat commonplace piece of New Testament theology. First, if true
judgement comes at the end, and since it is grounded in the spirit rather than
the flesh, in the new creation rather than the old, and in the resurrection rather
than in this mortal life, then it stands in radical discontinuity with the present
order of things. True Christian messianism must be radical; its essence cannot
be divined from prophecy, from reason, or existing political institutions – it is
neither Hebrew, Greek, nor Roman. Like the resurrection, it cannot be investi-
gated by established historical hermeneutics.40 It does not appeal to the per-
spectives of others, but to an as yet unknown divine perspective. Second, Paul
emphasized that his Christians walk by faith and not by sight, live by hope and
not by power, and order their lives by love and not by law. Promise takes prece-
dence over reason. Divine judgement and discontinuity with the present order
is experienced throughout the fabric of daily life by means of life in the Spirit.
Divine power is not confined to the messiah alone, but is distributed among all
those who are ‘in Christ’, who are adopted as sons, daughters and heirs of God,
the messianic or theological community, and who live in the sight of God.
Divine power or the kingdom of God is believed to differ from power in the
present order by virtue of both its transcendence, in discontinuity and judge-
ment, and its immanence, in distribution and in the Spirit. Third, this divine
power is believed to be actually effective, enacting a creation, revelation and
redemption that will displace every other ruler and authority and power. Such
characteristics pose the fundamental problem of the messianic: what is the
nature of divine power, a power believed to be at once transcendent, immanent
and effective? What is the content that can fill this structural form of the
messianic?
For Paul, the essence of such messianic power was exercised through dying
and rising, or in the terminology of Michael Gorman, who has to my mind pro-
vided the most faithful interpretation of the heart of Paul’s epistles, ‘cruciformity’:41
‘I have been crucified with the messiah; it is no longer I that live, but the messiah
who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20, modified translation). If we are to take Paul at
his word in this verse and suppose that he believed that Jesus did in some sense
live in him, then we have a licence to interpret the entirety of Paul’s thought in
reference to the Jesus tradition about which Paul is so silent, and yet some of
which he must have known. For this verse directly echoes the gospel call to dis-
cipleship: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose
it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 16.24–25, RSV).
In order to give a little more content to this notion of the messianic, it is there-
fore to the tradition of sayings attributed to Jesus that we may turn.
The Gospels read as a succession of shocks, offences and surprises. If
Heidegger once remarked that Nietzsche’s procedure is everywhere one of
inversion,42 much more so does this seem to be true of Jesus. Where money
promises the world, the messiah promises to overthrow it. A method of chias-
mic inversion characterizes many of the parables (e.g., the lost sheep, the good
Samaritan, the Pharisee and the tax-collector); many of the sayings (‘Those
who exalt themselves will be humbled, while those who humble themselves will
be exalted’ (Luke 14.11)); some of the stories (the disciples fish all night but
catch nothing; they fish in the day and catch a great haul; the great haul is
abandoned on the beach while the disciples leave to become fishers of men)
(Luke 5.1–11) and even the literary form of some of the sayings:
Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye,

but do not notice the log in your own eye . . .?
First take the log out of your own eye,
then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Luke
6.41, 42)
This chiasmic economy, then, characterizes the typical messianic promise of

the kingdom:
Blessed are you poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God . . .
But woe to your who are rich,
for you have received your consolation. (Luke 6.20, 24)
The extent to which wealth, taxation and money form the focus of Jesus’ proc-
lamation of the kingdom is remarkable, from the widow’s mite to the cleansing
of the temple. The source of political power, in Jesus’ day, was taxation and
tribute: it was in this form that power penetrated the lives of peasants. The
system of universal taxation introduced by the Romans was the source of their
military power. It forced taxpayers out of a non-monetary subsistence economy
into a cash economy based on trade. Jesus’ teachings on wealth were a focal
point of his opposition to the order of this world:
No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the
other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God
and wealth. (Matt. 6.24)
As a saying about mastery or rule, providing the context for the messianic
obligation to ‘seek first the kingdom of God’, this is a messianic saying that
again reinforces the discontinuity between the divine order and the order of
this world. Moreover, it shifts the focus from mastery to service: whom do you
love? It is striking that wealth, personified here as Mammon, is portrayed as a
master rather than as a servant. Like the Christian messiah, Mammon’s mas-
tery is achieved through service. For wealth is the supreme servant, the univer-
sal means, and no one has greater power or freedom than one who possesses
wealth. Wealth became the supreme principle of rule: when attacking the cen-
tral religious authority of his day, Jesus overthrew the tables of the money-
changers. Jesus’ teachings on wealth were a direct assault on the order of this
world.
Such an assault is conducted through an inversion of perspective: it is the
spiritual significance of material wealth that is given priority in the Sermon on
the Mount. Jesus inverted the normal relation of mastery between people and
wealth – your heart will be where your treasure is, not your treasure where your
heart is – by inverting the normal relations of perspective: ‘The eye is the lamp
of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light’ (Matt.
6.22). Service is enacted through time, attention and devotion. The object of
one’s attention – one’s pleasures, one’s wealth, one’s power – is used as the
material for the lens through which the world is to be seen. For wealth, specifi-
cally in the form of money, is not simply what is valued, but becomes the princi-
ple by which the value of values is determined. The value of all things consists
in its price. Mastery consists in a perspective of evaluation. One is not ruled by
the intrinsic values of things, nor by one’s own evaluations; one is ruled by a
principle of evaluation that bears authority. Jesus’ opposition to the Pharisees,
denounced by Luke as ‘lovers of wealth’, exposes the significance of the quin-
tessential charge of hypocrisy: wealth values what is prized in the sight of others.
‘You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your
hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of
God’ (Luke 16.15).
The messianic inversion, whether it occurs as repentance in the secret of
one’s heart, or as the eschatological revelation of all secrets, consists in living
one’s life in relation to the judgement of God, not in relation to the judgement
of others.43 Divine power would seem to consist not merely in a perspective of

evaluation, but in a perspective that sees and judges without itself being seen.
Here we have the most extreme transcendence, the polar opposite to a philos-
ophy that orders life in relation to knowable reasons.44 Nevertheless, we have to
reckon with a further chiasmic inversion:
Do not judge,
and you will not be judged;
do not condemn,
and you will not be condemned.
Forgive,
and you will be forgiven;
give,
and it will be given to you. (Luke 6.37–8)
The divine perspective, whether of judgement or mercy, seems to be instituted

by one’s own conduct. One seems to be back within the plane of immanence,
the sphere of reason, insofar as the divine perspective that judges the heart is
conditioned and effectively produced. The gospel principle, ‘Do to others as
you would have them do to you’, famously seems to epitomize the universaliz-
ability of the Kantian categorical imperative.45 One determines oneself and
one’s fate. There is, however, a notable difference. For where the Kantian crite-
rion is formed by seeing things from the perspective of others, the gospel
imperative is formed from seeing things from the perspective of God: one is
merciful, as the Father is merciful (Luke 6.36). Mercy is a principle of initiative,
not response: love of enemies, doing good, and lending without expecting
return takes the messianic promise beyond all earthly economy of recompense
(Luke 6.35). The promised reward is available only to those who ‘sell their pos-
sessions and give alms’ (Luke 12.33), according to the chiasmic structure: those
who try to save their life will lose it, while those who lose their life will save it.46
The messianic promise of a heavenly reward, the overflowing measure placed
in one’s lap (Luke 6.38), is the abundance of treasure of the heart (Luke 6.45).
The emphasis is placed upon a transformation of perspective, metanoia, and
belief in the promise. If one can consider an act of repentance as a form of cul-
tural memory, a storing up of treasure in heaven, it is one that has quite a dif-
ferent economy from reason or money. It is an economy of the heart. One gives
for alms those things that are within (Luke 11.41).
What interests me here is not whether Jesus was the messiah, was resurrected,
or was the son of God – such affirmations are modes of cultural writing that all
too easily proclaim Christ as Caesar – but whether it is possible to make explicit
the temporal logic of the heart. It is a matter of taking the log out of one’s eye
so that one can act from the heart. What might these strange phrases mean in
practice? If the spiritual life is a matter of perspective, and the eye is a source of
light that determines what is seen as real, then the ‘log’, that which obscures
vision, may indeed be that which is seen as real. To see wealth as substantial is
to have an ontology. One is concerned with who has what, who is what, who
does what. The gospel, by contrast, recommends abandonment of economic
concerns, of what one will wear, or what one will eat and drink. Instead, the call
to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field is a call to observation:
just as God counts the hairs of the head (Luke 12.7), the disciple is called to
observe life. For life, which is more than food, cannot be stored; and worry can-
not add a single hour to one’s lifespan (Luke 12.23–25). Wealth has no endur-
ing substance; it endures less than the grass of the field which is alive today and
tomorrow is thrown into the oven (Luke 12.28). For the temporal condition of
life is such that time cannot be saved; it can only be spent. You can only give
time without hope of reward. You are obliged to give to everyone who begs
from you, insofar as they attract attention. Life itself is the giving of alms. Hence
the gospel promise is merely an invitation to become what one is.
In a very strange way, therefore, the messianic promise of the gospels can be
read philosophically, even if this is not the intention or the most obvious read-
ing. Such a philosophy insists in the messianic, regardless of Jesus’ personal
authority and regardless of whether it is noticed. In place of the Parmenidean
tautology that directs attention to truth as a timeless substance, there is a celes-
tial economy of repetition: the measure that one gives is the measure that one
gets. The perspective by which one sees the world is the perspective by which
one is judged. A metaphysics of the One, the idea, or substance is replaced by
the determinate temporal distribution of attention. One’s own practices of
thinking and attention become the writing in one’s soul, the cultural memory
that makes life possible. Furthermore, in place of the Heideggerian care for,
and appropriation of, Being, the one who seeks to save his life will lose it. One
becomes what one is by expending all one’s substance. The fundamental reli-
gious gesture is one of renunciation of all wealth, all circular returns, all earthly
objectives. Breaking with the immanent order of this world, renunciation insti-
tutes a celestial economy, the promise of reward in heaven, which is also a
reward in the heart. To have a rich heart, and indeed a rich life, is to know how
to pay attention, to know how to seek life rather than wealth, to know how to
spend time.
Conclusion
Let me therefore attempt to recapitulate this somewhat circuitous exposition to
observe afresh the profligate way in which I have spent your precious time.
While our secular age has paid attention to the possibilities of human self-
determination, it has remained blind to its limits: the environmental limit to
economic growth, and the religious limit of faith or confidence. For modern
reason pays attention only to that which can be objectified and directly manip-
ulated for rational self-determination. It seeks certainty, not trust. A genealogy
of the secular explores its dependence on varieties of writing: on the one hand
the printed word, which invites one to live one’s life in accordance with the
book, and the ‘writing within writing’ of metaphysics, which invites one to live
one’s life in accordance with reason; on the other hand, the stamped coin,
which invites one to compare values in relation to trust in that measure, and the
paper debt, which invites one to live one’s life in search of wealth, while oblig-
ing one to live in order to repay debts. Modern subjectivity has a twin founda-
tion: ‘I think therefore I am’ and ‘I owe therefore I am’. The enduring
significance of trust and obligation as the basis for human civilization is the
underlying meaning of the insistence of the theologico-political.
The human animal is one that makes promises, but also one that believes
promises. Yet the question remains as to what kind of promise can be believed.
The promise of wealth and power, according to which everyone becomes Caesar,
remains incredible. It has no true power. There is, however, an alternative syn-
thesis of trust and self-determination, a different theologico-political synthesis
as a basis for human civilization: the promise that one becomes what one is by
expending all one’s substance. To live is to die and to die is to live. The funda-
mental religious gesture that breaks with the order of this world is renuncia-
tion. And it is such costly sacrifice that ensures credibility.
Where the metaphysical age was ordered around the cosmic order of being
and meaning, and where the modern age was ordered around subjectivity and
doing, perhaps the coming age will be ordered around promise, waiting and
attention. For as the natural, economic and political conditions of existence
pass once more beyond the limits of human control, and we await the apocalyp-
tic repercussions of the end of modernity, perhaps there is little more to do
than await the messianic age by accumulating treasure in one’s heart to more
richly spend one’s life and soul.
Notes
1
Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
2
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). All further references will be given in the
text.
3
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin,
2004).
4
I have omitted from this list explicitly religious philosophers such as Emmanuel
Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste.
5
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of
6
Charles Taylor argues that it is secularity that is the exception and requires expla-
nation. See Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007). All further references will be given in the text.
7
See Michel Foucault’s discussion of the ‘police’ in ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards
a Criticism of “Political Reason”’, Stanford University: Tanner Lectures on
Human Values, 1979, pp. 242–252. All further references will be given in the text.
8
Paul Fletcher, for example, has argued that Christian theology only has meaning
within the context of a Neoplatonic cosmology, and without such a metaphysical
support, attempts to revive a Christian political theology based on the social
model of the Trinity are doomed to both misinterpret the theological tradition as
well as misunderstand the nature of the contemporary exercise of political power.
See Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)Political Theology (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2009).
9
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of
10
Erik Peterson cited in Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine, 169.
11
From David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer.
12
Whereas many accounts of the secular are histories of ideas, a genealogy attempts
to relate ideas to their conditions that lie outside thought. Even Taylor’s full
account neglects to explore the economic dimension while gesturing towards it.
Many so-called genealogies, however, are histories of ideas, informed by
Neoplatonic or Heideggerean accounts of history as a fall from some primal illu-
mination, and treating the truth of contemporary phenomena as though it is
disclosed by their ancestry. Here there is a danger of the genetic fallacy as well as
a blindness to possibilities opened up by the new.
13
See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science trans. Walter Kaufman
(New York: Vintage Books, 1974); Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion
of Exodus and the Kingdom trans. J.T. Swann (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972);
Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969);
Thomas J.J. Altizer, The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Aurora, CO: Davies Group,
2002).
14
Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 209. All further references will be given in the text.
15
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002).
16
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault,
ed. Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
17
See, for example, Epictetus, Discourses Book 1 trans. Robert Dobbin (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998).
18
On genealogy as a study that does not privilege origins, see Foucault, ‘Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History’, in Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin,
1986), pp. 76–100.
19
Nietzsche explains this functional role of history in ‘On the Uses and Abuses of
History for Life’, Untimely Meditations ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
20
This is the role that Kant gives to the ideas of pure reason. See Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1929), pp. 309–322.
21
See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone
Press, 1994), pp. 129–132.
22
Vilém Flusser, Writings ed. Andreas Ströhl (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002).
23
‘Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational – not sheltered from the irra-
tional at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain
relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift.’
Gilles Deleuze, in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1995), pp. 53–54.
24
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality ed. Keith Ansell Pearson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 38.
25
Roland Boer, Political Myth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 112
26
Seaford gives this account of the origins of stamped coinage in ancient Greece.
27
See L.R. Wray, Understanding Modern Money (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998),
p. 25.
28
See Karl Menger, ‘On the Origin of Money’, in Geoffrey Ingham, ed. Concepts of
Money (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005), pp. 3–19.
29
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations ed. Andrew Skinner (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), p. 385.
30
Schumpeter is cited by Richard Arena and Agnès Festré, ‘Banks, Credit and the
Financial System in Schumpeter’, reproduced in Geoffrey Ingham, ed. Concepts of
Money, p. 377.
31
See Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery
and Destructive Economics (Charlbury: Jon Carpenter, 1998); Frances Hutchinson,
Mary Mellor and Wendy Olsen, The Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability and
Economic Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
32
For a fuller account of this theology of money, see my Theology of Money (London:
SCM Press, 2007).
33
This point was explained long ago by Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book
III.2 trans. Victor Watts (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 50.
34
See the very interesting discussion of the formation of consciousness in the rela-
tion to the mother as a transitional object, and the role of money as a form of
symbolic conversion, in M.D. Faber, Culture and Consciousness: The Social Meaning
of Altered Awareness (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981), pp. 48–124.
35
George Savile, quoted in Kevin Jackson, The Oxford Book of Money (Oxford: Oxford
36
Karl Marx: ‘The capitalist knows that all commodities, however tattered they may
look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and truth money . . .’ Capital
Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 256.
37
See the discussion of the messianic in Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to
Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 190–197, 327–334.
38
Romans 15.12. The New Revised Standard Version translates the Hebrew of
Isaiah 11.10 as ‘On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples;
the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.’ Paul’s version
is clearly more emphatically political.
39
N.T. Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2005).
40
While all historical-critical approaches attempt this to some extent, the attempt
to reduce the messiah to literary parallels is epitomized by Thomas L. Thompson,
The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (London: Pimlico,
2007).
41
Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001).
42
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 1 trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco,
CA: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 30.
43
See Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History ed. James Dodd
(Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996), p. 107.
44
One should, however, note the extent to which these polar opposites could be
reconciled by a Stoic such as Epictetus.
45
Note that Kant himself hesitated here. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason trans.
Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927), p. 48.
46
It is notable that Derrida, commenting on these verses in Matthew, does not
reduce the celestial economy to an earthly economy, but emphasizes the neces-
sity of absolute loss. Derrida, The Gift of Death, pp. 103–109.
Chapter 11
‘Something Unique is Afoot in Europe’:

Derrida Reading Kant1
Joanna Hodge
Manchester Metropolitan University
Reading The Other Heading: Reflections on

Today’s Europe (1991)
In Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘L’autre cap’ [‘The Other Heading’], which was first
published in a French newspaper in 1990, he writes: ‘The same duty dictates
cultivating the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea, the critical tradition, but
also submitting it, beyond critique and questioning, to a deconstructive genea-
logy that thinks and exceeds it without yet compromising it.’2 This ‘heading’,
which is both title of text and headland jutting out into the sea, is discussed by
Derrida in terms of the doubling of a capital city, la capitale, by its capital reserves,
le capital, and the doubling of the economic reserves of a territory, by its capital
city. This ambiguous doubling is a signature theme of Derrida’s writings, and
works especially powerfully in this context, in relation both to the mentioned
themes and, as will become clear, in relation to redoubling the delimitation of
criteria for distinct domains of enquiry, as first set out by Kant, in the critical
system. The text is framed by the alternate headings of publication in the first
instance in a newspaper format, and then as a freestanding theoretical text, on
the differences between which Derrida makes a remark. Topically enough, this
capital, as geopolitical place, is underpinned and subverted by capital, as
economic resource, and capital, as economic resource, is underpinned and
subverted by the operations of national and international banking arrange-
ments. There is also the thought that the European ideal of culture may play
some special role in the evolution of reason. This is often discussed by Derrida
in relation to texts by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In this essay
from 1990, however, he introduces a more localized notion of Europe as
Mediterranean, insisting on a role for the political writings of Paul Valery

