It seems like a good time to write a book about the end of the world. Since beginning research for this book in 2009, there has been no shortage of events that seem to herald the end: the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the election of Donald Trump, escalating fears about climate change and various other crises seem to keep the spectre of the end perpetually in the news. Some of these events may indeed turn out to represent endings, though the nature of those endings remains to be seen, but what is remarkable is that the abundance of looming catastrophes has provoked a renewed investment in the standard responses: ISIS will be crushed by ‘Western’ military force, political crises will be overcome if we trust the democratic process and new forms of technology will help us address climate change. Put another way, almost no one faces these supposed apocalypses apocalyptically. Many forget that endings take work. The world may yet surprise humanity with its persistence.
The following chapters are my attempt to explore what it means to think apocalyptically. They are motivated by the conviction that it is only with a peculiar admixture of pessimism and hope, a blend in which the two become virtually indistinguishable, that we will be able to confront the realities before us. This account of an apocalyptic political theology is assembled through engagements with the work of Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, with the assistance of Schmitt and Bloch. It entails careful engagements with the writings of each: reading Hegel’s philosophy of religion, engaging Taubes’s work and drawing out the apocalyptic implications of Malabou’s concept of plasticity. These tasks are not taken up for their own sake but in the service of developing a notion of plastic apocalypticism. In this sense, this is a book focused on thinking with Hegel, Taubes and Malabou rather than thinking about each of their ideas.
The first chapter offers an outline of apocalyptic political theology, providing initial answers to a set of key questions: What is political theology? What is the world? and Why must it end? Political theology is a term that is now used to describe a wide variety of perspectives, including theologically determined political analysis, political religion and approaches to thinking the nature of the law and the political. I define political theology in a narrow methodological sense indebted to Schmitt, Benjamin, Taubes and Agamben, among others. This political theology engages in what Schmitt calls the ‘sociology of concepts’ and then uses these concepts to critique the world. Apocalypticism, as one such concept, is as debated a term as political theology. While acknowledging its Jewish and Christian origins, I argue that these origins are beginnings rather than final definitions. Apocalypticism is a conceptual tool for critiquing the world, and that tool has mutated through repeated usage.
In developing this apocalyptic thought, I address recent critiques of both apocalyptic thinking and political theology. Some of these concerns are animated by too narrow a conception of apocalypticism, such as the notion that it relies upon the intervention of a transcendent divine figure. Others focus on the real issue of anti-liberal tendencies of apocalypticism and political theology. This anti-liberalism is taken up in later chapters, too, as I argue that it cannot be reduced to the authoritarian or totalitarian forms often invoked to dismiss critiques of the world.
Defining this world and desiring its end are intimately related tasks. I begin with Schmitt’s discussion of the imposition and emergence of a legal and political order that transforms the earth into a world. While this provides a useful starting point, I argue that it is an inadequate account of this order. Underneath his description of the division of land, sea, air and space, there is another set of divisions: nature, capital, gender and race. Put another way, Schmitt has an insufficient ontology of the world. Drawing on feminist materialism and aspects of social constructivism, I offer an account of the world that attends to the interaction of social and material relations such that this distinction between social and material begins to lose its usefulness. Through this blurring, it becomes clear that the divisions of nature, capital, gender and race are not merely conflicts in the world. They are irresolvable antagonisms that constitute the world. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this view of the world and the difficulty of thinking its end.
The second chapter begins to develop a political theology capable of thinking the end of the world. I outline a genealogy that connects Joachim of Fiore to Hegel and onwards. This genealogy is either a story of perpetual struggle and the hope for something different or a dangerous indulgence of theology’s worst political implications. Either way, this genealogy is significant for my argument in two key ways. First, it establishes Hegel as a key figure for both political theology and apocalypticism. Second, this genealogy is central to Taubes’s account of political theology.
