In the first chapter, I used Lloyd’s typology to argue that there is a narrow form of political theology that can be contrasted with both broad (political religion) and sectarian approaches. This narrow approach includes Schmitt, Taubes, Benjamin, Bloch, Agamben and others. I also provided an ontology of the world and argued that this narrow form of political theology offers resources for thinking about why this world should end.
Turning to Hegel as a resource for this work might be surprising for two reasons. First, if Hegel is the Hegel of teleological history and absolute knowledge, it is not immediately obvious what he has to offer to apocalyptic thinking. Further, having defined the world in terms of nature, capital, gender and race, it may seem suspect to turn to someone whose treatment of nature, gender and race is increasingly regarded as deeply problematic.1 Second, while Hegel offers wide-ranging thoughts on theology, religion, philosophy and politics, much of this work could be described in terms of broad or sectarian approaches to political theology. Hegel thinks religion plays an important social, political and ethical role. He also describes the social, political and ethical consequences of certain theological ideas and offers philosophical reflections on theological doctrines. There is a great deal of literature evaluating Hegel’s discussion of these theological themes and that conversation has come to dominate consideration of religion within Hegel scholarship. It could thus seem strange to appeal to Hegel in order to develop political theology in a narrow sense.
This chapter seeks to address both these concerns. First, I argue that there is an established genealogy of apocalyptic thought that draws connections between early Christianity, Joachim, Hegel and Marx. This genealogy is important for those critical of political theology in the broad sense (Lilla, Gray and, to some extent, Svenungsson) as well as those who find Hegel a resource for developing a narrow political theology. Whether Hegel appears as hero or villain in these historical narratives, something – usually unspecified – happens to theology in Hegel. In these narratives, Hegel is positioned between Joachim of Fiore and Marx as a point at which the relationship between politics and theology (or religion) is transformed in a way that is dangerously conducive to extreme political positions. Though some of these genealogies offer simplistic readings of Hegel, they nonetheless capture an underlying truth about his philosophy: he develops a notion of the relationship between philosophy and theology that allows for philosophical experimentation with theological concepts. In this implicit political theology, these concepts become resources for thinking about and against the world.
Second, I offer a detailed account of this implicit political theology through a reading of Hegel’s philosophy of religion. The central claim of Hegel’s philosophy of religion is that religion is a form of representational thinking. Religion is thus a form of thought and that form of thought is politically significant. Religion shares a truth with philosophy, but this truth is thought differently. It is this relationship between religion as representation and philosophy, and philosophy’s subsequent freedom to think the world through religion, that is the root of Hegel’s political theological significance. If Schmitt offers the sociology of concepts and Taubes a more inventive critique of the world through theological ideas, then Hegel offers an explanation of how these two approaches are related.
The critiques of political theology discussed in the previous chapter are rooted in a genealogy of messianic and apocalyptic thought. This genealogy is not unique to Lilla, Gray and Svenungsson but stems from a wider tradition of reflecting on the histories of apocalyptic and millennial movements or shifts in the philosophy of history. Examining this underlining historical narrative will show how Hegel has come to occupy a key role in developing themes within political theology. This genealogy is also key to establishing Hegel’s role within Taubes’s and Bloch’s political theologies. Establishing this role is vital – political theology may entail philosophical experimentation with theological concepts, but it is not a decontextualized experimentation. Placing Hegel in the development of the relationship between apocalypticism and the political provides the necessary backdrop for an analysis of Hegel’s implicit political theology and how that method can illuminate Taubes’s work.
While the details of this genealogy vary, there are few consistent figures: Jesus, Paul, Augustine and Joachim de Fiore. Thomas Müntzer also frequently makes an appearance. Eventually, this lineage arrived at the events and names associated with modern political utopias or revolutions: the French Revolution, Marx, Communism and National Socialism. This narrative describes a transformation: theological ideas become secular and political. Much in keeping with Schmitt’s most popular formulation, the idea of revolution turns out to be a secularized version of eschatological, messianic or apocalyptic ideas. Hegel is a central character in this story. In particular, the connection between his philosophy and the theology of Joachim de Fiore becomes key to understanding Hegel’s role in the development of political theology.2
One of the most influential historical accounts positing this connection is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium.3 Cohn focuses on European millennial movements between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries and the story he tells is an indicative example of efforts to establish a historical connection between medieval eschatological ideas and twentieth-century political movements. Cohn’s work is important for two reasons. First, he describes the general social conditions of millennial movements. Second, he links together Joachim, Hegel, Marx and totalitarianism. The story he tells then becomes a template for later critiques of revolutionary political ideas.
Cohn outlines the social and political contexts conducive to millennial views. These ideas tend to gain traction in communities that experience extreme unbalance as they transition from agricultural to more industrial economies. Previous social orders, built around normalized relations between peasants and lords, begin to break down as social mobility increases. Resultant tensions are only exacerbated by increasing population growth and movement. Cohn concludes that poverty and oppression do not provide a sufficient seedbed for millennialism. It is the insecurity caused by shifts in social and political relations that must be added in order for apocalyptic movements to emerge.4 Or, as Yonina Talmon explains, the ‘predisposing factor was often not so much any particular hardship but a markedly uneven relation between expectations and the means of their satisfaction’.5 Radical conditions are required for radical ideas to emerge.
Though Cohn does not make the connection, there is a clear parallel between the sociological analysis of these conditions and Hegel’s description of the Rabble. For Hegel,
The lowest subsistence level, that of a rabble of paupers, is fixed automatically, but the minimum varies considerably in different countries. In England, even the very poorest believe that they have rights; this is different from what satisfies the poor in other countries. Poverty in itself does not turn people into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government, etc. (PR, §244z: 221)
The Rabble does not form as the result of poverty but through a profound sense of alienation.6 Throughout the rest of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the Rabble appears as something that must be contained and controlled. Apocalypticism emerges at the moment the Rabble move from feeling alienated by society to desiring the destruction of a society that they have come to see as essentially unjust. For Cohn, these conditions result in irrational, revolutionary political fantasies.