(1871–1945) to describe a third destabilizing moment, which may be aligned
with neither of the above, neither the economic nor the political. This is the
notion of cultural capital as ideal capital, which is more usually associated with
the name of Pierre Bourdieu.
The concept of ‘Europe’, and of a distinctively Europe tradition, is, in the
move outlined by Kant in his ‘Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitical
Intent’ (1784), 4 years before the Critique of Practical Reason, to be universalized
beyond its geopolitical territory, as a claim on, and for, all humankind.3 The
singular case, Europe, acquires the form of the universal, moving from the
status of a subjective maxim to that of an objective principle, by becoming
the form of the rule to be applied. Both Kant, and indeed Husserl, wrestle with
the implications of this, for a theory of cultures and more importantly for a
theory of judgement, in ways which cannot be pursued here, although Derrida
discusses them continuously, and perhaps most directly in the essay appended
to Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2004), ‘The “World” of the Enlightenment to
Come (Exception, Calculation and Sovereignty)’.4 As radio news programmes
keep announcing, we live in exceptional times, where calculating risk has
frozen the free markets of money and finance, and the old concepts of sover-
eignty no longer function, since national attempts to regulate banks are held
in check by the mechanisms of offshore banking systems. This chapter is in two
further parts – ‘On Paul Valery and the Antinomies of Capital’; and ‘On Duty,
Again’– with a brief inconclusive concluding passage.
On Paul Valery and the Antinomies of Capital

In ‘The Other Heading: Memories, Responses and Responsibilities’, Derrida
pursues neither the enquiry about Europe, as developed by Kant, nor that
developed by Husserl, in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental
Philosophy, but rather, as mentioned, that of Paul Valery. Derrida mentions that
Valery is a Mediterranean European, with a split origin, as Italian, and Corsican,
and French, a splitting with which Derrida, as Algerian, and Jewish and French,
might be expected to be in sympathy. In the period since Derrida wrote and
published this piece, the relation between geopolitical identity and economic
resources has come to the fore, in differences of stance and policy, detectable
in the workings, on the one side, of the World Bank, as headed up by Joseph
Stiglitz, and on the other, of the International Monetary Fund, as headed up
by the proponents of Reaganomics, named after the former US president.
The former is willing to include in its calculations considerations of social
stability, territorial integrity and economic equalization, the latter was commit-
ted to radical deregulation, the consequences of which are gradually or indeed
apocalyptically coming to light. Derrida’s analyses of the need for a ‘new
critique of the new effects of capital’ (The Other Heading, p. 57) might well now
be supplemented by an enquiry into the manner in which a certain Anglo-

American political economy has exported its effects around the globe, resulting
in at least one bankrupt European nation, Iceland.
‘The Other Heading’ is thus interpretable as a claim that discussions of
political title make no sense, if the economy is in ruins, and thus antinomy
becomes a polite word for Marx’s diagnoses of the contradictions of capital and
diminishing rates of profitability. In the course of his analysis, Derrida remarks:
‘The aporia here takes the logical form of a contradiction. A contradiction that
is all the more serious in that, if these movements of “democratization” have
accelerated, it is to a large extent thanks to this new techno-media power, to this
penetrating, rapid and irresistible circulation of images, ideas and models,
thanks to this extreme capillarity of discourses’ (pp. 41–42). Indeed Derrida is
intent on an analysis of the transformation of Kantian antinomy into contradic-
tion and aporia, with implied connections forward to a renewal of Marxist ana-
lyses of capital and backward to a classical Greek philosophical preoccupation
with aporetic discourse.5
The ‘cap’ of the title of the essay is also the cape, or headland, as in the Cape
of Good Hope, or Cap Finisterre, the westernmost point of France, or indeed
Kolkas Rags, Cape Kolkas, where the Gulf of Riga meets the Baltic Sea. At this
point, contrary currents meet and build dangerous conditions for navigation.
But it is also the cap stone, in which a construction is brought to a completion:
in this case, the political economy of capital expansion, as twinned by the politi-
cal economy of national bankruptcy. These, then, are four of the meanings in
play in Derrida’s title: the cap stone of an edifice, the title of a text, the geo-
graphical headland, around which sea currents are the most dangerous, the
capital city, and its disruptive twin, capital reserves, or the lack thereof. The
thematics of a return of the ghost of Marx – this time in a return of the rele-
vance of his analyses in Das Kapital (volume one, 1867), of the contradictions
intrinsic to unregulated capitalism – arrive more evidently in the title of
Derrida’s text from 1993, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International, but there is already a call for a reading of Marx in ‘The
Other Heading’.
This subsequent encounter with the spirit of Marx provides one important
later supplementary point of reference for any reading of ‘The Other Heading’.
Another earlier reference point for the text is a previous encounter in Of Spirit:
Heidegger and the Question (1987), which, complemented by the only slightly
later ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Of Philopolemology’ (1989), analyses with great patience
the tangled strands of Heidegger’s political commitments.6 ‘The Other Heading’
may then be usefully placed between Derrida’s responses to the enquiries of
Kant and of Husserl about the ideal of European reason; it may be placed
between the currents of Derrida’s responses to the political events marking up
Heidegger’s phenomenology, and to the political economy of Marx’s analyses.
This positioning between the German inheritance of Marx and Heidegger and
the politics of the overcoming of capital is all the more poignant in Riga, where
the historical meeting between the Handelsstaat of the Hansa and Socialism in
One Country took place.
One feature of Derrida’s mode of composition should be made explicit: his
texts are embedded in one another in a relation more complex than that of
either complementarity, or even of the supplementarity, discussed in relation to
the readings he offers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Of Grammatology (1967).
The theoretical origins of this mode of composition can be discerned in the two
grounding texts of his earlier attempts to think through the implications of an
end of system, and a beginning of writing, in Of Grammatology (1967) and in
Glas: The Death Knell, or What Remains of Absolute Spirit (1974). The death knell
of course was sounded for capitalism in Marx’s earlier text, The Communist
Manifesto (1848). Of Grammatology juxtaposes readings of Saussure and of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Glas juxtaposes readings of Hegel and Marx on one side
with a reading of Jean Genet’s prison romances on the other. The mode of
complementary reading generates a kind of interpretative and conceptual
hybridism, which arrives, from a different direction, and at a different level, at
the same result as Derrida’s move of identifying the medusa-like structure of
terms such as the Pharmakon, in Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus.
The theoretical stance throughout is one in which ‘The Other Heading’ is
named ‘The Endurance of Antinomy’, both the subjective genitive – that
antinomy remains – and the objective genitive, that living is a process of surviving
antinomial relations. Derrida’s reading of Valery in ‘The Other Heading’ assists
him in diagnosing a series of antinomies generated by the use of concepts of
capital and of a certain European cultural ideal. He writes towards the end of the
essay:
We have, we must have only the thankless aridity of an abstract axiom, namely,
that the experience and experiment of identity, or of cultural identification
can only be the endurance of these antinomies. (p. 71)
And he remarks shortly before this:
According to this capital logic that we see confirmed here, what threatens
European identity would not essentially threaten Europe but, in Spirit, the
universality for which Europe is responsible, of which it is the reserve, le capital
or la capitale. (pp. 69–70)
La capitale: the capital city, le capital, capital assets, and, of course, the urgent
need for a recapitalization, in the first instance of the banks, with which we have
all become familiar in the course of the past months. Derrida writes of a double
duty:
Hence the duty to respond to the call of European memory, to recall what has
been promised under the name Europe, to re-identify Europe – this duty is
without common measure with all that is generally understood by the name
duty, though it could be shown that all other duties perhaps presuppose it in
silence. (p. 76)
This double duty is, by implication, an intensification of Kant’s concept of the

duty, where a perfect will would, in an exercise of its autonomy, make the law
which it imposes on itself. However, Derrida also speaks of a double contradic-
tory imperative, which displaces and rewrites Kant’s categorical imperative,
drawing on its paradoxical status as never knowingly enacted. For Derrida,
antinomy names structures of indenumerable, irresolvably conflicting princi-
ples, as opposed to the Kantian version of antinomy, which determines their
number as two, and is committed to their resolvability, in a movement through
a process of enquiry, with a beginning, an end, and a completion for rational
enquiry, in a capping stone. Throughout the text ‘L’autre cap’, or ‘The Other
Heading’, the twin tracks of Kant’s reflections on the necessary architectonic
of thought, and Kant’s reflections on the conceptual preconditions for the
constitution of sovereign states are both under interrogation. This is both
an essay on semantic ambiguities concerning the notion of capital, and an
essay on the textual tradition drawn together under the rubric ‘the critical
system’.
My citation at the head of this text highlights the arrival of certain Kantian
terms, and their redetermination, their recapitalization:
The same duty dictates cultivating the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea,
the critical tradition, but also submitting it, beyond critique and questioning, to
a deconstructive genealogy that thinks and exceeds it without yet compromis-
ing it. (p. 77)
In particular, there are here three of Kant’s master words: duty, virtue and cri-
tique. This is more than mere coincidence. Indeed, it might be shown, by
detailed reading of relevant texts, that Derrida is strongly in sympathy with the
thought, rehearsed at the beginning of The Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
that what cannot be demonstrated by speculative reason may, or indeed must
be, performed in the moment of a political decision, a taking of responsibility,
either explicit or, more regularly, implicit, for the terms, and associated norms,
in which political and cultural discussion is conducted. On each occasion,
there is a recapitalization, a re-evaluation and a revalorization of terms; a reval-
orization which presupposes a retrieval and transformation of Nietzschean
genealogy. However, when Derrida subsequently cites this discussion of a duty,
same but different, he frames it in such a way as to minimize the question of
the double contradiction. The effects of this self-citation is to emphasize the
notion of duty without taking up the connection from duty to necessity, as
impossible necessity, the ‘il faut’ of the double contradictory imperative. The
later text in which Derrida cites himself is taken from the 1992 conference,
‘Le Passage des frontières’, subsequently published as Aporias: Dying – Awaiting

(One Another At) the ‘Limits of Truth’ (1993).7 There, Derrida repeats his own
remarks on duty in a context where the commitment to a hybridized notion of
antinomy has been given up in favour of a return to a classical Greek notion of
the culmination of philosophical enquiry in the impasses, called aporia. Thus,
one strand of philosophical enquiry completes itself in the cap stone of the
architectonic; the other in the impasse of the Greek aporia.
It is worth pointing out at this point that Derrida tends to read Kant back-
wards, from the later historical and political theoretical writings, and from the
Critique of Judgement (1791), back to the First and Second Critiques (1781, 1788,
1789). In Truth in Painting (1978), Derrida remarks on the reversal of the order
of the categories in the Critique of Judgement, where a discussion of quality pre-
cedes that of quantity, in the Analytic of Taste. He also has a disconcerting habit
of discerning some elusive isomorphism between the methods and the results of
the enquiries of Freud and those of Kant. An orthodox reading, cumulative, and
unified, of the Kantian oeuvre, then, is not to be expected. However, it is my view
that the readings of Kant offered by Derrida are organized in accordance with
certain principles of consistency and unity. Thus, there is between Derrida and
Kant a certain methodological concurrence, as well as a movement of overreach-
ing, which must fall short of its exemplar, in the relation between the cited task
of critique, and the cited mode of deconstructive genealogy, between the critical
system, as inherited from Kant, and Derrida’s reiteration of it.
In Kant’s Second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant himself oper-
ates a reversal of the order of exposition culled from the Critique of Pure Reason,
which while exemplary for the conduct of systematic critique, is nevertheless
the grid, or matrix, and not the definitive model for all analysis. In the First
Critique, Kant gives an exposition first of sensory givenness, in the forms of
intuition, then of the concepts which form the basis for his tables of categories
and of judgment, and then turns to an exposition of principles. As is well known,
in the Second Critique, Kant gives first an exposition of the principles of prac-
tical reason, then an analysis of concepts, turning at the end of his first chapter
to an analysis of a binding of the drives, the Triebfeder of the analysis of motiva-
tion. In this way, the order of sensory givenness, concepts, principles, is reversed
into the order of principles, concepts and sensory givenness.
This, then, is the concordance, with themes in common between Kant and
Derrida: the parallel problems of order for an architectonics of reason and the
state, and the threat to both from aporia, paradox and antinomy. My focus is
the manner in which the attention to antinomy with respect to the experience
of identity and of cultural identification, in the context of a discussion of duty
in ‘The Other Heading’, is transposed into an affirmation of a prior condition
of aporia, the Greek experience of a dead end in the development of an argu-
ment. Thus, the formulation of a paradox of reason, in a form amenable to
resolution, in the Kantian concept of antinomy, is derailed by Derrida and
thrust back into the irresolvable mode of the aporetic. An exposition of the
form of the antinomy, as advanced in ‘The Other Heading’, is now needed,
but I shall first adduce a further horizon for this encounter with Kant. In his
description of the seminars given from 1989 to 1993, placed at the start of the
published text of one of them, Politics of Friendship (1994), Derrida indicates
that they addressed questions of responsibility by way of the experience of the
secret, and of testimony.8 These seminars started before the writing and publi-
cation of ‘The Other Heading’, but continued afterwards, into their partial
publication in 1994.
The epigraph to this volume intimates a further theme, an overcoming of
death in the institutions of friendship and of politics. It is taken from Cicero’s
text ‘On Friendship’: ‘And from that moment the absent were present and,
what is more difficult to say, the dead live on’. Amusingly, in the English trans-
lation, this is left in Latin, as though English speakers were still in touch with a
classical past. This is the moment at which the Freudian work of mourning
meets the survivre of Derrida’s readings of Maurice Blanchot. The scope of the
polity of today is expanded in the living on of the remembered friend, and the
political past is supplemented by its future, in which that friend is to be remem-
bered and commemorated. This temporal structure of the past, which is yet to
come, is a model for the political, offered by Derrida, in a reconstitution of the
European tradition of political enquiry. Another, more controversial, model is
offered by him in the juxtaposition of the Kantian and Husserlian tradition of
thinking future completions, to the violence of Heidegger’s enthusiasm for a
tradition of conflict and polemics, the philopolemology, or love of strife, in the
title of Derrida’s 1989 re-encounter with Heidegger, ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Of
Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’. This conflict is not just that of earth and sky,
the titanic conflicts of Prometheus with the Olympian Gods, although it is also
this. It is the conflict of Antigone with the powers of the State, of Hobbes’ bellum
omnium contra omnes, and of class struggle, announced between capital and
labour, or between bankers and citizens.
On Duty, Again
In his contribution to the conference entitled ‘Le Passage des frontières’, at
Cerisy-la-Salle, held between July 11 and 21 July 1992, Derrida cites the citation
selected for attention in the opening sentence of this chapter. He specifies its
time of writing as that of the first Gulf War, and locates it within a longer con-
text than given by me here, in a series of specifications of this duty. I shall now
give a lengthier citation:
Hence the duty to respond to the call of European memory, to recall what has
been promised under the name Europe, to re-identify Europe – this duty is
without common measure with all that is generally understood by the name
duty, though it could be shown that all other duties perhaps presuppose it in
silence.
This duty also dictates opening Europe, from the heading that is divided
because it is also a shoreline: opening it onto that which is not, never was, and
never will be Europe.
The same duty also dictates welcoming foreigners in order not only to inte-
grate them but to recognize and accept their alterity: two concepts of hospi-
tality, which today divide our European and national consciousness.
The same duty dictates criticizing (‘in-both-theory-and-practice’, and relent-
lessly) a totalitarian dogmatism that, under the pretence of putting an end to
capital, destroyed democracy and the European heritage. But it also dictates
criticizing a religion of capital that institutes its dogmatism under new guises,
which we must also learn to identify – for this is the future itself, and there
will be none otherwise.
The same duty dictates cultivating the virtue of such critique, of the critical
idea, the critical tradition, but also submitting it, beyond critique and question-
ing, to a deconstructive genealogy that thinks and exceeds it without yet
compromising it.
The same duty dictates assuming the European, and uniquely European,
heritage of an idea of democracy, while also recognizing that this idea, like
that of international law, is never simply given, that its status is not even that
of a regulative idea in the Kantian sense, but rather something that remains
to be thought and to come (à venir): not something that is certain to happen
tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international state, or trans-state)
of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise – and
thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now.
The same duty dictates respecting differences, idioms, minorities, singulari-
ties, but also the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agree-
ment, univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism
and xenophobia. (The Other Heading, pp. 76–78; and Aporias pp. 18–19)
At this point Derrida stops citing, and on another occasion it would be neces-
sary to pursue at greater length the question why the following two paragraphs,
which continue the rhetoric of the same duty, invoking, in addition, enlighten-
ment, toleration and faith, and the responsibility to respond before any and
every instituted tribunal, are not retrieved.
A double contradictory imperative is here named as the need to stay faithful
to the idea of Enlightenment, ‘while yet acknowledging its limits, in order to
work on the Enlightenment of this time, this time that is ours – today’ (The Other
Heading, p. 79). The first contradiction he states in the following way:
First tension, first contradiction, double injunction: on the one hand European
cultural identity cannot be dispersed (and when I say ‘cannot’ this should
also be taken as ‘must not’ – and this double state of affairs is at the heart of
the difficulty). It cannot and must not be dispersed into a myriad of prov-
inces, into a multiplicity of self-enclosed idioms or petty little nationalisms,
each one jealous and untranslatable. It cannot and must not renounce places
of great circulation or heavy traffic, the great venues and thoroughfares of
translation and communication, and thus, of mediatization. (p. 38–39)
This thought is then complemented, supplemented and subverted in the fol-

lowing way:
But, on the other hand it cannot and must not accept the capital of a centraliz-
ing authority that, by means of trans-European cultural mechanisms, by
means of publishing, journalistic and academic concentrations – be they state
run or not – would control and standardize, subjecting artistic discourses and
practices to the grid of intelligibility, to philosophical or aesthetic norms, to
channels of immediate and efficient communication, to the pursuit of ratings
and commercial profitability. (p. 39)
He sums this up under the rubric: ‘Neither monopoly, nor dispersion’ (p. 41),
and in this way he proposes to transform a certain resolvable Kantian antinomy
into ‘the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may
invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention’ (p. 41). The impossible
invention is of course the history of the future: that which has not yet been
inscribed.
The question of politics, he surmises, becomes a question of the quasi-politi-
cal, because the scope of the political is stretched beyond its limits, by the
demands and claims of culture and the claims and demands of capital move-
ment. He writes:
We are perhaps moving into a zone or topology that will be called neither
political nor apolitical but, to make cautious use of an old word for new con-
cepts, ‘quasi-political’. This is a quasi-quotation from Valery – once again –
who gave as a general title for a series of texts devoted to the crisis of spirit as
the crisis of Europe: ‘Quasi-Political Essays’. (p. 40)
The second tension, or contradiction, not named as such, is stated thus:
Taking a few shortcuts, economizing on mediations, it would seem that

