1Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007), 48. See also Schmitt’s view of Hegel’s relationship to Marx in the translator’s comments in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 106n.16.
2Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 218.
1Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 36.
2Schmitt’s definition of political theology can be ambiguous and shifts over time. At points he seems to want a stronger form of political theology than the methodological version described here, even as that methodological approach continues to dominate his work. On these ambiguities and the way that others have approached them, see Benjamin Lazier, ‘On the Origins of “Political Theology”: Judaism and Heresy between the World Wars’, New German Critique 35, no. 3 (2008): 147.
3Schmitt, Political Theology, 45.
4Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.
5This work is clearest in Schmitt’s study of liberalism and democracy in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), his study of the emergence of international law in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003) and his analysis of the changing nature of warfare in Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2007).
6Schmitt’s membership in the Nazi party and his efforts to justify and legitimate National Socialism necessarily colours any discussion of his work. This complicated legacy has been and continues to be evaluated. This work has been biographical, including Reinhard Mehring’s Carl Schmitt: A Biography, trans. Daniel Steer (Cambridge: Polity, 2014) and Gopal Balakrishnan’s The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000). In a more theoretical vein, a number of volumes have assessed his work in light of his political affiliations. In particular, the collections of essays edited by Chantal Mouffe (The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999)), and more recently by Jens Meiehenrich and Oliver Simons (The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)), catalogue Schmitt’s continued impact on political theology, philosophy and theory. This influence is not always welcome. See, for example, Mark Neocleous, ‘Friend or Enemy? Reading Schmitt Politically’, Radical Philosophy 79 (1996): 13–23. For an overview of some of this recent literature, see Peter C. Caldwell, ‘Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent Literature’, The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (2005): 357–87. As even Schmitt’s contemporaries noted, the fact that themes from his work offer some explanation for his support of the Nazis does not change the significance of the problems he identifies. Both Benjamin and Taubes thought that Schmitt had isolated something essential about the political as such. Benjamin says as much in a letter to Schmitt (CS, 16–7). On Benjamin’s view of Schmitt see Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’, Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 247–51. While Schmitt’s support of the Nazi’s clearly perplexed and troubled Taubes, in the end there was still an affinity between the two. Taubes writes, ‘As an apocalyptic spirit I felt and still feel close to him. And we follow common paths, even as we draw contrary conclusions’ (CS, 8).
7Massimo Cacciari makes a similar point in his The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 5. Hussein Ali Agrama goes even further, arguing that political theology already operates within a secular ‘problem-space’ rendering it incapable of adequately questioning secular politics. See Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 226–7. As Adam Kotsko points out, one of the distinctive features of Taubes’s work on Paul is that he does not view Paul as somehow analogous to the political or even a biblical figure that becomes political, but as political himself. See ‘The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Legitimacy: On the Root and Future of Political Theology’, Crisis & Critique 2, no. 1 (2015): 291–2. Taubes does not think all theological ideas or figures are political in the same way, but his approach reflects a murkier, more dynamic relationship between always already related political and theological spheres. Taubes’s political theology is closer to what Agrama calls asecularity,‘a situation not where norms are no longer secular or religious, but where the questions against which such norms are adduced and contested as answers are not seen as necessary’ (Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 186).
8Ted A. Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 12.
9Vincent Lloyd ‘Introduction’, in Race and Political Theology, ed. Vincent Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 5–9.
10Michael Kirwan, Political Theology: A New Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008), ix. For other theological perspectives on political theology, see William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T & T Clark, 2002), and Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
11Kirwan, Political Theology, xiii.
12Andrew Shanks, Hegel’s Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153.
13It is a different conversation in a literal sense. Despite both he and I offering some version of a Hegelian political theology, Shanks does not cite Schmitt, Taubes (admittedly a less well-known figure) or other key figures of this narrower political theology. He mentions Benjamin, but the discussion is of his philosophy more generally rather than his key contributions to political theology. This observation is not a critique of Shanks, but an indication of the gap that occurs between different approaches to political theology.
14Take, for example, Clayton Crockett’s Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) or Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan’s collection Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). While many of the essays in the latter are concerned with the sociology of concepts and a ‘narrow’ political theology, the volume as a whole is framed as a reflection on the ‘return to religion’. The political theologies of Schmitt, Benjamin, Taubes and Agamben offer something that extends beyond this interest in religion to reflections on the nature of the political as such.
15Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
16Lilla, The Stillborn God, 8–9.
17Lilla, The Stillborn God, 17–18.
18Lilla discusses Taubes, Schmitt and Benjamin in The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), but he does not frame his critique in terms of political theology.
19John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2008).
20Gray, Black Mass, 13.
21Though Gray critiques revolutionary ideas and connects them to religious origins, he also questions simplistic secular solutions (Black Mass, 366–8).
22Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler describe this form of post-secularism as ‘theological postsecularism’ in their ‘What Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?’, in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 14–16. For a prime example of this triumphalist theological post-secularism, see Phillip Blond’s ‘Introduction: Theology before Philosophy’, in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998), 18.
23On asecularity, see note 7. Though Peter L. Berger has used the term desecularization to discuss the ‘return of religion’ (‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’, in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 1–18), I am using the term to indicate a process of dismantling the distinction between religion and the secular. In this sense, desecularization is to secularism as decolonization is to colonialism.
24Jayne Svenungsson, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), xiii.
25Svenungsson, Divining History, 12.
26Svenungsson, Divining History, 22–3. Throughout the book, Svenungsson is concerned about the externality of the apocalyptic. For example, she returns to this point in her critique of Badiou (p. 158). There is a real question about the nature of the apocalyptic ‘agent’ and this agent’s relationship to the world (and whether apocalypticism even requires such an agent). As I will argue in Chapter 4, one of the advantages of Malabou’s plasticity is that it offers a way of thinking immanent, traumatic novelty. Plastic apocalypticism has no need of external, divine intervention into the world.
27Svenungsson, Divining History, 176, 179. She points to the revolutions in views of gender and sexual orientation as examples of the law serving as the precondition of emancipation (p. 195).
28While some of the political theologians discussed here do discuss theocracy, this anarchic, mystical form of theocracy is unrelated to the fundamentalist version that animates critiques of political theology. See Lazier, ‘On the Origins of “Political Theology” ’, 154–5.
29Svenungsson, Divining History, 195.
30This section is deeply informed by the social constructivism of Sally Haslanger’s Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) as well as Nancy Tuana’s essay ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’, in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 188–213. Neither Haslanger nor Tuana is concerned with defining a ‘world’ (and indeed may resist this term), but they both capture what Tuana describes as the materiality of the social (p. 188). Combined with Haslanger’s conviction that the socially constructed can be real and objective (Resisting Reality, 184), their work illuminates the historical process by which ideas, beliefs and attitudes exceed mental function and become the actual material ground of experience as such. In this regard, their work is similar to Adrian Johnston’s transcendental materialism, which I return to below. For more on Johnston see my ‘Transcendental Materialism as a Theoretical Orientation to the Study of Religion’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 29, no. 2 (2017): 133–54.
31For an overview of the concept of the world from German Idealism to postmodernity, see Sean Gaston, The Concept of the World from Kant to Derrida (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
32Markus Gabriel’s critique of the concept of world is particularly significant, given that it is offered in the process of developing a new realist philosophy that draws, in part, on German Idealism. Gabriel’s objection is twofold. First, the world is the ultimate horizon of human experience. As such there is nothing from which the world can be differentiated. Nothing forms the background against which the world can be perceived. Strictly speaking, this means the world does not exist. Second, ‘world’ implies totality or unity. Gabriel argues that this unity is an illusion. See his Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 187–9. A version of this argument is also the basis of his Why the World Does Not Exist, trans. Gregory Moss (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). Gabriel’s rejection of the concept world is developed through a critique of constructivism (as well as other forms of metaphysics). This critique is aimed at forms of constructivism that reject realism, so Haslanger’s account – both constructivist and realist – circumvents these criticisms. As will become clear as this chapter progresses, using Haslanger and Tuana allows one to theorize a dynamic and contentious unity that has a permanence worthy of the title ‘world’.
33The German die Erde may mean either ‘earth’, in the sense of soil or ground, or ‘the Earth’, in the sense of the planet. There is an ambiguity in Schmitt’s usage, and I have elected to follow the translators and critical literature in rendering this ‘the earth’ rather than ‘the Earth’. In later sections, I deal with scientific literature where there is less ambiguity and accordingly shift to ‘the Earth’.
34Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 67.
35Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 327.
36Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 78.
37Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 70. On the foundational nature of nomos see Robert Cover’s ‘Nomos and Narrative’, in Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 95–172. Drawing on the work of Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Karl Mannheim, Cover argues, ‘[t]his nomos is as much “our world” as is the physical universe of mass, energy, and momentum. Indeed, our apprehension of the structure of the normative world is no less fundamental than our appreciation of the structure of the physical world. Just as the development of increasingly complex responses to the physical attributes of our world begins with birth itself, so does the parallel development of the responses to personal otherness that define the normative world’ (p. 97).
38See G. L. Ulmen’s introduction to Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 23.
39Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 44–5.
40Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 44–8.
41As Johnston argues, ideas have real and traceable effects on their material ground. See Adrian Johnston Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 14, 18.
42Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 78.
43Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 59–60.
44Julia Hell, ‘Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 84, no. 4 (2009): 290.
45Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 178.
46Hell, ‘Katechon’, 310.
47Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 51–2.
48Hell, ‘Katechon’, 289–93.
49Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 28.
50Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 33. See Hell, ‘Katechon’, 292–3.
51Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 180.
52Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 355.
53Charles W. Mills points out that the racial categories that govern the process of appropriation, settlement and distribution can themselves be subject to political theological analysis. See The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 54–5.
54Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 6.
55For an overview of the Anthropocene, see Will Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (2011): 842–67.
56Steffen et al., ‘Anthropocene’, 849–50.
57Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’, Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 63.
58Jason W. Moore, ‘The End of Cheap Nature, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about “The” Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism’, in Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future Global Conflict and Cooperation, ed. Christian Suter and Christopher Chase-Dunn (Berlin: LIT, 2014), 285–314. See also Philip Goodchild, ‘Debt, Epistemology and Ecotheology’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 160.
59Moore, ‘End of Cheap Nature’, 288.
60Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’, Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 11.
61Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 217. It should be noted that Chakrabarty is not responding to Malm, Hornborg or Moore directly but rather to critiques of the Anthropocene more generally.
62In addition to the succinct summary of these issues provided by Malm and Hornborg’s essay, see Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 39ff., as well as his ‘Who Lit This Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy’, Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 215–48.
63Throughout the remainder of this chapter, I will refer to ‘material and social relations’ for the sake of specifying that I am addressing both. As will become clear, however, this distinction is only analytical – there are no social relations that are not also material.
64Malm and Hornborg, ‘Geology of Mankind?’, 66–7.
65Schmitt also makes this connection between the division of land and the ordering of people: ‘nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes statically visible – the initial measure and division of pasture-land, i.e., the land-appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it’ (Nomos of the Earth, 70).
66Silvia Federici refers to both enclosure and colonialism as forms of ‘land expropriation’ to mark that, even absent direct force, land was seized (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 68).
67Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74.
68Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74–5.
69Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75.
70Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74.
71Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97.
72Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97.
73Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97.
74Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75.
75Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 86–9.
76Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 194.
77Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 184. Emphasis in original.
78Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 164–5.
79Karen J. Warren identifies eight connections commonly asserted within ecological feminist thought: historical and causal, conceptual, empirical and experiential, epistemological, symbolic, ethical, theoretical, and political (praxis). See her ‘Ecological Feminist Philosophies: An Overview of the Issues’ in Ecological Feminist Philosophies, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), xi–xvi. The body of literature exploring these issues is vast, but Val Plumwood’s argument that ecofeminism provides an ‘integrated framework’ for critiquing the ‘network of dualisms’ that makes up Western culture is particularly important given Malcolm Bull’s understanding of apocalypticism taken up below (Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–2).
80Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2014), 76.
81Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 102. See also her account of the relationship between European forms of patriarchy and private property imposed upon the indigenous people of the New World (p. 111).
82In her analysis of witch-hunts, Federici describes the construction of a notion of women as ‘weak in body and mind and biologically prone to evil’ (Caliban and the Witch, 186).
83Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 200.
84Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 179–80. It was ‘the colonised native Americans and the enslaved Africans who, in the plantations of the “New World,” shared a destiny similar to that of women in Europe, providing for capital the seemingly limitless supply of labor necessary for accumulation’ (p. 198).
85Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 198–9. Adam Kotsko explores the political theology of both gender and race in regard to the devil in his The Prince of This World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 127–9, 157–64, 200–1. Similarly Falguni A. Sheth uses Schmitt to describe the racialization of the enemy. For Sheth, the ‘unruly’ racial other is the enemy that must be contained, disciplined or eliminated. See her Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 32.
86Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11.
87See, for example, Jared Sexton’s ‘The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism’, Intensions 5 (2011): 1–47.
88Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 18. Elsewhere, Wilderson describes the position of Blackness this way: ‘Human Life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its conceptual coherence. There is no World without Blacks, yet there are no Blacks who are in the World. The Black is indeed a sentient being, but the constriction of Humanist thought is a constitutive disavowal of Blackness as social death; a disavowal that theorises the Black as degraded human entity: i.e., as an oppressed worker, a vanquished postcolonial subaltern, or a non-Black woman suffering under the disciplinary regime of patriarchy. The Black is not a sentient being whose narrative progression has been circumscribed by racism, colonialism, or even slavery for that matter. Blackness and Slaveness are inextricably bound in such a way that whereas Slaveness can be disimbricated from Blackness, Blackness cannot exist as other than Slaveness’ (‘Afro-pessimism & the End of Redemption’, The Occupied Times, 30 March 2016. Available at: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14236 [accessed 7 July 2017]).
89As Wilderson argues, ‘the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker’ (‘Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?’, Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 230).
90Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 20. See also Jared Sexton’s explanation of the difference between the exploitation of labour and the position of the slave in ‘The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign’, Critical Sociology 42, nos 4–5 (2014): 8.