For where revolutionary chiliasm thrives best is where history is imagined as having an inherent purpose which is preordained to be realised on this earth in a single, final consummation. It is such view of history, at once teleological and cataclysmic, that has been presupposed and invoked alike by the medieval movements described in the present study and by the great totalitarian movements of our day.7
This connection between medieval movements and contemporary political fantasies is Cohn’s second important contribution. His identification of Joachim, a twelfth-century Calabrian prophet, as a key figure in the genealogy of apocalyptic and revolutionary thought continues to shape the construction of this tradition. Joachim is regarded as one of the most significant apocalyptic figures of the Middle Ages and his division of history into three ages forms the connection between more ancient forms of apocalyptic thinking and contemporary political manifestations of that tradition. He prophesized that the defeat of the Antichrist would bring about a spiritual age.8 This spiritual period, lived out on earth, would be one in which humanity’s relationship to law and God was profoundly transformed.
Cohn thinks Joachim would be dismayed by the political gloss his theological vision has received.
Horrified though the unworldly mystic would have been to see it happen, it is unmistakably the Joachite phantasy of the three ages that reappeared in, for instance, the theories of historical evolution expounded by the German Idealist philosophers Lessing, Schelling, Fichte and to some extent Hegel; in August Comte’s idea of history as an ascent from the theological through the metaphysical up to the scientific phase; and again in the Marxian dialectic of the three stages of primitive communism, class society and a final communism which is to be the realm of freedom and in which the state will have withered away.9
His description of the connection between the idea of three ages, modern philosophy and the arrival of ‘totalitarian’ thought and politics means that the irrationalities of millennialism can also be found in contemporary movements. For Cohn, this irrationality is located both in its ecstatic character and its belief in the ability to bring about unlikely or impossible realities. These fantasies, as Cohn so often calls them, are borne of situations in which there are no options. Only the apocalyptic provides a means of organizing and deploying the energies necessary to create hope where none seems possible.
There are reasons to be suspicious of the neatness of Cohn’s historical narrative. In particular, his readiness to link Joachim to every political invocation of the number three has been criticized by historians. Marjoree Reeves and Warwick Gould developed a set of criteria by which to determine whether or not a particular figure could be described as a Joachimist. This criteria centred on the questions ‘in what forms did a direct knowledge of Joachim’s doctrine reach nineteenth-century thinkers, who made conscious use of it, and how did they handle the sources from which they derived their knowledge?’10 While these questions might seem simplistic, Reeves and Gould were responding to a post-World War II resurgence of interest in Joachim and his connection to contemporary ideas of progress and revolution.11 Analysis of this connection was and remains problematic due to similarities between Joachim and other prophetic voices. Especially treacherous, in the opinion of Reeves and Gould, is the lazy connection between tripartite divisions of history and Joachim. Citing John Passmore and Henri de Lubac as examples, they describe how Lessing, Fichte, Schelling, Marx, Comte and Hitler have all been connected to Joachim largely by this unstable bridge.12
In both its strengths and weaknesses, Cohn’s narrative is an illustrative example of the genealogy connecting medieval apocalyptic movements and contemporary politics. He helpfully identifies commonalities between the religious movements and later secular movements. Less helpfully, the actual connection between the two is asserted rather than substantiated. An affinity of ideas does not necessarily indicate an actual connection. The parallels he identifies are significant, but he fails to provide sufficient analysis of how these ideas travel from marginal medieval sects to Stalin. This connection is further weakened by his broad conception of totalitarianism, which includes Fascism, National Socialism and Communism.13
Despite these sometimes tenuous connections, Cohn’s narrative has become a touchstone for the critique of political theology (in the widest sense of the term). His work is the precursor to that of Lilla and Gray, though Svenungsson provides a corrective account of the relationship between Joachim, German Romanticism and German Idealism.14 For contemporary critics of fanatical, apocalyptic or ‘political theological’ ideas, establishing the link between medieval religion and the desire for fundamental social and political change undermines the latter’s legitimacy. This strategy appears even in the work of those otherwise disinterested in such political theological issues. Daniel Bell, for example, in his influential argument that liberal democracy has exhausted all political alternatives, writes,
From the sixteenth-century chiliast, burning with impatient zeal for immediate salvation, to the twentieth-century American labor leader, sunning himself on the sands of Miami, is a long, almost surrealist jump of history. Yet these are antipodal figures of a curving ribbon which binds all movements that have sought to change the hierarchical social order in society.15
So Cohn identifies an affinity between ideas but is unable to establish that this affinity is the result of an underlying intellectual tradition. In some ways, whether or not there is an actual historical connection between Joachim and German Idealism is irrelevant. Later political theologians and their critics both construct a tradition tying together these historical movements. For the purposes of reflecting on apocalyptical political theology, Cohn is an important voice in that process of construction. Though he rushes to lump together disparate forms of political movements under the umbrella of totalitarianism, he correctly identifies an anarchic or revolutionary potential within these apocalyptic ideas. In this sense too, he anticipates Lilla, Gray and Svenungsson in objecting to the anti-liberal aspect of apocalypticism. It would be anachronistic to describe Joachim or other apocalyptic movements of the Middle Ages as anti-liberal, but it is the anti-liberal features of contemporary political movements that he traces back to that period. In the most recent edition of The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn concludes the book by observing that
There are aspects of Nazism and Communism alike that are barely comprehensible, barely conceivable even, to those whose political assumptions and norms are provided by a liberal society, however imperfect . . . Such beliefs seem grotesque, and when one hears them argued they can give one almost the same uncanny feeling as a paranoiac expounding his private systematised delusion. Yet in reality their strangeness springs from the fact that they are rooted in an earlier and forgotten age. However modern their terminology, however realistic their tactics, in their basic attitudes Communism and Nazism follow an ancient tradition – and are baffling to the rest of us because of those very features that would have seemed so familiar to a chiliastic propheta of the Middle Ages.16
While Cohn establishes a key narrative describing the transmission of this ‘ancient tradition’, in that version Hegel occupies a marginal position.17 It is not clear why Cohn differentiates Hegel from the rest of the German Idealists that he claims are influenced by Joachim. The separation is particularly confusing given Cohn’s emphasis on Marx, whose understanding of history is clearly developed in relationship to Hegel’s philosophy. Whatever reasons for this aspect of Cohn’s argument, other tellings of this story offer Hegel a more central role.