European cultural identity, like identity or identification in general, if it must
be equal to itself and to the other, up to the measure of its own immeasurable
difference ‘with itself’, belongs, therefore must belong, to this experience and
experiment of the impossible. Nevertheless, one will always be able de jure to ask
what an ethics or a politics that measures responsibility only by the rule of the
impossible can be . . . (p. 45)
European identity both is and is not European; it both is and is not an identity,
restricted to Europe, and extended beyond the geographical limits of Europe,
as a heritage and legacy to which any may make claim. The suspension of ethics
in the name of an expanded, quasi-political set of terms of reference neverthe-
less does not and cannot preclude the return of the claim of ethics to provide a
judgement on those relations. The de jure claim of ethics cannot be suspended.
These formulations concerning centralization and diversification, monopoly
and dispersion, and identity, its rigidity and its malleability, its determinacy and
its non-self-identity, all turn on contingent fact, which modifies into a non-
negotiable impossible necessity, whereby Kantian antinomy becomes aporetic.
The aporia of the antinomy is to be lived through as possible and impossible
futurity: the futurity made palpable in the death of the other.
In Place of a Conclusion
This long citation of my main text, ‘The Other Heading’ occurs in the text sub-
sequently published under the title Aporias. Heidegger’s notion that Dasein is
most authentically itself in its being towards death is here taken up and thought
as a redetermination of a concept of truth and of limit. The Kantian notion of
a limit of truth is thus introduced and redeployed in the context of a discussion
of Heidegger’s startling account of death, in Being and Time, to show that the
Kantian limit of truth is rewritten by Heidegger as the place of existential self-
attestation. This is Heidegger’s startling claim, developed in Division Two of
Being and Time, that death is the most proper, the most authentic, possibility of
Dasein, of that mode of being, as existence, which is distinctive of human exist-
ing, the mode for which the questioning of being takes place. Derrida’s texts
are multipally embedded, one in another; they are multipally embedded in the
texts constituting the traditions of European philosophical enquiry; they embed
one text in another. This substitution of a Kantian term, the limit of truth, for a
more likely Heideggerian determination of the context of enquiry, in the
notion of aletheia, the revealing of truth, is characteristic of a certain strategic
hybridism, implying both textual and conceptual interdependence.
But it is more than that. For Derrida, Kant’s critical system has traction only in
a current context of living breathing human individuals, a context in which rea-
son makes a claim but does not determine the next set of historical develop-
ments. The ‘same duty’ both is and is not the same: it both is and is not the duty
discussed by Kant, since the duty discussed by Kant is discussed in a context split
between pure speculative reason and pure practical reason, whereas the duty
discussed by Derrida is split between an affirmation of critical system and an affir-
mation of critical genealogy and deconstruction. In summary then, in The Other
Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (1991), Jacques Derrida performs an intensi-
fication of the Kantian concept of duty, to the point of implosion. This strategy of
intensification is one in which the categories of quality take precedence over
those of quantity, and there is a demonstration that attempts at denumeration,

and calculation, by contrast to exercising virtue and judgement, specifically in
relation to a practice of democracy, are always in jeopardy from the start.
The question of number is flagged up for attention in the prefatory remarks
to the seminar series roughly edited together to form the text, Politics of
Friendship. As remarked, this seminar, dating from the late 1980s, forms part of
the irreducible context for reading Derrida’s reflections responding to the ref-
ormation of the territory of Europe, after 11 November 1989. For friendship is
the category of quality as applied to the tradition of European politics. When
the prime minister of Iceland, Geir Hardie announced, in English, that the
application of the British Anti-Terrorism Act to sequester the funds of bankrupt
Icelandic Banks in the United Kingdom was ‘not very friendly’ and, when previ-
ously, he remarked that his old friends in Europe had failed him, and that he
had therefore sought out new friends to bail out his economy, he is still in this
emergency, and keenly holding on to this concept of friendship.
The embedding of a reading of the one text in a reading of another intimates
one of the strategies of reading to be proposed here, namely, of reading
Derrida’s texts in juxtaposition to one another, rather than taking texts in isola-
tion. The strategy of reversing the order of exposition reveals the primacy of a
context of decision, over the utopic space of pure speculation, set up by Kant at
the beginning of the First Critique. At that point of implosion, a line of demar-
cation between the claim of virtue, as in the cited ‘virtue of critique’, the claim
of duty and the claim of reason can no longer be sustained. This conforms to
the form of a question Derrida poses more generally to the viability of Kant’s
strategy of clarifying the scope of concepts and of domains of enquiry through
the formulation of domain-specific versions of arguments from antinomy. For
Derrida, concepts cannot be definitively delimited, and domains of enquiry
cannot be separated off from each other, thus compelling a resort to a strategy
of multiple reading, that is, of reading the various interlocking moments of
enquiry which arise in relation to one and the same set of concerns.
When he returns to this question of duty in Aporias, the refinement of a dou-
ble concept of the border is conceived as posing a problem for the Kantian
concept of limits, and, more specifically, for the possibility of delimiting a dif-
ference between empirical and transcendental borders, or limits. The ambigu-
ities of the empirical notion of the territorial border and the conceptual notion
of a critical limit are for Derrida inseparably linked, and aporetically indecid-
able, in the sense that international capital subverts the territorial integrity of
nation states, and the interdependence of enquiries prevents any decisive
regionalization of concepts. In a third text, ‘The “World” of the Enlightenment
to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty’ (2003), the priority of pure
practical reason over pure reason, for fear of a contradiction, is more directly
adduced. This plays a role in Derrida’s analyses of two distinct versions of a ship-
wreck of reason to which he supposes philosophy in the European traditions to
be prone. On another occasion it would be possible to read this last text as a test
case for the interdependence of Derrida’s enquiries with an inseparability of

the two mutually incompatible versions of transcendental philosophy to be
found in the enquiries of Kant and of Husserl.
Let us suppose a shipwreck of reason, distantly visible from the headland of
the Gulf of Kolkas, divided, as Derrida points out, as both the land and sea, by
the moving shoreline of the tideline, divided, that is, between past and future.
Derrida asks: did the ship run aground or did the steersman, losing hope of
making port, deliberately run the ship aground for fear of greater disaster? It is
a myth of the Mediterranean Platonic dialogue that the steersman can always
bring his ship safely to shore. Thus the champions of the free market, of the
nation of shopkeepers, those responsible for failing to regulate the London
Finance Markets, have in this last week nationalized three banks in the com-
manding heights of the economy: New Labour turned Old Labour.
These three texts – ‘The Other Heading’, Politics of Friendship, and ‘The
“World” of Enlightenment to Come’ – take Kantian distinctions to be constitu-
tive for a certain philosophical impasse, which must all the same be negotiated,
in order to give focus to the idea of a democracy to come, to the idea of a
New Europe, one which is on its way, through which to think the inheritance of
the idea of an Old Europe. The idea of the Old Europe is that of a certain
finality, as completion of what it means to be human, in a realization of reason,
in a concept of an ascent to a certain maturity, in individuals and, even more
unlikely, in modes of social organization. The required transmission and trans-
formation of this idea of Europe, its transferral and expansion to include those
peoples and territories lying beyond the geographically determined limit of
Europe, under another heading – that of an inclusive futurity – provides a
horizon both for responding, more narrowly, to Derrida’s readings of Kant,
and, more broadly, for giving an assessment of the ongoing pertinence of
Derrida’s political reflections. In this chapter, I have thus sought to show, by
paying attention to these three texts, the constitutive role of Kant’s distinctions
for Derrida’s thinking, and the disruptive and yet respectful relation Derrida’s
writings take up towards a certain Kantian inheritance. This relation generates
the doubled concept of capital, the doubled concept of a contradictory impera-
tive, the doubled concept of the border, and a redoubled concept of both duty
and of the idea of democratic Europe.
Notes
1
This chapter was originally delivered as a paper in memory of Paul Fletcher, in
Riga, at the Philosophy Symposium on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, held at
the University of Latvia, on 19 October 2008. I would like to thank my hosts on
that occasion, and, in memory of an excellent meeting, I have left in the local
reference to Cape Kolkas. As will be clear from what follows, the chapter was
written in the course of September 2008, and the financial crisis provided only
too apposite a context for revisiting Derrida’s discussions of capital, capital cities
and the need for recapitalization.
2
See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Other Heading: Memories, Responses and
Responsibilities’ in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1992), pp. 4–83, p. 76. All further references will be given in the text.
3
See Immanuel Kant, Political Writings ed. H.S. Reiss, Cambridge Texts in
the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2nd edition 2003).
4
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2004) trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michel Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
5
The move back from a discussion of resolvable antinomy, to unresolvable aporia
is discussed at greater length in my Derrida on Time (London: Routledge, 2007).
I argue therein that the thematics of time, death and finitude definitively disrupt
a Kantian form of antinomy, in favour of its reformulation, by Derrida, in order
to point up the distance between Paul de Man’s insistence on subordinating a
conception of time as a series and continuity to a notion of monumental history,
and the subordination of a notion of history in the writings of Walter Benjamin
to a notion of time as caesura.
6
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question [1987] trans. Rachel Bowlby
and Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991) and
‘Heidegger’s Ear: Of Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’[1989] in John Sallis, ed.
Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1993), pp. 163–218.
7
Jacques Derrida: Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One Another at) the ‘Limits of Truth’
[1992] trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
8
See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship [1994] trans. George Collins (London:
Verso, 1997).
Chapter 12
The Theocracy to Come: Deconstruction,

Autoimmunity, Islam
Arthur Bradley
In his late works, Jacques Derrida begins to articulate a new name for the logic
he had originally called ‘deconstruction’: autoimmunity.1 This term is mainly
deployed in two very different texts that, in retrospect, are now starting to look
like companion pieces. On the one hand, the essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’
(1994) speaks of an ‘auto-immunization’ of religion: Islamic fundamentalism,
in particular, is said to suppress its own retrogressive purity in order to propa-
gate its message in the information age. On the other, the two pieces collected
together as Rogues (2004) describe the ‘auto-immunization’ of democracy, and
of sovereign states: Algeria, the United States and other states suspend demo-
cratic freedoms in their attempts to defend themselves against a perceived
internal or external threat. For the later Derrida, it is thus clear that what super-
ficially appear to be two opposed geopolitical polarities, processes or trajecto-
ries – call them ‘Islamism’ and ‘Democracy’ for simplicity’s sake – are subject to
the same condition: what autoimmunity names is the syndrome whereby any
organism (a body, a belief system, even a sovereign state) is compelled to attack
its own immune system in order to preserve its own life. If ‘Faith and Knowledge’
and Rogues still tend to be read somewhat in isolation from one another,2 what
this logic suggests is that we need to see them as two parts of a larger diagnosis
of the relation between Islamism and Democracy, radicalization and seculariza-
tion, and the theologico-political more generally. What happens when two – at
least apparently opposed – auto-immune systems meet in a state like Algeria?
Islam
First of all, though, what exactly is ‘autoimmunity’? It is, we have just seen, the
essay ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason
Deconstruction, Autoimmunity, Islam 175
Alone’ (1994) that provides us with Derrida’s first concentrated discussion of the
term. As its title implies, the premise of this essay is that what we call ‘religion’
(from the Latin re-ligare, to gather or re-bind) is by no means singular. To Derrida’s
eyes, on the contrary, ‘religion’ is a field of force in which competing and irrecon-
cilable demands meet and clash (‘Faith and Knowledge’, p. 25). On the one hand,
religion necessarily involves an experience of something sacred, of the sacrosanct,
the unscathed, the unmediated and the absolutely immune. On the other, the
religious is also the experience of faith in the sacred, of belief, of credit, of an act of
testimony to be performed and repeated (p. 33). Yet, what is original about this
observation is the aporetic relation it articulates between these two sources: each
‘already reflects and presupposes’ the other in an undecidable condition (p. 58).
For Derrida, this means that any attempt to logically or dialectically oppose faith
and knowledge – belief in the sacred versus knowledge that it exists – must a priori
fail: religion’s attempt to affirm the experience of the sacred as sacred can only be
carried out by bearing witness to it in an act of faith, belief or testimony. Now, if
faith makes knowledge possible, the logic of the aporia insists that it must also
make it impossible by exposing it to what Richard Beardsworth, elsewhere in this
volume, calls its own constitutive excess. If religion is to preserve the singular expe-
rience of the sacred at all, in other words, it can only do so by corrupting that
experience a little, that is to say, by repeating it for a whole series of others who
have not, cannot or will not share in that experience (p. 63). Perhaps the most
remarkable example of this aporetic logic today, Derrida writes, is the unholy alli-
ance that has been struck between religion and the media: religious fundamental-
ism, for example, can only promulgate its singular vision of an anti-modern,
anti-secular theocracy by embracing the very modern technological resources
(television, video, the internet) that it seeks to overcome. Just as the experience of
the sacred is both preserved and contaminated by faith, so the resurgence of reli-
gious movements today both depend upon and are threatened by their own
mechanical reproduction as such: religious fundamentalisms must ‘die a little, in
truth, put themselves to death a little’ in order to keep themselves alive (Haddad,
p 31). In this precise context – where an organism (religion) attacks its own pro-
tection against a foreign body (technology) in order to carry on living – Derrida
begins to speak of the logic of autoimmunity:
It is especially in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity

have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the
‘indemn-ity’ of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign anti-
gens. As for the process of auto-immunization . . . it consists for a living organ-
ism . . . of protecting itself against its own self-protection by destroying its own
immune system. As the phenomenon of these antibodies is extended to a
broader zone of pathology . . . we feel ourselves authorized to speak today of
a sort of general logic of auto-immunization. It seems indispensable to us
today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and
science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general. (p.73n)
It is clear from this very first definition that the logic of autoimmunity has a
general applicability but, nonetheless, a very singular shadow arguably hangs
over Derrida’s essay: Islam. As he reveals in the very last sentence, ‘Faith and
Knowledge’ was written after reading Jean Genet’s account of the Sabra and
Chatila massacre in Lebanon in 1982 and references to Islamic violence –
whether as victims or perpetrators – saturate the text: the Islamic Revolution,
the Hebron massacre and, of course, the ongoing crises in Derrida’s own native
Algeria.3 First and foremost, it seems that Islam is not simply one religion, one
fundamentalism, even one form of fanaticism, amongst others:
And among the Abrahamic religions, among the ‘fundamentalisms’ or the