In this genealogy, Hegel does something to the relationship between theology and philosophy. The nature of this something is often left undefined. To clarify Hegel’s contribution to political theology, I engage in a close reading of Hegel’s philosophy of religion in order to specify his understanding of the relationship between religion, philosophy and politics. Hegel argues that religion and philosophy share a truth but think this truth differently. Philosophy thinks abstractly while religion engages this truth in the form of representations. Both modes of thinking are essential, as religious thought generates a philosophy that then returns to religious representations to creatively re-engage them. Hegel’s more direct engagements with the political role of religion have received attention, but I argue that this notion of religion as representations presents an implicit political theology. His method of thinking philosophically with theological concepts opens up new ways of using apocalypticism to critique the world. The Hegelian concepts introduced in this chapter form the basis of the engagement with Taubes and Malabou. They each provide new ways of engaging Hegel’s philosophy, reformulating and transforming his ideas in the course of a ‘plastic’ reading.
While Hegel’s overt political theology can be conservative, his implicit political theology is more disruptive. As Schmitt himself argues, it preserves ‘revolutionary sparks’.1 In the third chapter, I argue that Taubes fans these sparks into a flame. Taubes’s work has emerged from relative obscurity due to the recent philosophical interest in Paul, but this attention is usually limited to passing footnotes. This chapter offers a more substantial engagement, showing how Taubes offers distinct accounts of both political theology and apocalypticism. These accounts, respectively, can be summarized as experimenting with theological materials and disinvestment from the world. His development of these ideas and his reading of Hegel are key to arguing for an immanent version of apocalypticism that avoids critiques of its reliance upon transcendent intervention.
While Taubes’s understanding of apocalypticism is helpful in developing an immanent apocalyptic political theology, there is a hesitation when it comes to confronting the end. On the one hand, he is spiritually disinvested from the world, but on the other, he cautions against the nihilistic tendencies of the apocalyptic. The fourth chapter explores this hesitation with the assistance of Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity. Malabou offers a reading of Hegel that focuses on the nature of the future and opposes messianic tendencies, again reinforcing the argument for an immanent, disruptive change. Drawing together explorations of immanence, contingency, negation and trauma, she provides a philosophical framework that, with Hegel and Taubes, is capable of articulating what it means to look forward to the end.
Finally, the book concludes by circling back to the specific world described in the first chapter. What does it mean to think the end of the world today? I argue that it should take the form of an active pessimism. This form of pessimism may refuse the hope of this world, but it has not surrendered. Living negatively in the world requires a constant investigation of what it means to engage in this refusing, of cultivating habits of refusal and of developing the capacity to sustain this refusal as a mode of negatively being in the world. This refusal entails a strange hope rooted in the end rather than an investment in what would come after.
It is possible that it has always been a good time to write about the end of the world. It is conceivable that in every age every society has its pessimists, its doomsayers and those that cloak their misanthropy or nihilism with a layer of intellectualism. This depiction of apocalyptists recalls Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation. The book concludes by taking up Kierkegaard’s discussion of this knight and the contrast he draws with the knight of faith. In opposition to both of these figures, I propose a knight of apocalyptic pessimism as a model of what it might mean to live apocalyptically.
Hegel is a key figure throughout these chapters, but it is important to note that this book does not end with Hegel. There has been a great deal of work, most notably by Slavoj Žizek, that turns to Hegel in an effort to rethink religion, theology and politics. Indeed, whether he is cast as hero or villain, he inevitably appears in recent work in political theology. He is important for both Taubes and Malabou, but they are not primarily Hegel scholars. Rather, they think with Hegel, even when that entails thinking against Hegel. Hegel is a resource, not an authority. He helps articulate a problem well, because he is part of the history of that problem.
Viewing Hegel as a resource rather than an authority, to think with rather than about Hegel’s work, is in keeping with the spirit of Taubes, as well as other twentieth-century apocalyptic thinkers. Deleuze and Guattari, describing the French novel, write, ‘It can only conceive of organised voyages . . . It spends its time plotting points instead of drawing lines, active lines of flight or of positive deterritorialisation.’2 The following chapters are an attempt to determine new lines of flight rather than merely plotting the points of Hegelian philosophy and political theology. This apocalyptic political theology is not an attempt at recovering what has been lost. It is not a return. It is an attempt to experiment, to make use of a concept in order to think anew the world and its end. Such efforts always entail risks, not least trying to draw together disparate and sometimes contradictory voices. Perhaps this cacophony can anticipate the chaos that the katechon tries to restrain.