Karl Löwith, for example, offers a similar account, though he is concerned with the philosophy of history rather than millenarian movements. He describes his Meaning in History as a succinct summary of the philosophy of history as a ‘practice’. Löwith understands this practice to consist of the ‘systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning’.18 He argues that this reading of history is ‘entirely dependent on the theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of history as a history of fulfilment and salvation’.19 Löwith presents the development of this relation between the philosophy of history and theological ideas of history in reverse from Burkhardt to the biblical text. That long historical journey passes through Hegel.
For Löwith, Hegel obscures the fact that his view of history is really just ‘the pattern of the realization of the Kingdom of God, and philosophy as the intellectual worship of a philosophical God’.20 Hegel’s history is theological in two senses. First, it preserves the providential directionality of Christianity. Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ guides the actions of individuals, who think they are acting of their own will, in order to achieve the realization of absolute reason. In this sense, Hegel’s history is ‘secretly’ Christian, philosophically papering over theological concepts. Second, the figure of Christ is central to Hegel’s history. ‘With Christ the time is fulfilled, and the historical world becomes, in principle, perfect, for only the Christian God is truly spirit and at the same time man. This principle constitutes the axis on which turns the history of the world.’21 For Löwith, the connection between the philosophy of history and theology is so profound that Hegel is actually the last philosopher of history. After Hegel, Christianity’s dominance of the organization of history begins to break down. Löwith is critical of Hegel’s philosophy, arguing that it problematically assumes the possibility of a speculative philosophy realizing the Christian faith or even the possibility of such a realization.22
As Löwith argues, these theological aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history have clear parallels to Joachim. Meaning in History provides a more thorough description of Joachim’s teaching than Cohn and this thoroughness enables a greater understanding of these parallels as well as the important differences between their conceptions of history. While Hegel may adopt a similar pattern, Joachim’s version of the end is both more traditional and more radical. He is more traditional in that he preserves a greater continuity with the Catholic church of his age. At the same time, there is a greater anarchism to his final age, which includes ‘the liquidation of preaching and sacraments, the mediating power of which becomes obsolete when the spiritual order is realized which possess knowledge of God by direct vision and contemplation’.23 Like Cohn, Löwith also explains the connection between these ideas and later political moments.
The political implications of Joachim’s historical prophecies were neither foreseen nor intended by him. Nevertheless, they were plausible consequences of his general scheme; for, when Joachim opened the door to a fundamental revision of a thousand years of Christian history and theology by proclaiming a new and last dispensation, he questioned implicitly not only the traditional authority of the church but also the temporal order. His expectation of a last providential progress toward the fulfilment of the history of salvation within the framework of the history of the world is radically new.24
Or again, ‘Joachim, like Luther after him, could not foresee that his religious intention – that of desecularizing the church and restoring its spiritual fervor – would, in the hands of others, turn into its opposite: the secularization of the world which became increasingly worldly by the very fact that eschatological thinking about last things was introduced into penultimate matters.’25 For Löwith, this means that German Idealism, Marxism and the Third Reich are all perversions of the original theological intentions of Joachim, but connected to Joachim nonetheless. This connection is the ground of a new kind of history. This new history is contrasted to the view of traditional theology, represented for Löwith, as for Taubes and Bloch, by Augustine. Traditional Augustinian, that is institutional, Christianity writes history with an eye for self-preservation; put differently, the history of Christianity is the history of the Church. Hegel is a Joachimist in seizing upon a different notion of the history of Christianity.
Cohn and Löwith thus offer two versions of the same underlying narrative: the conversion of theological ideas about history into secular political concepts. In both, this development runs from traditional forms of Christianity to Joachim through Hegel to Marx. Both are critical of this tradition, expressing concerns about these connections between the theological and the political.
This same historical narrative, and much of the same interpretation, is shared by those who find these connections resources for critique and hope rather than causes for concern. The anarchic and revolutionary potential that worries Cohn and Löwith energizes Taubes and Bloch. For this latter pair, Joachim plays a central role in a genealogy that leads to Hegel and then fractures into the two alternatives of Kierkegaard and Marx.
Taubes links Hegel and Joachim early on in his discussion of the nature of eschatology (OE, 12). While the narrative is the same, Taubes offers his distinctive apocalyptic interpretation of Hegel. After critiquing both historicism, which he associates with conservative Hegelians, and the ‘ideology of progress’, Taubes offers a rival understanding – an apocalyptic ontology rooted in both the Joachimist tradition and Hegelian philosophy (OE, 13). For this apocalypticism, history is the period that stretches between creation and redemption.
In contrast to Löwith, Taubes places Hegel at the periphery of, if not outside, traditional theological understandings of history.26 If for Löwith, Hegel was the last philosopher of history because he was the last to maintain the Christian notion of universal history, in Taubes’s account Hegel and Marx reinaugurate a form of thinking lost due to Christianity’s submission to Aristotelian and Scholastic logic (OE, 35). This lost form of thinking had also been preserved by others, which Taubes describes in later sections, but it takes on a new, reinvigorated form in Hegel’s philosophy. This form of thought is dialectics. ‘Dialectical logic is a logic of history, giving rise to the eschatological interpretation of the world’ (OE, 35). This connection between eschatology and dialectics is not accidental in Hegel’s philosophy, but essential to understanding its implications. ‘Apocalypticism and Gnosis form the basis of Hegel’s logic, which is often discussed but seldom understood. The connection between apocalyptic ontology and Hegelian logic is neither artificial nor an afterthought’ (OE, 36). Taubes relies on Bauer’s famous work to justify this claim, but subsequent research by Laurence Dickey, Cyril O’Regan and Glenn Alexander Magee has continued to develop the understanding of Hegel’s relationship to mystical, gnostic and other heterodox traditions.27
Taubes presents two interlinked genealogies: one theological and the other philosophical. Like Löwith, he traces this theological tradition back to biblical texts. Taubes works through Daniel, Jesus, the Gospel of John, Paul, into the early Christian church and Origen.28 In this early Christian period, the focus is on apocalyptic ideas. Following Origen, however, Augustine introduces a fundamental shift in the Christian church’s view of eschatology. ‘Instead of the concept of universal eschatology, individual eschatology emerges. The destiny of the soul is central and the End Time is eclipsed from the last day of human life . . . Universal eschatology, which bears within it the expectation of the Kingdom, from now on appears within the Christian sphere of influence as heresy’ (OE, 80). This first section of his theological genealogy concludes with Joachim, who relocates the promises of universal eschatology to a new age. They are inscribed within history rather than beyond it. Taubes is thus in agreement with Svenungsson’s description of Joachim’s theology as a form of ‘non-eschatological apocalypticism’.29 This transferral breaks with the underlying Augustinian metaphysics that dominated medieval Christianity’s understanding of history.30 His genealogy resumes with Thomas Müntzer before jumping to Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, the text that transfers the chiliastic sense of history from Joachim to Hegel and German Idealism. For Taubes, Lessing’s text ‘is the first manifesto of philosophical chiliasm’ (OE, 86). The end of history, Joachim’s third age, becomes Hegel’s kingdom of the mind. The left Hegelians, like the Joachimists, devote themselves to the realization of this kingdom of the mind on earth. It is this ‘on earth’ that essentially links Joachim and Hegel, their mutual ‘equation of the history of the spirit with the course of world history’ (OE, 93).