‘integrisms’ that are developing universally, for they are at work today in all
religions, what, precisely, of Islam? (p. 5)
Why this – to say the least somewhat risky – focus on just one form of religious
fundamentalism? Is there not a danger of perpetuating Orientalist myths of the
archaic or irrational Islamic other? Can we convict Islam of everything that
happens in its name (Islamism, post-Islamist fundamentalism, terrorism)? Yes
and no. To Derrida’s way of thinking, what is significant about Islam now is not
its ‘real’ meaning – whatever that may be – but precisely its indeterminacy: what
is happening ‘in the name of’ Islam today testifies – long before we get into
questions of its fidelity or infidelity to its theological sources – to the mobility,
plasticity, the iterability (to use his own word) of that name. What we persist in
calling ‘Islam in the singular’ is an organism in which – perhaps more visibly
than any other religion today – competing forces, both immune and auto-
immune, come together. On the one hand, Islam is associated with a deep-
seated, sometimes violent, resistance to democratization, secularization, the
institution of international law and human rights (p. 5). On the other, it is just
as clearly complicit with the very political, economic and technological pro-
cesses of capitalization, globalization and secularization that it seeks to chal-
lenge (p. 20). For Derrida, though, the key thing to bear in mind here is that
once again we cannot choose between these two opposing forces because they
are part of the same logic of autoimmunity: contemporary Islam is both resistant
to modernity and contaminated by it, or better still, its resistance takes the form of
a contamination. Perhaps the most visible example of this process is what
Derrida calls the surge [déferlement] in extremist Islamic movements: Islamic
fundamentalism, like other forms of religious fundamentalism, auto-immunizes
itself with the antibody of technological modernity – video, satellite transmis-
sion cell phones and, massively, the internet – in the name of securing its vision
of a theocracy to come. In this respect, Derrida – writing in 1994 – was arguably
the first thinker to propound what has, since 9/11, become something of a
cliché for scholars of religious fundamentalism, terrorism et al.: al-Qaeda and
other groups are – far from being anti-modern, theological anachronisms –
essentially modern, indeed ‘hypercritical’ (p. 53) phenomena.
To be sure, Islam cannot be the only autos or organism upon which the logic
of autoimmunity has force – given that it describes the ‘duplicity of sources in
general’ – but we must wait 10 years before we encounter another in Derrida’s
work. It is not ‘religion’ that is the focus of Rogues but another equally over-
loaded – and yet still curiously empty – signifier: democracy. As in the case of reli-
gion, democracy (whether conceived as state, practice or ideal) has no self – no
autos – that is not already in the process of mutating, adapting, auto-immunizing
itself: ‘what is lacking in democracy is proper meaning, the very [même] meaning
of the selfsame [même] (ipse, metipse, metipsissimus, meisme), the it-self [soi- même]’
(Rogues, p. 37). Why is this? First of all, democracy – just like religion – occupies
the space between a series of competing demands: it is not caught between faith
and knowledge but between the classic juridico-political poles of liberty and
equality or legislative and executive sovereignty. Just as more personal liberty
means less collective equality – and vice versa – so the ‘bottom-upwards’ trajec-
tory of legislative sovereignty necessarily comes into contradiction with the ‘top-
downwards’ trajectory of executive sovereignty: the self-determining will of the
people remains inchoate without enforcement by the executive but the will of
the executive becomes autocratic when it does not represent the will of the peo-
ple. For Derrida, of course, it is still axiomatic that we cannot choose, or strike a
happy medium, between such rival and incompatible demands: what is required
is rather the ongoing invention of new democratic concepts, forms and institu-
tions that seek – in the absence of any criteria to guide it – to describe them all
(Rogues, p. 63). Perhaps the most radical and disturbing implication of what he
famously calls the ‘democracy-to-come’, however, is that this process of invention
may lead to the renunciation of existing democratic institutions and – nothing
excludes this a priori – the embrace of at least apparently anti-democratic modes
of politics in the name of greater democracy, liberty and freedom: this radical
contingency and openness to the other is the reason why democracy is the auto-
immune condition par excellence. If Derrida gives many examples of this demo-
cratic putting-to-death of democracy throughout Rogues – not least the restriction
of civil liberties in the US by the Patriot Act under the pretext of maximizing
national security – the paradigmatic case is the Algerian crisis of 1992 when a
military government took the decision to suspend the second round of general
elections because of a widespread fear that the Front Islamique Salut (FIS) would
come to power and put an end to Algerian democracy itself (Rogues, p. 33).4 In
this sense, Algerian democracy plays the same defining role in Rogues that Islamic
fundamentalism played in ‘Faith and Knowledge’: an organism (democracy)
puts part of itself to death (the suspension of democratic elections, political free-
dom to organize, a free press) in the name of preserving its life in the face of a
greater threat (Islamic fundamentalism).5
So, what has changed with this new manifestation of the logic of autoimmunity
in Rogues? Is the shift away from religious fundamentalism just a tactical one?
Or is something lost in the decision to focus purely on the democratic nation-
state? It could be argued, for instance, that Derrida’s decision to confront the
Algerian crisis purely from the governmental perspective risks – for all his
attempts to question Schmittean political theology – confirming a somewhat
authoritarian model of executive sovereignty. After reading Rogues, we might be
forgiven for thinking that the future life or death of democracy lies in nothing
other than the sovereign executive decision to suspend/preserve free democratic
elections – but what about the legislative, self-determining sovereignty of the
people and, in particular, of that significant proportion of voters who supported
the FIS? Unfortunately, we are encouraged to see the FIS and their supporters
from the military government’s position as simply a dangerous movement seek-
ing to put an end to democratic freedoms and establish an Islamic theocracy.6
To be sure, Derrida has very good reasons for taking this view – the FIS were at
the very least ambivalent in their support of democracy and women’s rights in
1991/2 (Islam and Democracy, p. 165) even if they commanded considerable
popular support at the time and have since been subject to several attempts to
integrate them within the political system – but later on in Rogues he is rightly
suspicious of any opposition between Islam and democracy:
For whoever, by hypothesis, considers him- or herself a friend of democracy

. . . the task would consist in doing everything possible to join forces with all
those who, and first of all in the Islamic world, fight not only for the secular-
ization of the political (however ambiguous this secularization remains), for
the emergence of a laic subjectivity, but also for an interpretation of the
Koranic heritage that privileges, from the inside as it were, the democratic
virtualities that are probably not any more apparent and readable at first
glance, and readable under this name, than they were in the Old and New
Testaments. (Rogues, p. 33)
If we might be tempted to see Derrida as just one more voice in the banal chorus
of calls for a liberal, moderate or ‘reformist’ Islam here – the pressing need for
an Islamic ‘Reformation’ being something of a fixation for western intellectuals
post- 9/117 – we need only recall ‘Faith and Knowledge’ to appreciate that this
argument actually concerns our understanding of Islamic political or religious
radicalism: Islamism may itself – in its very resistance to democratization –
contain the seed of a democratic virtuality. Just as democracy is permanently
engaged in a process of auto-immunization – because it must always risk destroy-
ing liberty in order to protect it – so the question arises whether the same might
also be true for nominally anti-secular, anti-democratic Islamist movements:
could political Islam equally auto-immunize itself with democracy? In order to
answer this question, we need to explore the politics of Islamism itself.
Islamism
Secondly, then, I want to focus on the other side of the logic of democratic
autoimmunity described in Rogues: the rise of political Islamism. It is not enough
to speak of the democratic ‘putting-to-death’ of democracy, as Rogues does,

because what is happening in Algeria and other states is also a kind of Islamic
putting-to-death of Islam. According to the French political scientist Olivier
Roy, this is symptomatic of a larger crisis in the Islamist project itself: we can
now even speak of the ‘failure’ of political Islam. To summarize his increasingly
influential thesis, Roy argues that Islamism ironically produces the exact oppo-
site theologico-political state to that which it intended: what should have pro-
duced the triumph of theology instead brings about the transformation of
religion into a political or national ideology.8 What form, though, does this
process of ‘hyper-politicization’ take?
1. First of all, Islamism mobilizes all the conceptual and institutional machin-
ery of modern liberal politics (political sovereignty, ideology, the party struc-
ture, elections and even a rights-based civil society) precisely when that is
what it seeks to abolish. To be sure, Islamism’s explicit goal is the Islamization
of the entire political sphere but the question has to be whether this has ever
actually taken place: where, if anywhere, does such a state exist? For Roy, it is
striking that even the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran – which is
pretty much the only contender for the title of a bona fide Islamic state – was
founded upon both Vox populi and Vox dei: the original constitution states
that the Republic is an expression of both the absolute sovereignty of
God and the sovereign will of the people as expressed in a referendum.
Accordingly, the pivotal constitutional figure of the Supreme Jurist
(Velayat-e-Faqih) – the guardian who will guide the republic until the return
of the hidden Imam – derives his legitimacy from both religious and political
authorities: ‘he should be both one of the highest religious authorities
(marja’ al-taqlid) and the political leader who “understands his time” (agah be
zaman)’ (Globalized Islam, p. 84). If the Faqih supposedly gains his position
from divine selection – he is divinely ordained and inspired by the hidden
Imam – Principle 5 of the constitution also stipulates that he must be recog-
nized as such by the majority of the people. Either this recognition is direct
and immediate – as was supposedly the case with the Ayatollah Khomeini –
or it is mediated through an Assembly of Experts (majlis-e-khobregan) com-
prising clerics elected by the Iranian people (p. 85). Whilst even the original
constitution was the product of ‘a dual emanation’9 of sovereignty – both
theological and political – the 1989 version tips the balance decisively in
favour of the political. The new constitution (written following the death of
Khomeini in acknowledgement of his own unique status) no longer stipu-
lated that the Faqih should be a high-ranking cleric.10 This politicization of
the state coincided with the election to the Presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Perhaps more importantly, Roy argues that the hyper-politicization of Islam
in Iran – to the extent where it becomes inseparable from the state – has
produced a corresponding evacuation of its theological content: what takes
place is something close to the nationalization – both in the political and eco-
nomic sense – of religion itself. In the post-Islamist world, as we’ll see later
on, it is perhaps not surprising that re-Islamization thus takes the form of a
privatization – quite literally a deregulation, liberalization or break up of a
statist monopoly – of Islam.
2. Now, we can see the same political logic at work in other defining Islamist
movements of the 1980s and 1990s. As is now well documented, the FIS,
Hamas and Hizbullah all arose out of secular political or territorial national-
ist disputes: French colonialism, the Israeli occupation and the Lebanese
Civil War, respectively – and often tend to use Islamic theology as little more
than a pretext for nationalist interests. To begin with, of course, such upris-
ings always describe themselves as supranational movements – their goal is
the establishment of an Umma that exceeds all nation states and potentially
contains the whole of humanity11 – but it is no accident that they have
become increasingly integrated as just one more player in the politics of the
nation state: Hizbullah, for instance, has officially abandoned its goal of an
Islamic state as impossible, endorses the existing confessional constitution of
Lebanon and now casts itself as a defender of the multifaith, multicultural
Lebanese nation as a whole.12 Just as Hizbullah has become increasingly
‘Lebanonized’, so the FIS, too, has become more integrated within the polit-
ical system of Algeria: it participated in a peace process, officially renounced
its policy for an Islamic state in 1997 and is today increasingly outflanked by
more radical Islamic splinter groups like the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé). In
each case, however, it is important to understand what is really taking place
here: political integration is not a sign of betrayal or maturity but the logical
outworking of the political condition of Islamism itself.
3. For Roy, then, the struggle for an Islamist State – whether in power or oppo-
sition – thus comes to represent something close to a performative contra-
diction: the way in which the goal of Islamization is pursued – political
ideologies, parties and above all nation-state building – ensures that this goal
can never be reached. It is thus inevitable that, sooner or later, the Islamic
state’s internal tensions will reveal themselves: the particular nexus of theo-
logico-political sovereignty on which it is founded is transformed into the
kind of power struggle between the religious and the political classes that is
now endemic in Iran. Quite simply, Islamism ends up producing exactly the
kind of state it seeks to oppose: the secular polis from which religion is essen-
tially marginalized. From the very beginning, in fact, the Islamic Republic of
Iran implicitly accepted its status as a territorial nation-state: the constitution
stipulates that the national language must be Persian, that the President
must be of Iranian nationality and that only Iranians can enlist in the armed
forces. No longer a theological credo or praxis, Islam became not much
more than the expression of one particular national or cultural identity
amongst many others. If Islamism always involved a nationalist dimension,
though, this identity obviously became even more pronounced during essen-
tially territorial conflicts like the Iran-Iraq war or the Israeli occupation of
Palestine and Lebanon: the universal ummatu al-muslimin was increasingly
‘Arabized’. Just as Khomeini was able to speak of the Iranian ‘fatherland’13

during the Iran-Iraq War, so today Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of
the Hizbullah, is happy to declare that all Lebanese citizens, regardless of
whether they are Shia, Sunni, Christian or Druze, belong to ‘a single umma’
(Hizbu’llah, p. 81). In the aftermath of the July 2006 Israel bombings of
Lebanon, Hizbullah’s self-styled image as defenders of the pan-Arab nation
was cemented in the Arab imagination: Nasrallah is now widely seen across
many countries in the region not as a Shia fundamentalist bogeyman but as
a kind of latterday Nasser.
Perhaps the single most important index of the failure of political Islam, how-
ever, comes in the subsequent emergence of post-Islamist conservative or fun-
damentalist movements – most notoriously al-Qaeda – borne out of
disillusionment by the structural secularism, whether in power or opposition, of
Islamism. In the contemporary Algerian context for instance, as we will see in
the next section, Islamization no longer consists in the national political strug-
gle of a discredited FIS but rather in the globalization of that struggle: al-Qaeda
has historically gained many of its recruits from Algeria but – until very recently
at least – Jihad has been waged seemingly everywhere except Algeria.14
So, why, then, did political Islam fail? Was it doomed from the start by its
own theological idealism? Or did it ultimately succumb to the pragmatism or
corruption of realpolitik? It seems to me that recent analyses are at their most
compelling when they reject such clichéd narratives of decline and fall and
grapple for a structural explanation: Islamism’s fate was the outworking of
its own internal – but unavoidable – theologico-political contradictions.15
Appropriately enough (though he is no deconstructionist), Roy’s recent work
chooses to speak of an ‘aporia’16 of the Islamic state: its very conditions of
possibility – the discourse, ideologies and institutions of modern secular
politics – are at one and the same time its conditions of impossibility. To put
it in even more Derridaean terms, we could risk the hypothesis that modern
political Islamism represents the auto-immunization of Islam: Islam must
surrender the goal of the ummatu-l-muslimin – must attack its own immunity to
the disease of secularism – precisely in order to preserve and sustain its own
life. For me, at least, the logic of autoimmunity not only clarifies the complex
relation between Islam and Islamism but enables us to get a firmer critical
purchase upon the process of secularization that is happening ‘in the name
of’ Islamization: ‘the in-depth secularization of Islam is being carried out by
people who are denying the very concept of secularism’, Roy argues, ‘Islam is
experiencing secularization, but in the name of fundamentalism’ (Globalized
Islam, pp. 40, 41). On the one hand, of course, autoimmunity acknowledges
that what happens ‘in the name of’ something is not necessarily the thing
itself: ‘Islamism’, we must continually repeat, is not the same as ‘Islam’. On
the other, though, autoimmunity insists that what happens ‘in the name of’
something is not simply an accident but a necessary possibility of their being
a thing in the first place: ‘Islam’ must continually repeat itself and ‘Islamism’
is one of those iterations (‘Faith and Knowledge’, p. 6). If political Islamism
is itself involved in a process of auto-immunization, though, this insight also
has implications for Derrida’s somewhat one-sided reading of the Algerian
crisis: we must read ‘Faith and Knowledge’ and Rogues together in order to get
the complete picture. Just as Rogues describes an ‘aporia of democracy’ –
which led the Algerian government to suspend democratic elections in
democracy’s own name – so we must also speak of a corresponding ‘aporia of
Islamism’ – which compels Islamist parties like the FIS to embrace seculariza-
tion in the name of building an anti-democratic Islamic state: each is forced
to destroy some part of itself in order to give it a chance for a future. In this
sense, we might argue that Islamist states are indeed ‘rogue states’ [etats
voyous] but perhaps not in the original political sense of a state that harbours
and sponsors terrorism or extremism: what is secretly sheltering within the
borders of the Islamic state is secularism.
Neo-Fundamentalism
Finally, I would like to consider one more example of auto-immune Islam that
has arisen in the aftermath of the failure of the Islamist project: the kind of
‘Neo-Fundamentalist’ movements typified in the western public imagination by
al-Qaeda. We can again use Algeria as a test case here. After the 1992 crisis, the
FIS was subject to the same classic political ‘squeeze’ as Islamist movements
everywhere. On the one hand, it was courted by the political establishment in
an attempt to bring it into a new coalition government. On the other, it was
outflanked by more radical Islamist groups such as the GIA at home and
al-Qaeda abroad. For Islamism, this produced two radically different outcomes
within and without the nation-state: the creeping importation of secularism
into the national polity – contemporary Algerian protest movements centre
around democracy and human rights, not the implementation of Sharia
(Globalized Islam, p. 305) – and the exportation of a newly radicalized Islamic
fundamentalism to the world. If Islamism is the product of the very secular
values it abhors, though, this is arguably even more true for post-Islamism:
Neo-Fundamentalism’s Umma is not located in some mythic Golden Age of the
Caliphate but in the de-territorialized market of neo-liberalism and global
capitalism. In other words, post-Islamism trades one secular religion for
another: what starts out as the nationalization of Islam ends up as the privatiza-
tion and ultimately the globalization of Islam.
What, to start with, is new about the ‘Neo’-Fundamentalism? Two very familiar
answers to this question emerge from the wealth of literature since 9/11. On
the one hand, Neo-Fundamentalism is seen as simply an archaic, defensive
reaction against western modernity: no less a figure than Jürgen Habermas, for
instance, dismisses al-Qaeda as just an Arab revolt against the secularization,
de-territorialization and economic neo-liberalism of the West. On the other,

Neo-Fundamentalism is also depicted as a uniquely modern phenomenon in
itself: John Gray, amongst many others, has depicted al-Qaeda as a kind of Cold
War Frankenstein’s monster (Afghan mujahedeen trained by the CIA, radicalized
by Leninist ideology and bankrolled by Saudi Arabia).17 However, neither
response really does justice to the complex spatio-temporal structures – East
and West, Arab and Muslim, archaism and modernization, fundamentalism
and secularization – at work within Neo-Fundamentalist dogma. For Roy, what
puts the ‘Neo-’ into Neo-Fundamentalism is not its call to return to the spiritual
roots of Islam and turn its back on a godless and decadent modernity (there
is nothing original about that) but that this past is itself a wholly modern
invention: al- Qaeda and its correlate movements seek – impossibly – to go back
to the future. Let me briefly unpack this line of argument:
1 First, we need to understand how post-Islamism articulates a fundamentally

different theologico-political nexus from Islamism: Neo-Fundamentalism
pursues the project of re-Islamization quite independently of what it per-
ceives to be the secular structures of the Islamic state. Political Islam views
the establishment of an Islamic state as the pre-condition of Islamization
but, as we have seen, this leads to nothing more than the total politicization
of theology in the name of ‘theology’ itself. Now, this auto-immune moment
(where Islamic theology attacks its own immunity to secular politics) is what
post-Islamism reacts against. For Neo-Fundamentalism – quite contrary to
the ‘top-down’ bias of Islamism – the Islamic state can only follow from a
groundswell of Islamization: theology must reassert its total authority over
the political sphere. In other words, re-Islamization must take the form of a
‘purification’ (Globalized Islam, p. 3) of Islam from state forms of religion
whose existence is deemed to be at best superfluous, and, at worst, anta-
gonistic, to Sharia. But what form does this ‘purification’ take?
2. Quite simply, post-Islamism is the privatization of Islamism: the national
religion – Islam – is de-nationalized in the name of Islam. Only by retreating
to an autonomous, individualized space, uncontaminated by the ideology,
institutions and values of the nation-state, can Islam renew itself. We have
already seen how Islamism attempts to institutionalize an Islamic culture but
once again post-Islamism turns this logic on its head: religion must be
de-coupled from any particular state, territory, culture or ethnic grouping
if it is to retain its universal force. No longer mediated through a nation-
state, cultural, ethnic or tribal group, political party, mosque, sheikh or even
family, religious revelation can be accessed equally and immediately by
anyone anywhere: the individual as much as the community, the youth as
much the parent, the student as much as the teacher, the second or third
generation immigrant living in the west as much as the resident of an Islamic
state (Globalized Islam, p. 268). If such scattered, atomized individuals are still
part of a larger community of believers – an Umma – this is emphatically not
the cultural or territorial Umma of the Islamic state or the Arab nation but an
abstract space – an imagined community – that, strictly speaking, exists
nowhere. In other words, the post-Islamist Umma is effectively de-territorialized:
‘Neo-Fundamentalism refers to an imaginary Umma, beyond ethnicity, race,
language and culture, one that is no longer embedded in a specific
territory’ (Globalized Islam, p. 272).
3. Perhaps the single most important consequence of the privatization, de-
culturization and de-territorialization of Islam is, of course, its globalization:
Islam, now de-coupled from any particular culture, ethnic group or nation-
state, becomes a priori exportable. It is not simply that anyone anywhere can
become a Muslim – this possibility is inherent in the very idea of the Umma –
but that individual decision or agency as opposed to collective cultural or
national identity becomes valorized as the essential pre-condition of
authentic faith. We can see why Neo-Fundamentalism sets such store on the
figure of the ‘radicalized’ convert: the European who converts to Islam in an
antagonistic secular culture is privileged over the Middle Eastern who
passively ‘goes along with’ the dominant Islamic culture. Even so, the
question remains of exactly how this notional individual convert – isolated
from family, culture and party or state allegiance – can connect with other
individual converts elsewhere in the de-territorialized Umma. For Roy, as
with so many other theorists, the answer to this question is, of course, the
internet: what Iran was to the Islamists, so cyberspace is to the post-Islamists
(Globalized Islam, p. 375). If it is now a sociological commonplace to speak of
the internet as a key propaganda tool for Islamists, Jihadists and so on,
though, I think that what is really taking place here is something much
more radical: cyberspace does not mediate or virtualize something real
or potential so much as really embody something that is already – in its
own essence – virtualized. In other words, the internet just is the abstract,
disembodied, de-territorialized Umma itself.
In this radical sense – where the virtual consumes the real and the potential
the actual – we might venture to say that the Neo-Fundamentalism creates or
performs the very space it claims, constatively, to describe: it is a field of pure
immanence referring to nothing outside its own act of assertion. It is thus no
accident that its defining mode of performance – as described most notably by
its intellectual progenitor Sayyid Qutb – is the individual’s commitment to per-
manent, infinite Jihad. The many commentators who argue that such a con-
cept of Jihad has neither a theological source in the Qur’an nor any realistic,
achievable theological or political goal thus arguably miss the point.18 This
total absence of an outside – an origin or telos that is external to its own perfor-
mance of struggle – is precisely what makes the individualized, globalized and
infinitized Neo-Fundamentalist Jihad possible. Jihad’s goal is Jihad itself.
So, what will become of the theocracy to come imagined by the
Neo-Fundamentalists? Can its rite of purification avoid the secular fate of
political Islamism? Or is that rite, too, a product and agent of secularization?

This is another arena in which the logic of autoimmunity can be of use to us:
Neo-Fundamentalism seeks to preserve the life of Islamic theology against the
slow death of secularization but this act of preservation again takes the form
of a putting-to-death. To extend the Derridaean logic developed earlier, we
might say that Neo-Fundamentalism consists in a new and more intense auto-
immunization of Islamism: self-purification can only be obtained through an
even greater act of self-contamination. Post-Islamism renounces absolutely
what it sees as the bankrupt secular apparatus of the Islamic state – political
parties, nationalist ideologies, governance – but the effect of this retreat is to
leave the opposition between secular and theological space more or less intact
(Globalized Islam, p. 40). For Neo-Fundamentalist groups, as we have seen, the
proper sphere of the religious is emphatically not the laique public space but
a privatized, de-territorialized even disembodied space: al-Qaeda, for instance,
adopts a position of effective political neutrality or libertarianism with respect
to key host states like Saudi Arabia. By expanding Islamism to a macrocosmic
level – where the strategic goal is less the petty matter of securing Palestinian
statehood, say, than of a world-historical Muslim ‘awakening’ – Bin Laden’s
own pronouncements effectively vacate the space of the saeculum itself and
leave it to groups like Hamas and Hizbullah.19 When Neo-Fundamentalist
regimes move from opposition to power, as with the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, the secular space of the state is paradoxically preserved in the
form of a perfect vacuum of political sovereignty: what is striking about
Taliban-era Afghanistan – which is surely the only possible candidate for the
oxymoronic title of ‘Neo-Fundamentalist Islamist State’ – is the sheer absence
of a social, economic or foreign policy beyond stringent and notorious acts of
prohibition (culture, women’s rights etc). Just as the rise of Islamism was at
least partly the product of one historical stage of capitalism – Khomeini’s Iran
was a classically Keynesian planned economy and Rafsanjani’s faltering
attempts to establish a free market in the 1990s were replaced by yet more
pump-priming from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – so post-Islamism is produced
by another: the post-statist, deregulated and globalized market. Perhaps what
is commonly depicted as a monstrous anachronism is, in fact, entirely syn-
chronous with other late-capitalist re-formations of cultural, political and reli-
gious identity: Neo-Fundamentalism’s individualized, unmediated and
consumerist model of religiosity – where anyone anywhere can be a believer
irrespective of background, culture and education – is uncannily close to
modern Christian fundamentalism and ‘pick and mix’ New Age religiosity in
the west (Globalized Islam, p. 40). In this sense, Reza Aslan and all the other
commentators obsessively seeking a historical parallel between Islam and
Christianity might be advised to look closer to the present day: what is taking
place in contemporary Islamism is less an equivalent to the German
Reformation and more akin to the rise of Neo-Evangelical Protestantism in
the US today.
Conclusion
So, what happens, to go back to the modest question with which we began, if
we read ‘Faith and Knowledge’ and Rogues together? It is not possible in what
remains to do any more than map the outline of this critical space. To put it
somewhat dramatically, I think that what is being described in these texts is a
pivotal moment in the modern history of the theologico-political where the
politicization of theology meets the theologization of politics. On the one
hand, Rogues describes the becoming-theological and more precisely mono-
theological or onto-theological of supposedly ‘secular’ forms of sovereignty: the
indivisibility of the ‘One God’ founds the indivisibility of the nation-state, of
the people, of right, law together with, of course, their suspension (p. 157).
On the other, ‘Faith and Knowledge’ describes the becoming-political, ratio-
nal and secular of contemporary religion: Islamic fundamentalism turns the
instrument of rational critique against the supposedly rational, secular and
democratic west. However, what remains unarticulated so far is the auto-
immune relation between these two trajectories: each is already in the process
of contaminating, exposing, in short deconstructing, the other. For Derrida, it is
clear that there are many implications of this insight – both theological and
political – but to conclude I want to identify just one: Islam is transformed
from its archetypal position as the last remaining theological redoubt against
the forces of modernity into a ‘hypercritical’ site from which a – rational, secu-
lar and even democratic – critique of the ideological and ultimately theolo-
gical foundations of western democracy can be launched. If Derrida is by no
means the only contemporary thinker to try to mobilize the historical excep-
tionality of Islam to critique the West – we can find similar arguments in Žižek,
Baudrillard and, of course, in Foucault’s notorious reportage on the Iranian
Revolution20 – it is important to note that, unlike the latter, he does not base
his argument upon the religion’s alleged resistance to globalization and so on
(talk of which merely perpetuates the Orientalist cliché of the unconvertible
Muslim ‘other’) but rather upon its very openness or porosity: what gives Islam its
exceptional power to critique neo-liberal ideology is precisely its capacity to
assimilate, dismantle and reproduce that ideology along different lines. Just as
the ‘west’ historically insists that secularism is the pre-condition of democracy,
for instance, so political Islamists are able to rejoin on exactly the same terms and
in exactly the same language that the opposite has historically proved to be the
case in the Mashriq and the Maghreb. From the Shah’s Iran, through Saddam’s
Iraq, all the way up to contemporary Algeria, the process of secularization has
in fact run precisely contrary to the process of democratization, the spread of
human rights and so on. Not only do the Islamic states assimilate the west’s
own ideology but they turn it back upon the west itself to accuse it of hypocrisy
in invoking human rights abuses in, say, Iran, whilst ignoring them in secular-
ized authoritarian states like Algeria: we can defend no Machiavellian calculus
for the necessary killing of the minimum number when the dead are counted
differently – or not counted at all – depending on which state you are in.
Perhaps most obviously today, Islamist states are also able to defend their own
societies – not in the messianic terms feverishly imagined by certain western
novelists21 – but in the utterly banal language of nationalism, civil society,
human rights and technological progress (Globalized Islam, p. 32): ‘why
shouldn’t Iran be entitled to civil (or indeed military) nuclear power when
considerably less democratic, but secular, regimes like North Korea can have
it?’. We are not dealing with a mere strategic mimicry or parody here, I think,
but rather with a systematic assimilation, mobilization and hyperbolization of the
possibility of democracy itself. The ‘failure’ of political Islam, then, far from
being an occasion for western triumphalism, is the site of a de facto secular,
rational – indeed democratic – deconstruction of the neo-liberal monopoly
upon techno-scientific rationality, secularity and democracy (‘Faith and
Knowledge’, p. 73n). This historical process might thus profitably be seen as
part of, rather than opposed to, the larger critique of the theologico-political
idea, praxis and institutions of democracy in the name of an absolute, quasi-
messianic but apparently still secular futurity that is the leitmotif of Derrida’s
later works.22 In the fall and rise of political Islam, we are reminded that
democracy – no less than theocracy – remains to come.
Notes
1
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the
New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994),
p. 14; Politics of Friendship trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso,
1994), pp. 75–76; ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” At the
Limits of Reason Alone’ trans. Samuel Weber in Religion ed. Jacques Derrida and
Gianni Vattimo (London: Polity, 1998), 1–78; ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic
Suicides’ in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 85–136;
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). All further references will be
given in the text.
2
It is interesting that most recent critical discussions of deconstruction and
autoimmunity tend, for perfectly good reasons, to see Rogues as Derrida’s defini-
tive treatment of the topic and relegate the earlier ‘Autoimmunity: Real and
Symbolic Suicides’ and ‘Faith and Knowledge’ to the status of preliminary
sketches. See, for example, Samir Haddad, ‘Derrida and Democracy at Risk’,
Contretemps, 4 (2004), pp. 29–44; Michael Naas, ‘“One Nation . . . Indivisible”:
Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of
God’, Research in Phenomenology, 36:1 (2006), pp. 15–44 and Elizabeth Rottenberg,
‘The Legacy of Autoimmunity’, Mosaic, 39:3 (2007), pp. 1–14. All further refer-
ences will be given in the text. In what follows, I want to argue that – at least
insofar as the Algerian question is concerned – ‘Faith and Knowledge’ is the
more contemporary text: we can only understand the post-1992 history of that
country in the light of the phenomenon of religious auto-immunization dis-
cussed in the earlier text.
3
Jean Genet, Genet à Chatila (Paris: Solin, 1992). In Derrida’s words, ‘Today I
remember what I had just finished reading in Genet at Chatila, of which so many
of the premises deserve to be remembered here, in so many languages, the actors
and the victims, and the eves and the consequence, all the landscapes and all the
spectres: “One of the questions I will not avoid is that of religion”’ (‘Faith and
Knowledge’, p. 66).
4
John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996) is an authoritative overview of the crisis. In fact, the state of emer-
gency was anything but temporary and – despite the attempted political
integration of the FIS – the state repression of political and civil liberties are a
permanent fact of Algerian political life today. All further references will be
abbreviated in the text.
5
Marq Smith and Joanne Mora, eds. ‘Translating Algeria’, Parallax, 4:2 (1998)
offers a good range of responses to the Algerian problem up until 1998 in the
light of Derrida’s own work. In my view, the best recent discussion of the question
is Alex Thomson, ‘Derrida’s Rogues: Islam and the Futures of Deconstruction’, in
Madeleine Fegan et al., eds. Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
6
As Derrida acknowledges in a 1993 interview, the Algerian crisis was by no means
the straightforward stand-off between Islamism and democracy he risks depicting
here: ‘The unity of Algeria is certainly in danger of dislocation, but the forces
that are tearing it apart do not, as is often said, oppose East and West, or, as with
two homogeneous blocks, Islam and democracy. They oppose different models
of democracy, representation, or citizenship – and, above all, different interpre-
tations of Islam.’ See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, in
Negotiations trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002), pp. 85–116, p.114.
7
Reza Aslan, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam (New York
and London: Random House, 2005).
8
Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Umma (London: Hurst, 2004),
p. 3. In this text, Roy distinguishes between political Islamism (which he defines
as the attempt to build an Islamic state) and post-Islamist Neo-Fundamentalism –
which he defines as a globalized militancy that exists independently of any
national political programme: Islamist movements would thus include the Iranian
Islamic Revolution, Palestine’s Hamas, Algeria’s FIS, Lebanon’s Hizbullah, the
Turkish Refah Partisi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. See also Olivier Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); John
Esposito and Azam Tamimi, eds., Islam and Secularism in the West (London: Hurst,
2000) and Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) for further recent discussions of
political Islamism. All further references will be given in the text.
9
Chibli Mallat, The Renewal of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 72.
10
Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic
Revolution in Iran (New York: Transaction, 2nd edition 2005), p. xii. As Dabashi
wryly notes, the appointment of Ali Khameini as Khomeini’s successor was com-
parable to giving a full professorship to a particularly bright graduate student.
11
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003). For Asad, it is crucial to distinguish between the
umma of Islamic theology and the umma ‘arabiyya of Arab nationalism: ‘The
ummatu-l-muslimin (the Islamic umma) is ideologically not a “society” onto which
state, economy, and religion can be mapped. It is neither limited nor sovereign, for
unlike Arab nationalism’s notion of al-umma-al-‘arabiyya, it can and should even-
tually embrace all of humanity’, (Formations of the Secular, p. 197). In modern
political Islamism, however, it is precisely this distinction that has become
confused.
12
Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto Press, 2002),
pp. 82–87. All further references will be abbreviated in the text. In Lebanon, the
term used to describe Hizbullah’s increasing integration into the political land-
scape is ‘infitah’ or ‘opening up’.
13
Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (London: I.B.
Tauris, 1993), p. 1.
14
To be sure, the December 2007 bombing of the UN headquarters in Algiers by a
group calling itself ‘al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb’ represents a
horrifying exception to this rule but the fact remains that al-Qaeda has histori-
cally favoured high-profile targets outside the Maghreb: the United States, Turkey,
Bali, Spain and London.
15
Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York and London: The New Press,
2007), p. 217. For Dabashi, Islam – and more precisely Shia Islam – is a religion
of revolutionary protest that cannot assume political power without instantly dis-
crediting itself: this explains Khomeini’s permanent revolution within the state
and endless wars without it.
16
Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam trans.George Holloch (New York: Columbia
17
Jurgen Habermas, ‘Fundamentalism and Terror’ in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy
in a Time of Terror (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003), pp. 25–44; John
Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Verso, 2003).
18
Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader, 2nd edition.
(Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005) p. 116. In the Qur’an, Jihad has
a multifaceted set of meanings and refers to both internal and external forms
of struggle: it is never mentioned explicitly in the context of harb (war), qittal
(killing) or ma‘raka (battle). For the Prophet, the famous ‘Jihad of the Sword’ is
by no means a permanent act of war but a defensive and preventative measure
that should only be undertaken under particular circumstances: ‘Fight in the way
of Allah against those who fight you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loves not
aggressors’ (02:190).
19
See Mark Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious
Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 3rd edition, 2003) for an
account of the performativity of religious violence. In the wealth of literature on
al-Qaeda – much of it sensationalist – to appear since 9/11, pretty much the only
thing everyone is agreed upon is that the group does not have anything approaching
a ‘realistic’ political strategy or objective: it desires no state, no territory and allies
itself only strategically with ethnic or national liberation struggles.
20
Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to
Baudrillard (London; I.B. Tauris, 2007).
21
Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001–2007 (London: Jonathan Cape,
2008). For Amis, Iran’s nuclear sabre-rattling is the product of Shia messianism:
President Ahmadinejad is apparently attempting to provoke the ‘catastrophe’
that will result in the revelation of the hidden Imam. See Arthur Bradley and
Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11
(London: Continuum, 2010) for a discussion of Amis and Islamism.
22
See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1992) for the first articulation of the concept of the ‘democracy to come’.
Chapter 13
Violences of the Messianic1