Taubes then shifts to a philosophical history of the same ideas. This history includes Leibniz, Lessing and Kant before again arriving at Hegel.
Working from the principles of love and freedom, which are identical in the essence of the spirit, Joachim and Hegel construct world history from the perspective of an end to fulfilment. They both consider the history of the spirit to be synonymous with the course of history. Just as Joachim’s exegesis interprets the metaphysical fate of Christ, including the resurrection, in terms of a historical dialectic, Hegel, too, in his philosophy of religion, builds his dialectical, historical speculations on the foundation of death and resurrection. (OE, 162)
Taubes concludes his study with the splitting of the Hegelian legacy by Kierkegaard and Marx. He treats both as valid heirs of Hegel, the former turning Hegel’s philosophy inward to the subject, the latter directing it outwards into society.31
Bloch, like Taubes, claims a strong connection between Joachim and Hegel. His Atheism in Christianity is effectively a political theological genealogy, suggesting that Christianity’s destiny is its own end. Again, the links between Joachim, Hegel and Marx are essential to this story. Bloch divides Christianity into two basic tendencies: religion of the On-high and religion from below (AC, 13–15). These correspond to two contrary aspects of the biblical text: creation and apocalypse. The task taken up by Bloch is the ‘detective work’ of discerning which texts and ideas fall into each of these categories (AC, 57–70). He runs through an analysis of recent (for him) biblical hermeneutics before beginning his own interpretation of the text. Compared to Taubes, Bloch’s treatment of both Joachim and Hegel is brief. His reading of the Old and New Testaments, though, is littered with references to Origen, Joachim, Müntzer, Hegel and Marx. Bloch is less focused on drawing actual, historical connections than Cohn, Löwith and even Taubes. Rather, they are presented as key figures of the tradition of realizing Christianity from below in opposition to that of the On-high.
While Bloch’s discussion of Hegel is slightly more sustained than his treatment of Joachim, the specifics of neither are of particular concern to him at this point. Bloch is important here not for his insights into Joachim and Hegel but for the interpretation he offers of the tradition as a whole. Bloch develops a reading quite similar to Taubes, though one that remains implicit underneath his reading of the biblical text. If for Taubes, the essential thesis of this genealogy is the ever-greater realization of the identity of the history of spirit and the history of the world, Bloch’s insight is the reframing of the history of theological development given this identity. Rather than dismissing mythology or religion, Bloch returns to it convinced of this identity to reread the tradition of Christianity.
What is clear is that for Taubes and Bloch, as well as many others, Hegel transforms theology in a key way. Whether the genealogy connecting early Christianity, Joachim, Hegel and Marx is regarded as a dangerous source of extreme ideas or a resource for utopian or revolutionary ideas, Hegel is there. For Taubes and Bloch, Hegel is not secularizing theological concepts, but the theological is not unadulterated for having passed through Hegel. If he is to be a resource for the development of an apocalyptic political theology, the precise nature of this transformation needs to be made clear. Only with that understanding in place, can I turn to thinking apocalyptically with Taubes and Malabou.
Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are consistent themes from Hegel’s early writings through to the end of his life. Across this body of work, Hegel repeatedly returns to the social and political significance of religion as a distinct mode of consciousness. Religion not only plays a key role as a ground for the emergence of philosophy, it is essential to the development and maintenance of the ethical community or Sittlichkeit. This ethical community is the end goal of Hegel’s political thought and, in many ways, his whole philosophical project.
In order to understand this wider political significance, it is necessary to understand the difference between religion and philosophy. Religion and philosophy share a truth but differ in the way that truth is thought.32 Whereas philosophy is concerned with truth in its abstract form, religion grasps the same truth in the form of representations. Philosophy’s task is to understand this difference. In this sense, philosophical thinking develops out of religion’s self-understanding. By tracing this development, the nature of religion, philosophy and their relation will become clearer.
Hegel explains the relationship between representational thought and philosophy by tracing the movement from art through religion to philosophy. In the Encyclopaedia he writes,
Whereas the vision-method of art, external in point of form, is but subjective production and shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes, and whereas religion, with its separation into parts, opens it out in representation, and mediates what is thus opened out; philosophy not merely keeps them together to make a totality, but even unifies them into the simple spiritual vision, and then in that raises them to self-conscious thought. Such consciousness is thus the intelligible unity (cognized by thought) of art and religion, in which the diverse elements in the content are cognized as necessary, and this necessary as free. (E3, §572: 302/554–5)
Here, philosophy is the means of raising religious thought to the level of self-consciousness. What religion considers a narrative of separate moments linked together through a process of historical unfolding, philosophy comprehends conceptually and in its unity. From the perspective of religion, these moments are external. For Hegel, the paradigmatic example is the Incarnation. The birth, life and death of Christ and Pentecost are presented as historical events by Christianity. Philosophically they are representations of necessary modes in the development of self-consciousness. The route for attaining this self-consciousness in relation to religious ideas is explained in the following paragraph of the Encyclopaedia. ‘Philosophy thus characterizes itself as a cognition of the necessity in the content of the absolute representation’, which in the religious representations is presented in the form of ‘first the subjective retreat inwards, then the subjective movement of faith and its final identification with the presupposed object’ (E3, §573: 302/555). The story of the Incarnation is really the story of subjectivity that encounters an externality that drives thought inward, beginning a process that culminates with the realization that the God ‘out there’ is not external at all.