Michael Dillon
Introduction
There are few, if any, thinkers as rigorously honest intellectually about the vio-
lence that is sutured into the very fabric of the world than Jacques Derrida, and
few who struggled so consistently with the challenge to ethics, justice and poli-
tics which that violence poses. Which is not to say that Derrida succeeded in
answering the questions that violence poses. That was not his way. Rather, it is
the way he re-poses the question of violence to us that matters most. What he
did in the process was refuse all safe conduct to good conscience in relation to
violence. This he did notably in respect of the key claim of modern politics that
violence can be tamed by submitting it to a politically strategic calculus of nec-
essary killing, whose definitive contribution to the very project of modern poli-
tics is that of resolving the foundational political question of how much killing
is enough.2 That modern politics has failed in this, its foundational claim to
legitimacy, is historical fact. That modern politics comprehensively subverts its
allied promises of freedom and justice also, in the name of that strategic legiti-
mation, is equally evident. Most especially in its now all-pervasive securitizing
rule.
However, Derrida teaches us a principled, rather than an historical, lesson in
respect of the modern political claim to provide a strategic calculus of necessary
killing. For what Derrida remorselessly demonstrates, throughout his account
of the messianic, is that, since the incalculable is always already operative in
every calculation, we cannot even accept in principle what modern pluralist
democratic politics, for example, asserts as its basic premise, namely, that there
can only be politics where interests are fungible and strategic calculations are
possible. In doing so, Derrida made the aporia of the lesser violence that he
advocated, and to which we must return in a moment, not an answer to, but the
aporetic core of, both politics and justice to come.
We have, however, barely even begun to think through the idiomatic demands
of how to live out the ethical and political demands that this ‘Politics to Come’
levies on us. And, since the operation of all politics and power is necessarily
idiomatic in that it necessarily takes place perfomatively in some time and place,
and since that idiom always expresses a violence in that it necessarily also limits
the ethical obligation to which we are subject, then the question of idiom rather
than strategy is the foundational issue for modern politics; one in which the
danger of the worse rather than the lesser violence is the logical corollary of
the strategic calculus of necessary killing that currently legitimates it. Strategic
calculation, in short, is an idiom, one that, according to Derrida’s account of
the economy of violence obtaining in the world, constantly poses the danger
of the worst violence.
In his account of the ‘Politics to Come’, whose central motif is the messianic,
Derrida looks forward instead to how the fugitive and fragile solidarity of singu-
larity might displace the solidarity of the sovereignly self-same upon which the
entire strategic tradition of western political thought has been based. That sol-
idarity of the singular is a quite exceptional thought of how politics might allow
itself to be structured ethically by the specter of the Other. All that I have space
to do here, however, is to broach the question of the complex relation that
obtains in Derrida’s work between violence and the messianic account that he
gives of that promise.
The larger part of the messianic in Derrida’s texts serves in fact as yet another
of those tropes he uses to deconstruct the idioms and violences of law, of
politics and of morality, of the necessary institution, in other words, of rule and
decision. It is a vehicle through which he continues his interrogation of
violence and decision as he remains in deep conversation with modern philoso-
phy from Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard through to Husserl, Heidegger and
Levinas. It is a device, also, for bringing the ties of religion and the question of
God within the ambit of these enquiries as well. Here he uses it to interrogate
the violence and the sacrifice demanded, especially, by the violent non-violent
doctrines of peace promoted by philosophy and religion as well as the project
of modern politics alike.3
Not hopeless in despair, he tells us in the Preface to Rogues, the promise of
the messianic, the very idiomatic greeting of the messianic, is nonetheless
‘foreign to the teleology, the hopefulness, and the salut of salvation’ (p. xv). In
sum, not foreign ‘to the salut as the greeting of salutation of the other, not
foreign to the adieu (“come” or “go” in peace), not foreign to justice’, the
messianic is nonetheless ‘heterogeneous and rebellious, irreducible, to law, to
power, and to the economy of redemption’ (p. xv).
And so the messianic does not remain a trope, a mere deconstructively ana-
lytical device by which to question and, in questioning, disclose more about the
complex aporetic difficulties posed by the irreducible mismatch that obtains
Violences of the Messianic 193
between the incalculable ethical demands of the Other, to which he believes we

remain subject, and the madness of the historically situated decisions that we
are also obliged to make, even should we attempt to transact and not merely
refuse, that ethical demand. For the messianic does not remain merely a trope
disclosing the deep implication of all thought as well as all law, decision and
rule, in violence. It mirrors the structure of the promise, the irreducible affir-
mation within existence without which, for Derrida, existence would not be
able to continue coming at all. Inasmuch also as the messianic is therefore one
of the names he gives for a promise, the originary affirmation that always already
underwrites the world and whose promise of a continuous ethical and political
‘to come’ he also champions in the world, there is no promise of the Derridaean
sort without the violent conditions that, calling it forth, continuously also
threaten to overwhelm it. Equally, there is no such promise outwith the force of
the binding through which we are tied to it, struggle as we may against it. In
short, violence is as integral to the promise as the promise is integral to the
structure of the messianic, and that is why the messianic itself as promise, rather
than merely as trope, cannot be dissociated from violence.
Indeed Derrida never does try to dissociate it. His work is a rigorous refusal
to do just that. Even the espousal of the injunction to practice the lesser vio-
lence resonates with aporetic ambivalence and difficulty. A device for exploring
the complex question of violence, the messianic, in all its associated tropes,
especially of hospitality and of the arrival of the arrivant, is both the occasion of
violence as well as one of the idioms of violence. Derrida himself witnesses that
violence visited on himself and in himself every time he is drawn to testify to it
philosophically by returning to ‘the question’. This he does most vividly in the
early sections of Rogues, to which I return below.
Just as the messianic arises directly therefore from what Richard Beardsworth
calls the tertiary economy of violence that structures the world of the western
tradition (Derrida and the Political, pp. 20–22), so also does it serve for Derrida
not only as the counter-violence to that violence but also as the promise of a
lesser violence. I am still not sure that I understand or am finally persuaded by
this central claim. In any event, it cannot be addressed without understanding
also that the lesser violence is part of an indissociable couplet for Derrida.
The lesser violence is, in other words, always already associated with the ever-
looming possibility of monstrosity and of the arrival instead of the worse
(le pire). He explores that particular prospect in his account of the messianic via
the claim of hospitality and of the ways in which hospitality itself is so closely
coupled also with hostility.4 It is the prospect of the greatest force overwhelming
the promise of the messianic which puts him back on the rack of the question
at the beginning of Rogues (2005): ‘The turn (le tour), the turret or tower
(la tour), the wheel of turns and returns: here is the motivating theme and the
Prime Mover, the causes and things around which I will incessantly turn.’5
Raising the question of the violences of the messianic is therefore not meant,
and does not serve, to denounce the messianic, or Derrida the thinker, whose
account of the messianic and its violences is not confined to that of employing
it as analytical trope. It is, instead, intended to pursue further some issues that
Derrida himself insistently raised in his reflections on the materiality of messi-
anic insight. Specifically, on how it arises as a material force for him in his phil-
osophical testifying to it, and how it arises as a material force also for us in the
injunction to practice the lesser violence to which, he says, it also gives rise. No
denunciation, then, but perhaps a disfiguring re-figuration of the messianic via
reading it tragically.
The chapter structure that follows is simple. It opens with a reflection on the
way the messianic arises in complex triangulation also with the theos and the
tragic; three ways in which the western tradition addresses the singularity – or
indeterminate character – of the event, and the equally singular and violent
enigma of the human within it. The section does not even attempt to explore
all of the salient issues thrown up by this complex triangulation. It merely
poses it as part of the wider economy of violence and of overcoming within
which Derrida’s account of the messianic arises. Suffice to say that you cannot
get a grip on one point of the triangulation without becoming trammelled
somehow also in the allied legacy of the other two. They bear so intimately on
one another that some of that co-relating has to be addressed as the violent
milieu from out of which the messianic arises in Derrida as a kind of counter-
force.
Specifically, this section seeks to differentiate, however sketchily, the messi-
anic from the tragic. For, however much tragic and messianic sensibilities reso-
nate in their accounts of the wound of existence, and while their accounts of
the essential violence of existence often appear very similar, the section argues
that ultimately they are different. The section offers little more, however, than
an intimation of how they differ, and of how, ultimately, they differ as much idi-
omatically as they do ontologically; that is to say perfomatively rather than
merely descriptively or conceptually. Thereafter, I focus on Derrida’s witness in
Rogues and on the aporia of the lesser violence.
The Theos, Tragic and Messianic

I want to begin this section by first linking the messianic with the tragic as
Derrida himself did, for example, when addressing the apocalyptic tone
adopted in philosophy: ‘A mimesis opens the fiction of tone.’ He says. ‘It is
the tragedy of “Come” though it must be repeatable (a priori repeated in
itself) in order to resonate.’6 The messianic and the tragic resemble each
other most in their preoccupation with the violence, of which we are all com-
prised, and which arises in consequence of our singularity. ‘Greek tragedy
poses questions about the riddle that each of us is assigned’, Dennis Schmidt
also teaches, ‘by beginning with the simple fact of the singularity of our expe-
rience of that riddle’.7 In revolving around the singular, in their allied but
differing accounts of human singularity, that is to say of its non-knowability,

its resistance in it very singular indeterminateness to being fully known, the
messianic and the tragic revolve around the violence as well as the promise
that necessarily also attends this singularity. It may be true, in some sense, to
say that we are singular, but there is no peace to be found therein.
It is not, however, the resemblance between the messianic and the tragic that
concerns me. The turn to the tragic is indeed a turn towards something much
more foreign to us than the turn to the messianic. For in the tragedies we turn
towards the fact of our ineliminable strangeness, ‘independently of structures
and assumptions – subjectivity, the good, metaphysics’ which so preoccupied
Derrida, and which his work, among others, ‘has shown to be exhausted’ (On
Germans and Other Greeks, p. 281). Consequently, the messianic and the tragic
inhabit different economies of violence, not least, also, because of their differ-
ent understandings of the divine.
Despite his acute sensibility also to the tragic, therefore, Derrida’s attach-
ment to negative theology,8 for example, signals how differentiated his Judeo-
Christian indebtedness is from the theogony and cosmology of the Greeks.9
So I differentiate the tragic from the messianic below in order to profile the
specific economy of violence within which the messianic arises for Derrida.
But, first, a word about the theos with which both the messianic and the tragic
are, of course, ultimately also concerned and the relation of theos not only to
violence and the horror religiosus (see de Vries, Religion and Violence) but also to
reason and to politics – to the claims of reason over politics and the modern
promise of a rational political order – which finds its limits in the transcen-
dence to which all three testify, albeit very differently.
Theology, Werner Jaeger teaches us, ‘is neither a medieval, nor a Christian
but a classical Greek word’. 10 Whereas the Christian form of theology, of which
we think, first, when we apply the term, is more specifically called ‘revealed the-
ology’, the concept of theology originally meant every form of rational approach
to the problematic of God. Hence, Augustine hailed Plato as the true father of
theology. Meister Eckhart also called him ‘the great theologian’ (p. 46).
Christian philosophers also used to call this ‘first philosophy’, in the sense of
Aristotle, or ‘natural theology’, as opposed to the supranatural kind. It was ulti-
mately Aristotle, through Aquinas’ reception of him, which provided Christian
theology with a theological architectonics. But such Aristotelian architectonics
grounded in reason also remained contested throughout the Christian tradi-
tion; and not just by Luther and the Protestant Reformation (p. 13). Still oper-
ating within the boundaries of the medieval church, two centuries after Aquinas,
for example, Thomas à Kempis furnished a powerful example of Christian piety
less susceptible to the influence of the reason of Greek philosophy. Thus, while
theology was always linked to reason (the logos of the theos), not least in terms
of addressing the force of the godhead as well as the violences of religion, it
never depended upon reason alone. The same applies also in fact to politics as
well. For it is Plato who teaches us, most directly in The Statesman, that reason
fails to comprehend the technē of the politikos as much as it proves unable also to
comprehend the mystery of God.11
Experience arises, as Derrida puts it, having interrogated elsewhere how
Plato’s recounting of the myth of the khora also says as much,12 in ‘the hollow
space of finitude in which messianic eschatology comes to resonate’.13 In the
instant of messianic as well as tragic insight, then, the limits of reason are bru-
tally exposed against the eschatological horizon that contours all experience,
an open azimuth whose impact on experience is the provocation that excites
the tragic and the messianic sensibility alike. And while each is also preoccu-
pied with the problematic of giving the singularity of things their due – that is
to say with the problematic of justice – the tragic is not a morality play whereas
I think the messianic, despite the great care and vast subtleties of expression
that Derrida brings to its articulation, might, ultimately, still be said to be so.
That is a thought to conjure with anyway. Schmidt again: ‘Greece marks the last
moment in what has come to be the Western world has a contact with forms of
thinking that are not defined by metaphysics or by the polarities of good and
evil, and it is this above all else that lends Greek tragedy a claim to distinction’
(On Germans and Other Greeks, p. 279).
It is therefore important to emphasize that not only have the discourses of
theology and politics always been heterogeneous in relation to one, so also were
they heterodox in themselves. Neither tradition of thought offers a settled
account of their respective objects of thought – theos or polis – through reason
alone. And while the theos and the polis have been wedded together from their
inception, not least in the violences that attend them, it seems there could be
neither one without the other: the limit of reason, as Derrida discusses it in
Rogues (2005), especially, for example, is always violently exposed there as well.
In The Marriage of Cadamus and Harmony (1994), Roberto Calasso notes a
classic paradox that could have no greater pertinence than here. It is a paradox
to which Derrida is endlessly sensitive in his way, also, because that paradox is
an unquenchable source of the violence to which he remained acutely attuned.
‘To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them’, says Calasso. But it sets
history in motion and thus: ‘A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth
living’.14 Here lies a source, nonetheless, of that monstrosity which Derrida
confronted throughout his work. But I turn to John Sallis to explicate the point
further for me. ‘[I]n crossing variant species [the gods and man],’ Sallis
observed in his reflections on the tragic, ‘there is always the risk of producing
monsters’.15 The violent encounter of the heterogeneous and the heterodox in
this fateful conjuncture of politics and theology therefore always engenders a
space in which something disturbing is likely to come to presence. In a gesture
that repeats but nonetheless also differs from that of the tragic, and in the ways
in which it turns towards but also seeks to turn religion away from itself, the
messianic in Derrida also has something of the violating and violently
monstrous about it. Something, as it were, that nature did not intend, a supple-
ment placed beside it as Nietzsche also remarked of the tragic (Crossings, p. 83),
without which in fact there would be no nature to call nature at all, however
indeterminate and violently divided – created yet creative according to tragic
insight, undecidable according to messianic insight – that nature may be.
However similarly khoratic their sense of space, and however similarly kairo-
logical their account of decision, however much they also share the sense of
being suspended in the abyss of existence, the tragic and the messianic very
much differ in the ways in which each plays out that supplementarity in exis-
tence and its sense of the divine. In the tragic, for example, Dionysius is the god
that ravingly comes to presence.16 Dionysius the mad god, the liberator, whose
arrival precipitates ravening lust and life dispensing force in the overthrow of
settled lives. In Derrida’s messianic, it is instead not only the arrivant, who never
arrives. The arrivant is always coming. The arrivant signals a call to infinite
justice that, whatever violence it must also intend towards the settled forms of
distributive justice ordered by settled modes of being, is not the ravening lust of
the Dionysian. Dionysius and the arrivant do not therefore compute. They sing
a different song.
The transformative power to which the messianic appeals is therefore always
rooted in a significantly different account of the supplementarity that defines
what it is to be human while tying it also to the divine, and however much the
tragic sensibility resounds throughout the messianic, we must be careful not to
flatten out that difference, subtle though it is in parts. Derrida, in Rogues, offers
one example of their intimate co-relation. Reflecting on the theogonic mytho-
logy of patricidal struggle for sovereignty between the Greek gods – for exam-
ple, Cronos seeking to prevent being overthrown by his son Zeus – Derrida
observes that this struggle ‘belongs to, if it does not actually inaugurate, a long
cycle of political theology that is at once paternalistic and patriarchal, and thus
masculine, in the filiation father-son-brother’ (Rogues, p. 17). That cycle contin-
ues in different forms to the present day: ‘This political theogony or political
theology gets revived or taken over (despite claims to the contrary by such
experts as Bodin and Hobbes . . .) by so called modern political theology of
monarchic sovereignty and even by the unavowed political theology . . . of the
sovereignty of the people, that is, of democratic sovereignty’ (p. 17).
But, if Derrida contests the founding of politics in the strategic calculations
of the phalo-logo-centrism of the formal equality of sovereign subjectivities
(see, for example, The Politics of Friendship), he equally dissents from democratic
theorists who seek to found politics in the equality of everyone with everyone of
the sort championed most eloquently and persuasively today, for example, by
Jacques Rancière.17 With Rancière, equality enables the social order; itself, he
says, a division or partition of the sensible. The event of political subjectifica-
tion occurs through polemical engagements, within an historical partition of
the sensible, between superiors and inferiors, when inferiors challenge the
material inequality established by a partition of the sensible in the name of this
equality. Derrida differs fundamentally. Such events lie instead, Derrida
maintains, in a ‘. . . dissymmetrical, unequal correspondence, unequal as always
to the equality of the one to the other: the origin of politics, the question of
democracy’ (Rogues, p. xii). Whereas the polemical relation obtaining in
Rancière’s politics of disagreement confines violence by limiting politics to the
litigation he thinks proper to it,18 no such limitation is granted by Derrida. In
the khoratic space and kairological decisioning of his messianic politics of
democracy-to-come, there is always already the possibility of the worse as well as
the lesser violence. The central problem, as we shall, see is how we might ever
confidently distinguish between them.
To return to the tragic and the messianic, however, and in the challenge that
his messianic insight poses to reason, Derrida makes a demand that we can see as
analogous to, albeit different from, the demand that Euripides makes on the
tragic. ‘Euripides, the critic, the thinker’, Sallis tells us, ‘submitted tragedy as it
had been attained to a demand for illumination, for intelligibility, the demand
that what is to be beautiful must be intelligible’ (Crossings, p. 115). Since Derrida,
also a thinker, characterizes the messianically-informed wound of experience dif-
ferently from that afforded by tragic insight, however, he similarly also submits it
to a different demand. Whereas Euripides would have the tragic submit to the
demands of intelligibility and reason, Derrida would have reason and intelligibil-
ity submit to the demands of the messianic. However much it must travel the path
of reason, in the event Derrida teaches that the travail of reason, bringing itself to
its limits, discloses the continuous arrival of justice to come in the occulting of
those limits. There it must expose itself, I think even recompose itself in exposing
itself, to the claim of an insatiable justice towards which its face must always be
turned in the effort to seek the lesser violence that would defer the worse.
Derrida’s messianic insight parallels that of the tragic. Everything that we do is
irresolvably implicated in violence. We are indelibly contaminated, more or less,
by violence. That more or less is the point; expiation is not, although neither is it
beside, the point. On the one hand, Derrida teaches that we must distinguish
between the monstrous and the lesser violence. On the other hand everything he
teaches seems to say that we cannot. He is himself racked by the responsibility
posed by this radical undecidability. And here I detect in the figure of Derrida
himself a certain, quasi-tragic, quality.
Although the problematic of justice was, of course, at the heart of the tragic
as well, the promise of overcoming around which the messianic and the tragic
equally revolve is therefore also different. In a stunning passage, Nietzsche
teaches Dionysianly: ‘[t]ragedy is seated in the midst of this excess of life, suf-
fering and joy, in sublime ecstasy listening to a melancholy song that tells of the
mothers of being whose names are delusion, will and woe’ (quoted in Crossings,
p. 96). The messianic is similarly situated but differently articulated. It too
sings a song, as Nietzsche taught it was the genius of the tragedies to do. Rather
than simply echoing the tragic, however, especially out of the specific economy
of violence to which it is a response, the messianic might perhaps be better
understood as possessing a different attunement, a different ear for the oppres-
sions of existence and the predicament of the oppressed. For that reason,
equipped thereby also with a different voice, the messianic not only sings in a
different key. In respect of violence especially, everything about its music and its
message is different. The messianic is a song to be sung with and on behalf of
the solidarity of the shaken. Bearing witness to the solidarity of the shaken, less
in the violent Dionysian idiom of sublime ecstasy, for example, than in the
transforming counter-violent juridical appeal of another justice simultaneously
operating within and against the law.19 The messianic’s song of singularity there-
fore also sings of a different fate, substituting a version of destiny (moira -μοῖρα)
more in celebration of the irrepressibility and insatiability of the ethical demand
to which existing, as such, subjects us all.
Thus, to draw a further important distinction, and notwithstanding its own
powerful idiom, the discourse of the messiah, as distinct also from that of the
messianic, ultimately depends upon the message, the violently sublimating
sacrificial good news, in particular, of the Gospel. As the Catholic liturgy has it,
‘Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again’. That of the messianic
does not. What distinguishes the messianic is, instead, the transformative
aesthetic, the very idiomatic tone of the messianic,20 the how of its bearing
witness to a singularity suspended precariously between the finite and the infi-
nite, rather than the secure despatch and reception of a message reporting the
existence of a safe passage from life to Life. Ultimately, however, in testifying to
the entire aporia of witnessing, the messianic speaks out of a line from Paul
Celan’s ‘Acshenglorie’: ‘No one bears witness for the witness.’21
In bringing the theological and the political together again, allowing the one
to refigure the other in the dangerous messianic monstrosity of that very
encounter, Derrida not only raised new questions about the categorial status in
the western tradition of the tragic, the messianic and the theos, as well as the
violences obtaining in all three, he has thereby introduced a new dimension
into what Claude Lefort called the permanence, in western thought and
practice, of the theologico-political.22 Whereas, then, according to modern
doctrines of secularization, the political was long supposed to have supplanted
the theological in the modern ‘disciplining of the divine’, it is perfectly clear
that a complex and pervasive enchantment continues to characterize the
modern world through the very political, techno-scientific, appropriation of
the divinising that characterizes it most.23 Here in the religio-political nexus
that still distinguishes the modern, with all its works and aspirations, progres-
sive disenchantment is simply not the point. The issue is the modern’s distended
enchantment with itself, the how of that enchantment and the all-pervasive
violence which drives it towards the greatest force and the worst violence. It is
precisely here that the messianic arises, Derrida maintains, especially within the
modern and against some of the most powerful philosophical contributions to
the modern, as a powerful ethico-political counter-violence to the narcissisti-
cally violent self-enchantment of the modern.
A further gloss to the counter-force claimed for the messianic is required
here. Recall Heidegger’s teaching that ‘all counter movements and counter
forces are to a large degree co-determined by what they are against, even though
in the form of reversing what they are against’.24 In its search for that deus ex
machina capable of correcting the world through the violence of its knowing,
for example, the modern pursues self-transformation equally as much as the
messianic. Techno-science itself, for example, is an aesthetic, and all aesthetics
seek transformation not just of the human condition, but ultimately always also
of the human soul. The very donation of life, that comes and goes as one’s life,
one’s name assigned to it as an afterthought. If techno-science seeks, thus, to
improve the world, via the forceful overcoming of calculation, the messianic
seeks, instead, to heal it through the equally but differently forceful overcom-
ing of its own distinctive affects. These include notably, hospitality, welcome,
the gift and, finally also, a –dieu. They are what Babich might call its conncinni-
ties (Words in Blood, Like Flowers, p. 61).
Through deconstruction, therefore, Derrida sought to describe a messianism
without a messiah in terms that transcend the reductively bitter and circular
counter-force logic of the dialectic. This presupposes an originary homogeneity
in the order of things that Derrida refused from the outset of his philosophiz-
ing, in particular in his account of the messianic and of the ‘non-dialectizable
tension . . . of the concept of hospitality’, so integral to it, ‘even of the concept
in hospitality’ (Of Hospitality, p. 362). For all the circular counter-force logic of
the dialectic does is return itself to the self-same, whereas that of deconstruc-
tion admits the surprising force, surprisingly violent force, of the wholly Other.
In his insistence on going through reason, however, not only to the undecid-
ability of the decision, but also to its decisive responsibility – to pick up the
commission of the omission of existence through the very heterogeneity of
whose rupture existence flows – Derrida enacted his own version of Nietzsche’s
Apollonian/Dionysian couplet. But he did so with a typical deconstructive twist;
one designed to allow for the possibility of a ‘to come’ undetermined by the
force and counter-force negation of the merely dialectical.
Shortly after this observation about hospitality, Derrida reminds us that:
After peace, after the peaceable and peaceful experience of welcoming,

there follows (but this following is not a new stage only the becoming-explicit
of the same logic) a more violent experience, the drama of the relation to
the other that ruptures, bursts in or breaks in, or still, you may recall some
of these citations, an experience of the Good that elects me before I welcome
it, in other words, of a goodness, a good violence of the Other that precedes
welcoming. (Of Hospitality, p. 364)
Here again we encounter evidence of so many diverse, heterogeneous and

violent tones in the messianic – the ‘good violence of the Other’, the ‘lesser
violence’, the ‘weak force’ of the messianic and so on – that, tempted as I am to
try and enumerate them, I think that enumeration is beside the point. For the
purposes of this sketch, at least, it is the complex violent tone of the idiomatic
whole that they comprise which counts, and to which I can only gesture here.
Critical to which idiomatic ensemble, nonetheless, is the promise Derrida
promises us, of ‘a good violence of the other’. I hesitate to say it of such a care-
ful thinker, but one wonders if the promise is ultimately a quixotic one.
Let me therefore emphasize again. One does not raise the issue of violence
in order to discredit the messianic. One raises the messianic in order to inter-
rogate, without reserve, and without deference either to the piety demanded by
the Other, or the homage demanded by power, the inescapable violence of exis-
tence and the challenge it poses to all thinking concerning the possibility of
justice; including that of the thought of the messianic itself.
To bring justice out of injustice, and thereby transcend oppression, that is the
alchemical promise of the messianic in Derrida. The messianic, must go through
reason, for him, but it does not ultimately work its work through reason. For the
work of reason, what reason in the modern period has wrought and the novel
oppressions it threatens, is one of the single most important targets of the mes-
sianic. Working with and through reason, the messianic in Derrida seeks less to
go beyond reason than to find the means at the limits of reason – limits only
to be attained by the passage through reason – to continuously welcome the
well-spring of life which is ultimately Other than reason and life. Such is his
messianic promise. But there is no gainsaying its violently disruptive force
throughout both reason and life. He never desists from admitting this.
Ultimately, then, the messianic and the tragic inhabit different worlds.
Different idioms, they are also engendered by different economies of violence.
Derrida pays no more forceful witness to the violent an-economical force of the
messianic itself, however, than in the tortured testimony he provides during the
first lecture of Rogues.
On the Rack of the Question

On 14 October 1984, Derrida gave a lecture entitled Shibboleth at The University
of Washington in Seattle. It was delivered to the first international conference
on the work of the poet Paul Celan. He was careful to date it. Derek Attridge
reprints part of the lecture with a short but helpful introduction in an edited
collection of Derrida’s essays, Acts of Literature (1992).25 Observing that one of
the distinguishing features of Celan’s poems is that ‘they enact with peculiar
intensity the paradox which lies at the heart of Derrida’s sense of literature’,
which very much also informs his sense of the messianic, Attridge notes how
each one of Celan’s poems
is imbued with a quality of uniqueness, of here-and-nowness, while at the

same time owing that quality to the cultural and linguistic cross-roads that
constitute it, and from which it speaks to us, in our equally singular and situ-
ated time and place. (Acts of Literature, p. 370)
It is that dual quality, characteristic also of the ethical challenge posed by mes-
sianic, in this time and this place nonetheless also to welcome the disruptive
alterity of the Other, that Derrida explores again in his tribute to Celan.
Concentrating in particular on the significance of dates and dating in Celan’s
poems, Attridge explains how the ‘date implies, for Celan and for Derrida, the
possibility of encounter (including the encounter with the absolutely other)
and of the anniversary, the gathering together of events across historical bound-
aries’ (p. 371). Whereas philosophy aspires to make writing timeless, and poli-
tics to make dating machination, all writing, and all the signatures that sign
writing off, is a dating. Specifically in respect of Celan’s poems, Derrida remarks,
quite beautifully, ‘a poem is en route from place toward “something open” (“an
approachable you”), and it makes its way “across” time, it is never “timeless” . . .
[it is] all cipher of singularity . . . the anniversary repetition of the unrepeat-
able’ (p. 371). The motifs that characterize the lecture all concern circling, the
singularity of ‘once’, one time, turns, turning, and returning ‘replacements and
supplantings, voltes and revolutions’ (p. 373).
In a lecture he gave 10 years later at Cerisy-la-Salle during the summer of
2002, included in Rogues, Derrida directly recalls the themes and motifs of
turning and returning which characterized so much of the lecture that he gave
on Paul Celan. This time, however, the motifs are dramatized through the meta-
phor of the wheel and the rack setting the scene for the torturing to which
Derrida himself feels subject by the complex violence of the messianic – its
injunction to seek the lesser violence indissolubly coupled also with the pros-
pect of the ‘greatest force’, as he puts it, here, having introduced Fontaine’s
poem ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ in which the proposition is made that ‘the
strong are always best at proving they are right. Witness the case we’re now
going to cite’ (Rogues, p. xi).
Full of emotion at returning to Cerisy, clearly moved also by the wars and
threat of war as well as by the mounting generic violence globally that was char-
acterizing the early years of the new century as the infinite ‘war on terror’ devel-
oped, Derrida recalled his Celan lecture, ‘political through and through’ (p. 7).
In explicit messianic tones, Derrida noted the difference in time but also the
same abiding necessity – one more time – of acceding to the imperative of con-
firming the messianically ‘dangerous law of supplementarity or iterability that
forces the impossible by forcing the replacement of the irreplaceable’ (p. 7).
Derrida twists and turns on the rack of the question.
What question? It is not easy to supply a simple answer. In one sense, he says, it
is the question of democracy-to-come (included in the title of the conference to
which he first delivered the lecture). But the future of democracy-to-come is
entangled with the historicity as well as the semantics of power – not least, at the
time he gave the lecture, of the renewal of fresh forms of global violence at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. It is similarly entangled with the very history
and meaning of the democratic; to which he also returns. And, finally, of course
the question is entangled with the prospect also of the messianic promise, itself,
we have to emphasize, always already marrying the injunction to seek the lesser
violence with the fear of the worse violence. As John Sallis reminds us, however:
‘The question of the question is not just another question’ (Crossings, p.126).
The ‘question’ Derrida teaches in Rogues always comes doubled – ‘at the same
time semantic and historical, at turns semantic and historical’ (p. 6). But also
re-doubled by the ways in which its many historical and semantic registers invoke
these other mutually disclosive implications and associations of affirmation in
the midst of the worst violence, and of the prospect of the lesser violence of
democracy-to-come – only ever a prospect but the more irruptive and disruptive
for being so – to which Derrida bears witness again, racked more than usually by
the intimation of the messianic promise installed in the deep undecidability that
stalks this problematization of violence to which he has long been committed;
not least since his essay on Levinas, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’.
Little wonder, then, that one can almost smell the burning flesh as Derrida is
put to the question: ‘This double question . . . a torturing question’ (p. 8), ‘the
question in the senses of an inquisitional torture where one is not only put in
question but is put to the question’ (p. 7). Indeed, puts himself to the question in
a curious and perverse parallel to the autoimmunity that he fears, and his testi-
mony to the messianic is wrung from him once more; this time against the histor-
ical background of a century new-born, yet tooling itself up to repeat, if not
exceed, the violences of the one that preceded it. ‘The Free Wheel’, as he titles
his chapter, turns him over again. But he, in turn, seeks to turn the wheel as he
says more in the direction or at least to the place he desires, specifically here to
what he calls the precomprehension of democracy. For, as he says: ‘Did we not
have some idea of democracy, we would never worry about its indetermination.
We would never seek to elucidate its meaning or, indeed, call for its advent’
(p. 18). And so, typically, he seeks to move, ‘towards the horizon that limits the
meaning of the word, in order to come to know better what “democracy” will
have been able to signify, what it ought, in truth, to have meant’ (p. 18). If I find
this element of the argument compelling, and I do, then perhaps I ought to be
equally persuaded by the injunction to a lesser violence. But I am not. I am happy
to accept that this is a failure of my understanding. But – again – while I fail to
understand, I have to bear counter-witness in my own questioning.
The messianic question that tortures him first comes in the form, then, of
democracy-to-come as that which signifies the promise continually to revise
democracy as the sovereign power of the people in its self-production and self-
legislation. Moving to the limits of democratic thought, he observes that it still
finds its expression in terms of ‘a force (kratos), a force in the form of a sover-
eign authority (sovereign, that is, kurios or kuros, having the power to decide, to
be decisive, to prevail, to have reason over or win out over (avoir raison de) and
to give the force of law, kuroō) and thus the power and ipseity of the people
(dēmos)’ (p. 13). But it is ipseity itself that is the source of the problem: ‘ipseity
names a certain principle of legitimate sovereignty . . . the very self or auto-
positioning, of ipseity itself’(p. 12). Everywhere ipseity reigns, he says, ‘there is
some oneself, the first, ultimate, and supreme source of every “reason of the
strongest” as the right (droit) granted to force or the force granted to law (droit)’
(p. 12). In the event, then, as his reflections on the messianic insist, the prob-
lem is the sovereign self-same, auto-legislating itself and now also, he claims,
threatening self-destruction as well through its auto-immune systems. So now
I must conclude with where I most want to start. Here, therefore, as he encoun-
ters the suicidal drivers now impelling globalization (mondialization) to self-
destruction the stakes posed by the messianic – the correlation of the worse and
the lesser violence – could not be higher. But neither it seems are the prospects
of finding a resolution to the aporia of the lesser violence any clearer.
Violence More or Less

If one hears a quixotic tone in the messianic promise that Derrida holds out for
us, I admit to a gross uncertainty in my attempt to capture the tone of the mes-
sianic with that word, this tone alone would, however, also serve to differentiate
messianic from tragic insight. For, the knowledge at which we arrive through
tragic ordeal is a knowledge that makes us sad. It is a knowledge at which we
would rather we did not have to arrive. Its tone is pathos. Derrida’s messianic
tone is quite different. The messianic insight which inflects all of his, otherwise
remorseless, depiction of the solidarity of the shaken is characterized by a
knowledge that serves to elevate our spirits. It is the tone of hope. I would that
I could be persuaded by that tone. Whereas I understand how Derrida thinks it
is sourced, I do not fully understand how he thinks it can be operationalized in
relation to distinguishing violence, more or less. I might have drawn too fine a
distinction, so once more the failure to understand no doubt belongs here
rather than there. But let me conclude with pressing the point of what I am
failing to understand.
Recall two of Derrida’s most important teachings in this regard. The first is
not a simple injunction to a lesser violence. The first is the insistence that the
lesser violence and the worst arise together as one predicament. They are not
serially, but co-related. He does not allow us the luxury of dealing with them
one after the other. The aporia is that of not having any secure means ulti-
mately of being able to distinguish the prospect of one from the other. This
admits something vital. In electing for what we think may be the lesser violence,
we may very well commit the worst. Good conscience is no defence against
being contaminated in holocaustal violence. We know that for sure after the
horrors of the twentieth century. But that is not Derrida’s most pertinent
teaching on this point. The point is that the advent of the messianic, of the
Other, is itself violent and who can tell, how are we to tell, that the violence of
the messianic may not itself evoke holocaustal violence from us? An impious
thought? Then, I am impious. But, again, that is not the point either. The point
is that I have learnt the lesson of this ‘impiety’ from Derrida.
The second teaching is this, and it brings me to my conclusion. At the begin-