These dense passages are essential to grasping the relationship between philosophy and religion. As much of recent Hegel literature has argued, his main goal is to demonstrate the necessary shape of thought itself.33 Religious representation is one specific form of thought, consisting of a distinct configuration of self-consciousness, the subject–object relation and the absolute.
Hegel offers a similar explanation at the beginning of the section on religion in the Phenomenology. Earlier sections of the text deal with religion, ‘although only from the standpoint of the consciousness that is conscious of absolute notion; but absolute notion in and for itself, the self-consciousness of Spirit, has not appeared in those “shapes” ’ (PS, §672: 410/495). To use terminology Hegel employs elsewhere, spirit has appeared as object but not yet as subject. Religion in its broadest Hegelian usage, including natural religion, religion in the form of art and revealed religion, marks a decisive move from relating to the absolute as an externality to an understanding of the absolute as something immanent to the sphere of human activity. Terry Pinkard offers a succinct summary:
Hegel’s point is that we regard as divine, as the object of awe and reverence, that which we take to be the ‘ground’ of all belief and action, and that which we take to have absolute value; the concept of the divine is not at first identical with the concept of self-founding humanity, but in working out the insufficiencies of its previous accounts of itself, humanity as ‘self-conscious spirit’ comes to realize that identity, to see the divine as implicit in its own activity of reflection on what it can take as divine.34
Again, the same themes are present: religion regards something as external, other and infinite in relation to the finite self. The narrative core of the Phenomenology is the gradual realization of the divine within the subjectivity of human community.
So religion and philosophy share a truth. Philosophy understands this truth conceptually and realizes that the divine and human are identical, while religion thinks this truth through representations. ‘Representation’ is a translation of the German Vorstellung, a term that, as is often the case with Hegel, presents some challenges.35 Miller, in his translation of the Phenomenology, uses ‘picture-thinking’. While picture-thinking captures an aspect of representation, it has overly visual connotations. I follow Peter Hodgson, Terry Pinkard and others in preferring representation.36 This alternative term allows for a wider range of meanings. Representations can be ideas or feelings; indeed, representation in both these senses is essential to understanding religion’s role in Hegel’s philosophy.
Hegel explains this understanding of Vorstellung as a mode of spirit’s self-consciousness.
So far as Spirit in religion represents itself to itself, it is indeed consciousness, and the reality enclosed within religion is the shape and the guise of its representational thought. But, in this representational thought, reality does not receive its perfect due, viz. to be not merely a guise but an independent free existence; and, conversely, because it lacks perfection within itself it is a determinate shape which does not attain to what it ought to show forth, viz. Spirit that is conscious of itself. If its shape is to express Spirit itself, it must be nothing else than Spirit, and Spirit must appear to itself, or be in actuality, what it is in its essence. (PS, §678: 412/497–8)
Here, Hegel specifies two key elements of this discussion of religion. First, as seen above, religion culminates in the recognition of the identity of spirit’s existence and self-consciousness. Second, representational form of thought is at least initially an obstacle to this goal. Hegel further elaborates this second point at the outset of the Encyclopaedia, explaining that representations share the content of thought, but that this content is presented as an ‘admixture’ with the form of the representation. Thus, while ‘the content is ob-ject of our consciousness . . . the determinacies of these forms join themselves onto the content; with the result that each of these forms seems to give to rise to a particular ob-ject’ (E1, §3: 26/44). Manifestations of philosophical truths as external objects and historical events means that these truths have a force that often eludes abstract formulations, but the truths of those objects and events can all too easily be confused with the objects and events themselves. This manifestation as a specific object is both the source of religion’s force in society and an obstacle to its elevation to thought.
Conceiving of religion as representation means that Hegel’s theological reflections take on a distinct role. Religious thought is representational and his discussion of the crucifixion or Pentecost should be understood within that wider philosophical framework. The importance of representation for interpreting Hegel’s philosophy of religion can be hard to keep in mind, as Hegel offers extended theological commentary. Indeed, his writing can give the sense that it is theology that should take priority over philosophy (or that his philosophy is deeply theological). For instance, in the introductory materials of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, he states that his philosophy is a continuation of natural theology, before claiming that
God is the one and only object of philosophy. [Its concern is] to occupy itself with God, to apprehend everything in him, to lead everything back to him, as well as to derive everything particular from God and to justify everything only insofar as it stems from God, is sustained through its relationship with him, lives by his radiance and has [within itself] the mind of God. Thus philosophy is theology, and [one’s] occupation with philosophy – or rather in philosophy – is of itself the service of God. (LPR1, 84/6)
Hegel provides proofs for the existence of God and explores the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. From examples such as these, it is clear why more theological interpretations of Hegel have dominated Hegel scholarship. The interpretative direction of any reading ultimately hinges on the degree of emphasis placed on the idea of representation. For in the same section of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel goes on to specify that ‘the whole of our treatment – indeed, even immediate religion itself – is nothing other than the development of the concept, and that [in turn] is nothing other than the positing of what is contained in the concept. This positing constitutes the reality of the concept; it elevates and perfects the concept into the idea’ (LPR1, 110–11/30–1). Hegel makes the same point in the Philosophy of Right. In a passage particularly relevant to the political theology being developed here, he writes,
The essence of the relation between religion and the state can be determined, however, only if we recall the concept of religion. The content of religion is absolute truth, and consequently the most elevated of all dispositions is to be found in religion. As intuition, feeling, representational knowledge [vorstellende Erkenntnis], its concern is with God as the unrestricted principle and cause on which everything hangs. It thus involves the demand that everything else shall be seen in this light and depend on it for corroboration, justification, and verification. (PR, §270r: 242/417)37
This relation between representation and concept, religion and philosophy, is the starting point for thinking about Hegel’s implicit political theological method. Representations are one relation to truth and philosophy another. If religion, in the course of representing that truth, comes to understand the dynamics of representation, that effects a transition to philosophy. Philosophy then grasps representations as representations, in the unity of content and form.
But why is this necessary? A hasty reading might conclude that Hegel is offering an evolutionary account of thought. People were once religious but now, having cast aside useless representations, they can emerge into philosophical light. Yet it is clear that Hegel means something else. Representations continue to be necessary, as the above discussion of their political significance indicates. Understanding this significance, and further grasping the relation between philosophy and religion, requires delving deeper into the nature and function of representations.
Thus far, I have shown Hegel’s understanding of religion in relationship to philosophy, emphasizing the importance of his concept of representation. When Hegel discusses religion as representation, he argues that it is both necessary and problematic. It is necessary in that it facilitates the development of self-consciousness, but problematic in that the representations can be confused with the truth they represent. Up to this point, Hegel’s insights are helpful for thinking about political theology in the broad sense of political religion.38 Religious ideas (as well as experiences and affects) are a form of relating to truth and that relationship has political significance. That significance is distinct from, but still related to, the more narrow sense of political theology that I am developing here. I am claiming that beneath Hegel’s wider philosophy of religion, there is an implicit political theology. Still rooted in the notion of religion as representation, this more subterranean political theology takes theology as a way of engaging the world.
While there has been a significant amount of work on Hegel’s notion of representation, this has focused on religion in isolation from politics. In particular, Malcolm Clark’s Logic and System and Kathleen Dow Magnus’s Hegel and Symbolic Mediation both provide a helpful analysis of the function of representation in Hegel’s philosophy. Yet, Clark’s systematic overview leaves little space for an in-depth consideration of religion, and Magnus concentrates on theological elements without connecting them to politics.39 Thomas Lewis provides the connection between religion as representation, on the one hand, and philosophy and the state, on the other, but is less concerned with an analysis of the dynamics of representation itself. Taken together, though, Clark, Magnus and Lewis will help clarify the central role of representation in Hegel’s implicit political theology.
Clark, Magnus and Lewis are all agreed that representation plays an ongoing and central role in Hegel’s philosophical system. To reiterate an earlier point, thought does not dispense with representation after arriving at philosophy. As Clark shows, this creates a tension between a system that is expressed through representations, the ‘other’ of thought, while simultaneously systematizing the functioning of representations.
Hence the paradox of Hegel’s system: logical thought is at once the whole of philosophy and but a part of it. In Hegel’s own terms, logical thought contains its other. That is, true philosophical thought contains all reality and is not simply opposed and applied to it. Nevertheless, thought contains reality as its other, not merely as a ‘confused thought’, but as that which reduces the system of pure thought to one part of a greater whole.40
Representations and philosophy as pure thought are parts of a whole, a whole that philosophy thinks in its totality, but also a whole that contains the other of pure thought. It is a difficult balance to hold – philosophy thinks the dynamics of thought in its abstractness, comprehending that which it cannot reduce to itself.
Magnus confronts the same problem. Her exploration of representations is written in response to Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s supposed elision of sensuousness. The specifics of that critique are not key for this present discussion, so suffice it to say that Derrida is concerned that the material ground and ambiguity of any metaphor are domesticated by Hegel’s treatment of metaphor.41 This critique is frequently lodged against Hegel: all of reality is reduced to abstract conceptuality. For Derrida, this allows Hegel to hide ‘a fundamental contradiction: self-grounding spirit negates the sensuous element of reality in the same moment that it uses it’.42 Here, there is a parallel between Clark and Magnus; both explore the ways in which Hegel depicts representations leading to a concept which comprehends that act of representation in its essentiality. While this comprehension places the concept ‘above’ representation, it does not remove the need for representations. So spirit does not need to negate the sensuous element of reality but can grasp that sensuous element in its otherness to pure thought. That does not presuppose a rejection of that sensuousness, though it does transform the relationship. What both Clark and Magnus show is that Hegel’s philosophy has to be read dynamically. It is thought in motion. Any argument that claims representation is somehow overcome or left behind is guilty of freezing Hegel’s thought in the moment of the concept rather than continuing to follow the trajectory of pure thought from its abstractness back to its interaction with sensuousness. It is for this reason that the Phenomenology can be read as loop. Its conclusion is not an end, but now enables the reader to return to the beginning to comprehend the journey of self-consciousness from the perspective of spirit (PS, §20: 11/24).
Put another way, the persistence of representational thinking is sometimes overlooked in thinking about Hegel’s understanding of philosophy. As Clark argues,
Before it can rise above the limitations of mere consciousness and become the infinite, self-relating unity its concept supposes it to be, it must appear to itself as outside of itself. It must, in other words, take on various symbolic forms. But even after it recognizes its object as itself in absolute religion, spirit remains in need of the symbolic. Its discovery of its self-identity does not delete its internal difference; its being as spirit eliminates neither its experience as consciousness nor its need for symbolic representation.43
Clark describes this necessity of representation as the return to representation: ‘If philosophical thought be seen as abandoning its stake in the familiar world, it is only in order to return to a profounder experience of it. The transition from Vorstellung to thought is itself but an abstraction of the concrete movement which includes no less a return from thought to Vorstellung.’44
One of the continuing roles of representation is to provoke thought. In Magnus’s reading of Hegel, ‘symbols are in a certain sense the negative of thought; they are the material thought must transform in order to be thought’.45 Or as Clark claims, ‘Vorstellung must be seen both as thought and as the “other” of thought.’46 This otherness is not an externality, though it initially manifests as such. In terms of religion, representations begin as the other in the form of the divine object, then as divine subject, before absolute religion’s realization that the consciousness of divine subjectivity is a moment of self-consciousness. This process thus represents spirit’s self-alienation into the form of another subject, to which it relates. This transition marks the move from a divine object to divine subject, which prepares the grounds for recognizing the identity of human and divine subjectivity – the becoming substance of subject. Yet all the while, otherness is maintained. The transition is not one of otherness to sameness, but otherness is misidentified as external, to the recognition of otherness as interior.47
These statements should be read in light of Hegel’s claim that spirit is the unity of identity and difference. Symbolic thought is not completely eliminated in the course of this process. Rather it is maintained as a negativity necessary for the continual activity that spirit is. As Magnus explains, spirit
never gets to the point of being able to ‘be’ in a simple, immediate, or nondifferentiated way. Spirit’s identity depends upon the real difference it bears within itself. Its identification is only as true as its difference . . . Spirit never gets to the point of being able to deny or cancel its intrinsic negativity because this negativity is essential to what spirit is. It cannot forget or disregard its internal difference because this difference is the source and substance of its life. For Hegel, spirit, the ultimate truth of reality, is something that both is there and something that makes itself be there; it is both immediate and mediated, self-identical and self-differentiating. Spirit is the activity that unites these two dimensions of reality.48