ning of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Derrida explains how ‘the question’ – at
once both the question of being which has distinguished philosophy one way or
another since its inception, and the profound mystery, after Kant, Hegel, Marx,
Nietzsche and Heidegger, of what the question could possibly be now – becomes
the very question of the question as such, ‘within that fragile moment when the
question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have
already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined
enough for its voice to have been already fraudulently articulated with the very
syntax of the question’ (p. 80). The teaching here, then, is in fact threefold.
First, that the ‘question must be maintained. As a question. The liberty of the
question (double negative) must be stated and protected’ (p. 80).The question, in
short, must remain a question. Second, is that the question is never even given as
a question. It is always buried somewhere in the answers on the basis of which the
world has been proceeding long before we became responsibilized through and
for it; in this time and in this place. ‘Thus the question is always enclosed; it never
appears immediately as such, but only through the hermetism of a proposition in
which the answer has already begun to determine the question’ (p. 80). Third,
and this is the point of the point, the question does not authorize itself. It has for
Derrida an Other authorization: ‘The question has already begun – we know it
has – and this strange certainty about an other absolute origin, an other absolute
decision that has secured the past of the question, liberates an incomparable
instruction: the discipline of the question’ (p. 80). Hence the question follows
the law of the law or the command of the commandment: ‘There is no stated law,
no commandment, that is not addressed to freedom of speech’ (p. 80).
There is then a chart datum in Derrida. But that chart datum does not lie in
the logos, however much he teaches us that we still have to wade through the
logos to get to it. Neither does it lie in the Other, in this essay at least, however
much he inclines, later, towards binding that freedom to the Other. Chart datum
is the an-economical gift of this difficult bloody freedom. The aporia of freedom
has no secure metric for computing the lesser violence. That is why it is an
aporia. We could almost say that this, precisely, is the definition of factical free-
dom. Thus the aporia of the lesser violence has Derrida whirling on the wheel of
‘the liberty of the question’ (p. 80). It thereby enacts a condition in which, despite
himself, tragedy appears to win out over the messianic in Derrida himself.
Notes
1
I would like to thank Arthur Bradley and Andrew Dawson for the encouragement
and support of their friendship. It was indispensable to me in the writing of this
essay. The essay is dedicated to the memory of Paul Fletcher.
2
See Michael Dillon, ‘Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian
Moment’, Theory and Event, 11:2 (June 2008).
3
See Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996) and
Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) for accounts of Derrida’s
engagements with political philosophy. All further references will be given in the
text.
4
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000). See also de Vries, Religion and Violence, p. xv. All further
5
Jacques, Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael B. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 6. All further
6
Jacques Derrida, ‘D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie’, in Les
fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida sous la direction de Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Éditions GALILÉE, 1981), p. 480.
7
Dennis, J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 281.
8
See Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999) and Arthur Bradley, Negative Theology and Modern
French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004) for accounts of Derrida’s engage-
ments with negative theology.
9
See Jan N. Bremmer, Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999); Richard Bodéüs, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals (Albany,
New York: SUNY Press, 2000); Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, The Gods and
Mortals (London: Profile Books, 2001) for accounts of Greek religion.
10
Werner Jaeger, Humanism and Theology: The Aquinas Lecture – 7 (Milwaukee, WI:
Marquette University Press, 1980), p. 6. All further references will be given in the
text.
11
See Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Statesman: The Web of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1997); Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s Statesman (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002) and Michael Dillon, ‘A Passion for the (Im)pos-
sible: Jacques Rancière’s Politics without Politics’, European Journal of Political
Theory, 5:4 (2005), pp. 429–452 for readings of Plato’s Statesman.
12
Jacques Derrida, On the Name trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford
13
Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of
Emmanuel Levinas’ trans. Alan Bass in Writing and Difference [1967] (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 79–195, p. 103.
14
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadamus and Harmony (New York: Vintage Books,
1994), p. 387.
15
John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 1991), p. 5. All further references will be given in the text.
16
See Walter F. Otto, Dionysius. Myth and Cult (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications,
1993). It is not only that the myths teach that the god comes to presence, that the
whole structure of the cult of Dionysius turns on the coming to presence of
Dionysius, as in the tragedies it is how that presence is manifested that counts as
well. Turbulence attends the coming of Dionysius.
17
See Jacques Rancière, On The Shores of the Political (London: Verso, 1995);
Dis-Agreement (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1998) and The
Philosopher and his Poor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). All further
18
See Michael Dillon, ‘A Passion for the (Im)possible: Jacques Rancière, Equality,
Pedagogy and the Messianic’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5:4 (2005),
pp. 429–452.
19
See Michael Dillon, ‘Another Justice’, Political Theory, 27:2 (1999), pp. 155–175.
20
See Peter Fenves, ed., Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant
Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993); and, Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).
21
Paul Celan, ‘Acshenglorie’ in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John
Felstiner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
22
Claude Lefort, ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ in Democracy and
Political Theory trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), pp. 213–255.
23
See Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)Political Theology (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2009).
24
Babette Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in
Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Heidegger (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2006), p. 251. All
25
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature ed. and intr. Derek Atridge (London: Routledge,
1992). All further references will be given in the text.
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Index
Absolute spirit see Geist demise of messianism

Adorno, Theodor W. 41, 78, 132, ‘false’ messiahs and messianic
133, 134, 136 movements 1, 2
Agamben, Giorgio 3, 27, 36, 92, 132, democracy 168, 177, 178, 187, 198,
134, 136, 139, 141 202, 203
Antelme, Robert 134, 135 Derrida, Jacques 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 17,
Antichrist 7, 49, 99, 101–2, 105, 108 35 n16, 42 n2, 92, 122, 139,
see also katechon 141, 161, 166, 187 n2, 191,
Aquinas see Thomas Aquinas, Saint 196, 205 see also democracy;
religion
Badiou, Alain 141 ambiguous doubling is a signature
Being and Event 4 of 37, 161, 170, 171
Bataille, George 114, 115, 116 auto-immunization, state of 9, 18,
Bauman, Zygmunt 133, 134 20, 21, 40, 174, 175, 185, 203
Beardsworth, Richard 5, 26, 27, 31, Deconstruction 3, 32, 36, 37, 170,
32, 35 n15, 175, 193 174, 186, 200
Beckett, Samuel 99 ‘Faith and Knowledge’ 9, 17, 18, 19,
being 49, 50, 53, 156 20, 41, 80, 174, 182
Benjamin, Walter 3, 15, 132, 135, 138 ‘Force of Law’ 8, 30, 138
Biester, Johann Erich 59, 60 Of Grammatology 164
Bourdieu, Pierre 162 ‘L’autre cap’ [‘The Other
Brito, Emil 81, 86 Heading’] 9, 161–6
Browning, Christopher 132 and Levinas 31, 40
Bultmann, Rudolph 81 ‘messianism without messianism’ 3,
Butler, Judith 6, 56 n9 27, 29, 31, 200 see also freedom
on performativity 51–3 Rogues 9, 17, 19, 23, 162, 174, 178,
182, 192–4, 201
Cappadocian Fathers 87–8 singular Other versus multiple
chiliasm 2 see millenarianism ‘Others’ 29, 30, 32, 39, 202
Christ 80, 81, 85 see Jesus Christ Specters of Marx 3, 28, 163
Christianity 85, 98, 101, 102, 108, Descartes, René 49, 141
112, 142, 185 Meditations in Totality and
Christology 81, 82, 92 Infinity 43
Clement of Alexandria 47–9, 54, 85 Doctrine of Trinity, The see The
Trinity
Dalmiya, Vrinda 123
Davidowitz, Lucy 133 emptiness 85, 124
Deleuze, Gilles 16, 28 Enlightenment and reason 41, 70, 195
222 Index
epistles of John 100–1 Hegel, G.W.F. 6, 16, 21, 28, 79, 85,
eschatology 2, 70, 78, 80, 93, 138 93 n3, 94 n23, 95 nn24–5,
Eucharist 112, 117, 119 114, 116, 192, 205 see also
eschatology
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit 82, 83 the Absolute 2
see also The Trinity the dialectical method 78, 87, 92
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 16, 47 the Absolute Spirit 89
Fichte, J.G. 63, 70, 72 see also Kant, divine thinking versus human
Immanuel thinking 87
revolution 68 lecturing cycles
Fletcher, Paul 113, 158 n8 philosophy of history 80, 81
Foucault, Michel 141, 142, 158 n7, philosophy of religion 80
186 philosophy of right 80
freedom 67, 73, 91 three forms of alterity
of all, by all, for all 79, 88 intra-trinitarian otherness 83
as such 66 an otherness of creation from its
French Revolution 15, 59, 67, 70, 91 creator 83
see also Kant, Immanuel, good radical otherness 83
versus evil ‘translation’ of religious
Freud, Sigmund 16, 113, 116, 167 picturing into philosophical
Fukuyama, Francis 6, 90 thinking 81, 82
fundamentalism 37, 40, 41 universal versus individual
Christian 26 82, 89
neo-fundamentalism Heidegger, Martin 3, 6, 38, 39,
al-Qaeda 9, 182, 183, 185 42 n2, 48, 55, 83, 139, 146,
153, 156, 163, 167, 192,
Geist 89, 90, 91 199, 205
Girard, René Being and Time 170
the mimetic theory 117, 119 temporalization of thinking 15
Violence and the Sacred 114 Heine, Henrich
God 51, 52, 54, 87, 152, 196 History of Religion and Philosophy
creation versus incarnation 92 of Germany 58
finitude versus infinitude 84, 85, 92 Henry, Michel 141
known versus unknown 55 Hilberg, Raul 133, 136
representation of 84 Hobbes, Thomas 105
art 48 Hodgson, Peter 91
temporality versus eternal 85, 86, Husserl, Edmund 38, 161, 163, 167,
91, 105 172, 192
Godhead 84, 87 see also The Trinity phenomenology 15
Goldhagen, Daniel 133
Gorman, Michael 153 Irenaeus, Saint 85, 92
great opponent of God 101 Irigaray, Luce 121
Grossheutschi, F. 101 Islam 174, 178, 185
globalization of 182
Habermas, Jürgen 19, 23, 33, 182 Islamism 178, 179, 180–3
see also Benjamin, Walter; jihad 184, 189 n18
Derrida, Jacques, Rogues post-Islamist movements 181
Index 223
Jaeger, Werner 195 Kristeva, Julia 7, 111 see also Fletcher,

Jankélévitch, Vladimir 122 Paul; sacrifice
Jesus Christ 57, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90, Black Sun 117
98, 108, 111, 119, 199 The Feminine and the Sacred 119
as Caesar 155 symbolic order of patriarchy 113,
as a new ruler, or messiah 151 116, 121
the Second Coming 99, 100, 101, Küng, Hans 81
105, 108 see Paul, Saint; Second
Epistle to the Thessalonians Lacan, Jacques 114
Joachimite Langer, Lawrence 136
trinitarian doctrine 2 see also The Laruelle, François 141
Trinity Lechte, John 116
Justice Le Doeuff, Michèle 122, 123
à venir [to come] 30, 201 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 2
Lessius, Leonard 58, 72
Kafka, Franz 1 De providentia numinis 57
Kant, Immanuel 3, 6, 9, 17, 22, 28, Levinas, Emmanuel 3, 4, 16, 29,
43, 48, 58, 60, 141, 155, 161, 31, 43, 136, 192, 203 see also
171, 192, 205 Derrida, Jacques, and Levinas
Critique of Judgement 166 Levy, Daniel 137, 140 n21
Critique of Practical Reason 62, 165, 166 liberalism 4, 42, 58–60, 72
Critique of Pure Reason 62, 166 liberal democracy 21
disposition of the nomad 61 liberal modernity 2, 3, 59
good versus evil 63, 64, 66, 67 Logos 83, 84, 86
Marcionite heresy of early Löwith, Karl 78
Christianity 70, 76 n36 Luther, Martin 79, 86
Providence 69 see also Providence reformation 69, 195 see also
beyond the limits of political Fichte, J.G.; Kant, Immanuel
authority 66 Lyotard, Jean-François 16, 141
purity of duty 65
Religion 63, 73 Macchiavelli, Niccoló 57, 105
revolution 65, 66 Marx, Karl 3, 16, 163, 205
before the limits of political Marxism 2, 19, 41
form 66 Mauss, Marcel 114, 115
katechon 7, 99, 104, 108 messiah
grammatical peculiarities of 100, 107 advent of 92, 93, 98, 105
moral quality of 100 arrival of 197
kenosis 85, 90 apocalypse 6, 48, 80
in creation, incarnation and foreshadowing 48, 49
crucifixion 86 futurity 48
Kertesz, Imre 132, 133, 135 prophecy 48
Kingdom of God 72, 79, 87, 90, 152 ‘messianic turn’ 4, 5
sacred and secular, dissolving the 88 messianism 3, 98, 194
Kofman, Sara 134 and Holocaust 122, 137, 204
Kojève, Alexandre 90, 114 epoch 132
on Hegel 114 epiphany 134
Koyré, Alexandre 61, 62 redemption 135
224 Index
messianism (Cont’d) politics 3, 33, 57, 67, 90–2, 99, 103,

with a messiah 151 143 see also freedom; religion
of modernity 88, 92 and atheism 57
sacralization of historical power 2 authority 7, 69
secularization of eschatology 2 of feminism 113
power of 32, 114, 124, 136, futurity 10, 72, 124, 167, 168, 191
153, 192 without messianism 36
promise of 5, 9, 153, 156, 192–3, order of society 107
201–2 philosophy 99
structure of power 7, 22, 59, 73, 91, 105, 146, 153
katechon 100 of the present 39
lawless one, revelation of the 100, promise 147, 149, 168, 192 see also
101 money
the second coming 98, 100 Providence 58, 67, 80
theologico-political consequences 99
understanding of 103, 108 rationality and reason 32, 33, 38, 41,
metaphysics 6, 39, 49, 53, 59, 61, 92, 42 n2, 58, 63, 143
103, 106, 107, 142, 144, 156, Reformation 70, 80, 91, 101, 104,
196, 205 133, 143, 195
millenarianism 2, 92 Reineke, Martha J. 120
money 145, 151 religion 73, 92, 114, 141, 175 see also
gives value to all other values 147, politics
149, 150, 154 determinations of 15
global economic crisis 8, 39 identity of
myth 55 analytical structure 20
ontological structure 20
Negri, Antonio 141 pre-ethical structure of
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 16, 21, 47, 49, ‘radical evil’ 20
53, 61, 62, 145, 146, 165, 196, and philosophy 18
198, 205 rethinking of 16, 72
Noddings, Nel 122, 127 n31 return of 17, 20, 38
rewriting of 39
O’Regan, Cyril 81–2, 86–7 a way to regulate social violence 114
see also Girard, René
parousia 105 revelation
Parsons, Kathryn Pyne 112 morality versus reason, principle
Paul, Saint 7, 27, 70, 79, 81, 86, 87, of 63
89, 93, 98, 104, 153 Revolution 60, 65, 66, 71 see also
and Caesar 151 French Revolution
‘lawless one’ 100, 101 Robespierre, Maximilian 58, 59
grammatical peculiarities of 100 Romanticism
messianism of 4, 8 Jena Romantics 70, 72
Second Epistle to the Rose, Gillian 92
Thessalonians 99 Rosenzweig, Franz 3, 15
philosophy of excess 15, 17, 38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 164
Pindar, poet 47, 48, 49, 54 Roy, Olivier 179, 183, 188 n8
Plato 53 Rubenstein, Richard 138
Index 225
sacrifice 116, 119 theologico-political predicament 3,

imitating Christ 122 5, 7, 98, 99, 106, 107, 142,
negative dimension of 111, 112 147, 179, 186, 195, 197, 199
power of 111, 113 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 49, 50, 52, 195
violence of 112, 117, 121, 192 Thurschwell, Adam 5, 36, 40
sacred practices 114, 115 time, relationships 8
sexually specific 121 messianic versus historical 16
Sartre, Jean-Paul totalitarianism 17, 168
Being and Nothingness 122 The Trinity 2, 81, 82–4, 86, 90
Schelling 141, 146 understanding of time, messianic
Schiller, Friedrich 71 perspective 92, 93, 98, 132–3
Schlegel, Friedrich 71, 72, 76 n40
Schmidt, Dennis, 194, 196 utopianism 4
Schmitt, Carl 99, 142 see also
Antichrist; Taubes, Jacob Valery, Paul 162, 164, 169
katechon, according to 102 Voltaire
Political Romanticism 103, 105, 106 Dictionnaire Philosophique 1
Political Theology 7, 103, 105, 106 von Goethe, J.W. 73, 77 nn46–7
theory of transposition 106, 107 Vorstellung [Representation] 48,
Scholem, Gershom 3 90, 91
secularism 2, 19, 41, 141
secularization, wave of 18, 38, 106, Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 133
107, 143, 149 Weil, Simone 122, 124
Shanks, Andrew 81 Wiesel, Elie 136, 138
Spinoza, Baruch 47, 57 Wistrichs, Robert 133
Sznaider, Natan 137, 140 n21
Yerkes, James 81
Taubes, Jacob 2, 70, 103
Taylor, Charles 143 Zevi, Sabbatai 1
Tertullian 84, 85, 102 Žižek, Slavoj 4, 141, 186

(Arthur Bradley, Paul Fletcher) The Politics To Co

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The Politics to Come

Continuum Studies in Religion and Political Culture

The New Visibility of Religion, Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl

© Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-184-706-315-1 (Hardback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Introduction: The Politics to Come: A History of Futurity 1

Part One: Promises

Part Two: Genealogies

Part Three: Futures

Chapter 10: Economies of Promise: On Caesar and Christ 141

This collection of essays emerges out of an international symposium, The

Pamela Sue Anderson is Reader in Philosophy of Religion, University of Oxford,

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at

Georgetown University Law Center and American University – Washington

The Politics to Come:

Today everything is theology, except what the theologians declare to be such.

of popular millenarian expectation in England.5 This radical, early-modern

here: Agamben sees messianic time as a means of criticizing the sovereign

The Politics to Come

Messianic, an international and multidisciplinary set of contributors – includ-

theologico-political formation of liberal secular modernity. What are the histor-

themselves a kind of historicized version of Christology – but it reaches its cul-

better or worse – now be taking place: the Holocaust, environmental catastro-

The Future of Futurity

The Messianic Now: A Secular Response

I believe it important to emphasize here the historico-political context in

age, such development constitutes an important historical, educational and

religious fundamentalism. Let me return to the tertiary structure of religion, as

principles under which world politics should be thought and developed.

1. The principles of reciprocity and symmetry: To treat the other as a person

Politics without the Messianic or a ‘Messianic

Derrida called a ‘messianic without messianism’.2 He therefore knows enough

including Levinas, Lyotard and Deleuze’s) thinking was constrained by four

I will return shortly to what Derrida means by history as ‘promise’, ‘promise as

that that injunction is conceptualized as entirely empty. It thus remains a fair

This indifference to content here is not an indifference, it is not an attitude

historical actuality’, is doomed to suffer the same fate as ‘techno-scientific

Can we preclude the possibility of a meaningless emancipation? In complex

No less than Habermas, Beardsworth fears the prospect of the world-as-market,

A Brief Response to Adam Thurschwell’s

In a gracious and thoughtful response to my previous article ‘The Messianic

is simple: to say that something is philosophically pertinent does not mean to

genocide of the Jews through decolonization to sexual normativity) in terms of

determinations would be more violent, not less. Derrida’s reworking of Levinas

the service of progressive enlightenment’ (Adorno). Thurschwell’s final

Western hegemony. I am not concerned with commodity fetishism or the

Messianic Deposition: Representation and

Nietzsche’s resistance of Aristotle – ‘being’ means no more than this. At the

When we describe a matter as ‘natural’ or one conforming to the ‘natural

Towards Perpetual Revolution:

In 1613, Leonard Lessius, one of the most formidable Christian apologists of

Kant’s condemnation of revolution was compromised only once in an impor-

beginning of his own revolutionary project (and here Heine is absolutely

In addition, as to the excellence (kalokagathia) that concerns practical actions

Such speculations, within the realms of the Kantian revolution, amount to

of particular ‘acts’ or ‘habits’ that, individually, might be judged wicked. It is, as

a contradiction to seek the temporal origin of man’s moral character, so far

ineluctably tied to the law as ‘the will of a World-Ruler’ revealed through

Delivered in terms of more than a hopeful declaration, and supported by the