This understanding of representation is the ground of Magnus’s rejection of Derrida’s accusation that Hegel ultimately resolves every negative into a positive. Derrida’s reading is in one sense true – Hegel does have a complete system which one could regard as resolving every negative, but only if ‘every negative’ is taken to refer to contradictions emerging within the categories of thought. ‘Both alienation and totality, identity and difference, remain a part of what spirit is. Spirit reconciles these two sides, but, as Hegel points out over and over again, spirit is the continual activity of this reconciliation, not merely the end result of it.’49 This understanding still allows for negativity, it just comprehends the way negativity ‘works’ in the broader philosophical system. As I will argue in my reading of Malabou, this insight parallels Hegel’s argument for the necessity of contingency and the refutation of critiques of Hegel as a totalizing thinker. Representation marks one of the points at which Hegel asserts the identity of identity and difference: ‘the difference intrinsic to the symbol remains within spirit as part of its act of self-identification. Logically speaking, there can be no self-identifying spirit that does not also contain and bear difference within it.’50 This further clarifies the relationship between representation and philosophy. Magnus and Clark show the ongoing necessity of representation. As Magnus writes, ‘we can come to see how the contradictoriness, negativity, and “otherness” inherent to spirit is less an impediment to spirit’s self-realization than the condition for it.’51
If Magnus and Clark track the mechanics of representation, Lewis draws out the key social and political consequences of this approach to understanding religion. For Lewis, the continuing need for representations is primarily related to the ultimate goal of Hegel’s philosophy: the cultivation of an ethical society and the strengthening of the state. Such a society and state requires social cohesion, and religion can be one source of this communal bond.52 ‘Hegel argues that although religious representations do not cognize the truth as adequately as philosophical thinking does, these religious representations are still capable of instilling and expressing the reconciliation necessary for social cohesion.’53 The external form that complicates the apprehension of truth is necessary for the cultivation of a bond that goes beyond abstract thought to a form of feeling (PR, §270; 244/418).54 Their externalized form makes representations more accessible than philosophy’s abstract formulations, as they are ingrained in rituals and impact communities on an emotional level.55 It is representations, not abstract thought, that provide the ‘existential matrix’ of life.56
For Lewis, the social function of religion eclipses the traditional sense of a belief in a more or less stable set of dogmatic beliefs.57 This understanding of religion as representation means that ‘God’ no longer need refer to a transcendent being and that the question of the existence of God becomes mostly irrelevant. Indeed, what Hegel conceptualizes as religion need not be what is typically conceived of as a religious community or tradition.58 John Burbidge makes a similar case for an expanded sense of religion. ‘It is potentially a universal phenomenon that singular, historical incarnation passes away and becomes universal. So Jesus is now only one among many – the Koran; the founding of Israel, Sri Aurobindo; the Jacobite revolution (or the Paris commune); nature’s struggle for survival; the traditional Ojibwa hunter, smoking a peace pipe over the bear he has just killed; Freud’s therapies . . . Each has become the focus of stories, because in each all the transcendent and ultimate has become actual.’59 In this wider notion of religion, God is the representational name of the unity of being and thought.60 Hegel moves from the divine to the divine concept, claiming that ‘this movement of thinking itself, of the concept itself, is that for which we should have the utmost awe. It is at the heart of, in some sense, everything and consequently is appropriately referred to as “divine.” ’61 The resulting philosophy of religion develops ‘a conception of religion that supports social solidarity for the broader populace’.62
Together Magnus, Clark and Lewis provide a description of Hegel’s understanding of religion as a politically charged form of thought that enables a different mode of relating to the truth of philosophy. This understanding sheds new light on Hegel’s own use of theological concepts, but it still leaves open the question of constructive engagements with those representations. If philosophy can explain how representations have meaning within a community, can it also use representations to make new meaning?
In the course of the discussion, I have argued that representational forms of thought are both necessary and problematic. Representations tend to become divorced from the act of representing undertaken by the subject. This subject then relates to its own representations as external objects rather than tools for reflective practices. ‘Religion thus effects a double alienation: The self is alienated from what it conceives to be absolute and from the actual world. The revealed religion partially overcomes this alienation in the cultus, but precisely insofar as it completes this overcoming, it passes from religion into philosophy.’63
This transition from religion to philosophy involves a kind of cancellation but also preserves representational thought.64 Having arrived at philosophy, representations are now viewed in their appropriate light, but continue to function as a moment of that philosophy. As Hegel explains in the Phenomenology, spirit maintains the universal determinations of consciousness, self-consciousness and reason, but as moments of the unity that is spirit.
Religion presupposes that these have run their full course and is their simple totality or absolute self. The course traversed by these moments is, moreover, in relation to religion, not to be represented as occurring in time. Only the totality of spirit is in time, and the ‘shapes’, which are ‘shapes’ of the totality of spirit, display themselves in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure freedom in face of an ‘other’, a form which expresses itself as time. (PS, §679: 413/498)
Understanding this relationship, philosophy preserves representational thinking as part of the whole it comprehends.
There are two aspects to the preservation of representational thinking: the representations themselves are preserved as well as representational thinking as such. As Magnus and Clark argue, representations as the other of thought, trouble abstract conceptuality, continuing to drive its movement. It is at this point that the inventive possibilities of Hegel’s implicit political theology become clear. It is not only that representations are externalized truths that philosophy can understand as part of self-consciousness. Philosophy can continue to use those representations and engage in other forms of representational thinking. Put more succinctly, philosophical thought can return to representations and experiment with ever new ways of thinking the world.
The return to representations is not something that Hegel discusses in his major works or lectures. He does, however, explore this idea in his response to Karl Friedrich Göschel, the author of Aphorisms on Ignorance and Absolute Knowledge (Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen).65 Published in 1829, Göschel argues against the ‘ignorance’ of Jacobi, the theology of feeling found in those like Schleiermacher and the varieties of theological rationalism that emerge after Kant. While these specifics are not relevant to the present task, Hegel’s review of the book provides some interesting reflections on the nature of Hegel’s understanding of religion.
In the initial sections of the review, Hegel summarizes the main features of the book, occasionally pausing to offer remarks on the relationship between religion and philosophy. These comments are similar to the arguments found in the Phenomenology, the Encyclopaedia and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. He then addresses a question raised by Göschel on the point of the relation of Hegel’s philosophy to scripture.
The question, namely, is whether this philosophy would not gain in definiteness and clarity in its progress if it were to attach itself more decisively to the Word of God out of which it has developed; if it were to proceed more definitely and in name (i.e., with the naming of names) from the sin which has become manifest to it as abstraction, without the presupposition of which no understanding of the world is possible, without the recognition of which no self-knowledge is possible, and without the transcendence of which no knowledge of God is possible. According to this philosophy itself, it is not thought but representation which is highest. (RG, 1:389/377)
Affirming this higher role of representation would allow Hegel’s philosophy more clearly to demonstrate its connection to scripture. Hegel acknowledges there is some truth to Göschel’s claim, but quickly moves to refute it. The passage warrants citing at length,
The author has touched on an interesting point – the general transition from representation to the concept and from the concept to representation, a two-way transition which is already present in scientific mediation, and which here meets with the demand that it be also expressed in the scientific exposition . . . The present reviewer may, at least with a view to apologizing for the imperfection of his works in this respect, recall that it is precisely from the beginning, to which the author as well refers, which chiefly imposes the necessity of holding more fixedly to the concept which is expressed in pure thoughts, and which has often been won in hard battle with representation. This at once means the necessity of attaching to the course of the concept’s development, of holding oneself more strictly in its tracks so as to win self-assurance with respect to it, and of holding off by force the distractions which the manysidedness makes the danger of yielding something in the methodological strictness of thought too close for comfort. But greater firmness attained in the movement of the concept will license greater unconcern before the temptation of representation, and at once allow representation to breathe more freely within the overlordship [Herrschaft] of the concept; and to do so with as little fear of its consequences as concern over its [internal] coherence, which – in relation to presupposed faith – need not prove itself free. (RG, 1:390/378–9)66
Hegel thus argues that his presentations of the relationship between representation and concept have been pedagogically necessary for the historically situated task of elevating humanity to conceptual thought. As Clark Butler explains in his commentary on Hegel’s relationship with Göschel, ‘Once the transition from representation to the concept has been made, an enlivening transition from the concept back to representation is permissible. Freer reign can be given for representation to develop under the ascendancy of the concept.’67
Shortly after Hegel clarifies the two-way transition between representation and concept, he addresses a common flaw in the critiques of speculative philosophy, namely their one-sided determination.
Such determinations, as previously indicated, are in part called forth by falsification of the speculative fact and put forth as a complaint against that fact. But they are also in a part advanced as assertions against this fact. Such one-sided determinations, [viewed] as bound up with the matter, are moments of its concept which thus arise, in the course of the exposition of it, in their momentary positions. The negation of these moments must be exhibited in the immanent dialectic of the concept. This negation, insofar as such moments have been posited as objections, assumes the guise of their refutation. (RG, 1:392/380–1, emphasis mine)
Not only does this reaffirm the emphasis on the dynamic immanent movement of the dialectic, but it also provides a basis for extending Hegel’s argument further. The cessation of movement at the concept allows a one-sided determination of the concept itself. Conceptual thought must return to the level of representation in order to be actualized. The abstraction of the concept is not final, but generative.
Here, it is possible to push past Hegel’s own stated conclusions. In returning to representations the concept not only allows ‘greater unconcern’, it enables the transformation of representations. As is clear in his review, Hegel does not see a great need for revising those representations. He is primarily concerned with affirming Göschel’s position that scripture may be used to cultivate philosophical thought. I am claiming that it is possible to go further: not only should conceptual thought return to representations, but these representations can be transformed. These kinds of transformations are implicit within Hegel’s formulations of Christian doctrines such as sin or the Trinity. Another way of expressing Hegel’s heterodoxy is to view these doctrines as transformed by the return from the concept. These transformations are politically significant as convictions about justice, social order and rights mutate in the representational laboratory of political theology.68 Having understood the necessity of representations, it becomes necessary, as Magnus argues, ‘to think through the representations given to us, regardless of what they are. Only in this way can they become our own. Only in this way can they be transformed from something imposed upon us to something determined by us. To use Hegel’s terminology: only this way does spirit’s abstract being in itself become for itself and free.’69
Hegel has two interrelated political theologies and understanding religion as representation is essential to both. First, there is a broad political theology that argues for the importance of religion to the life of the state. Second, there is an implicit, narrow political theology that develops an understanding of the relationship between religion and philosophy, allowing for philosophy to inventively and experimentally use theological ideas to think the world.
In the genealogies of political theological themes offered by Cohn, Löwith, Taubes and Bloch, Hegel plays a key role. Something significant happens to theology in Hegel and that transformation remains significant for reflecting on politics today. This transformation involves conceptions of history and the development of dialectical thought, but there is also a shift in the way that Hegel uses theology. Theology becomes a way of philosophically thinking the world. Though it requires pushing past Hegel’s own conclusions, I argue that there is a way of reading Hegel as experimenting with theological concepts. That experimentation, along with Schmitt’s sociology of concepts, is at the centre of a narrow form of political theology that engages in an inventive use of theology to critique the world. While neither Taubes nor Bloch appeal to Hegel’s concept of representation, they engage in this form of experimentation. They both express a lack of concern before representations. Theological concepts become tools of thought, critique and revolution. Both Taubes and Bloch trace the malleability of religious doctrines and then transform Jewish and Christian teachings in order to express more clearly the insights they find in the Hegelian system. Of course, this reformulation is not all they accomplish and both Taubes and Bloch express wariness of Hegelian philosophy.
At the conclusion of the first chapter, I noted three persistent questions that confront apocalyptic political theology. First, there is the issue of political theological method and the relationship between theology and philosophy. This chapter has offered an answer to that question, finding in religious representations the impetus towards philosophical thought as well as the persistent ‘other of thought’. Political theology, as a discourse of limits, beginnings and endings, is concerned with the boundaries of what can be defended. In theological concepts such as apocalypse, philosophy finds an other that pushes it to think anew. Thus, in keeping with the opening call for a desecularizing political theology, there is no hierarchy between theology and philosophy. Both are useful for critiquing the world.
That leaves the remaining questions of novelty, trauma and pessimism. If philosophy can return to religious representations and creatively engage them to think the world, how can apocalypticism offer the possibility of an immanent novelty? Taubes will begin to answer these questions, but the possibility of newness is closely followed by the shadow of destruction. Reading Taubes together with Malabou then, will provide insights on the particular form of hope that accompanies the trauma of the end of the world.