91Nancy Fraser, ‘Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson’, Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 163–78. I am grateful to Jeremy Posadas for drawing attention to this parallel argument in Fraser’s work.
92Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 58.
93Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), 87.
94Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87.
95Wilderson cites David Eltis, whose research shows the limits of economic explanations for slavery. See Eltis, ‘Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation’, The American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1399–423.
96Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 20.
97Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 337; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 71.
98Sexton, ‘The Vel of Slavery’, 7.
99Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 103.
100Tuana, ‘Viscous Porosity’, 189–90. Tuana’s notion of a dynamic unity or fundamental connectivity is echoed in a wide variety of attempts to develop new, scientifically aware forms of materialism. In particular, see Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). As will become clear over the course of the rest of this book, I am persuaded by Adrian Johnston’s transcendental materialist account of these dynamics. For the purposes of my argument, Johnston’s linking of materialism, German Idealism and psychoanalysis is particularly useful for drawing connections between Hegel, political theology and apocalypticism. While I find Johnston’s philosophy ideal for this task, it is unfortunate that contemporary materialist philosophy and theory often seems rigidly divided, particularly between vitalist or process approaches on the one hand and accounts indebted to German Idealism on the other. There is not a great deal of interaction between the two camps, though Johnston offers some critiques in the concluding chapter of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism. While these divisions are important, they often serve to obscure important connections between the two groups.
101This interactionism thus avoids the critiques of those like Bruno Latour who argue against a globality that is a purposeful or static totality. See Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 130–41.
102Tuana, ‘Viscous Porosity’, 188 (italics in original). Tuana’s approach thus echoes Latour’s call to ‘rematerialize our belonging to the world’ (Facing Gaia, 219).
103Malm and Hornborg, ‘Geology of Mankind?’, 66.
104While Donna Haraway has introduced the term ‘Chthulucene’ to capture the ‘dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part’, I think Moore’s Capitalocene already includes this sense of dynamic ongoingness (‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65). Though perhaps, as Haraway argues, more than one name is necessary.
105Malm and Hornborg, ‘Geology of Mankind?’, 63.
106Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 22.
107Tuana’s account of hurricane Katrina in ‘Viscous Porosity’ is an example attending to this materiality of ideology. On the question of the reality of race, see also Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2015), 110.
108Tuana, ‘Viscous Porosity’, 189.
109This notion of the world thinking itself is an effort to bypass Anthony Paul Smith’s criticism of ‘World’s’ dominance of environmental thought. For Smith, ‘What the World provides philosophy is an abstract field where God and Nature become things that are subsumed within a transcendent form philosophical and/or theological thinking. The philosopher is always above the World as transcendental ego and the theological is always in the World, but not of it’ (A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 176). In the notion of world presented in this section, the subject is neither above the world, nor apart from it. The subject is the world thinking itself, though not exhaustively.
110Angelica Nuzzo, ‘Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation: The Systematic Beginning of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit’, in Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. David S. Stern (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.
111Nuzzo, ‘Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation’, 1.
112Johnston’s transcendental materialism can be interpreted as an example of such a rereading. Similarly, Nuzzo argues that Hegel is developing a philosophical perspective that transforms the opposition between idealism and materialism (‘Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation’, 13–14).
113Heidegger is also noteworthy because Catherine Malabou explores the themes of plasticity, novelty and alterity through a reading of his work. While her argument in The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy, trans. Peter Skafish (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) touches on many of the themes of apocalyptic political theology, discussing her detailed engagement with Heidegger’s concepts of Wandeln, Wandlungen and Verwandlungen would require a level of attention that this current argument does not allow.
114Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Blackwell, 1962), 92–5. For more on Heidegger’s conception of the world, see Chapter 4 of Gaston’s The Concept of the World from Kant to Derrida.
115Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185.
116Philip Tonner, ‘Are Animals Poor in the World? A Critique of Heidegger’s Anthropocentrism’, in Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, ed. Rob Boddice (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 204.
117Haslanger, Resisting Reality, 213.
118This notion of the violence of the law clearly draws on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of lawmaking and law-preserving violence in his ‘Critique of Violence’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 284–9.
119Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideway Reflections (London: Profile, 2008), 8.
120Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.
121On the invisibility of this violence, see Linda Martín Alcoff’s summary of standpoint epistemology in her ‘Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types’ in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 39–57. Though Alcoff does not employ the language of slow or objective violence, she describes the dynamics that enable people to not see systemic forms of injustice.
122Federici makes this point in her ‘Wages against Housework’ in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 15–22. For an appreciative yet critical assessment of Federici’s proposed solution, wages for housework, and the possibility of universal basic income as a means of updating those demands, see Chapter 3 of Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 113–50.
123Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 5.
124As is clear from the above discussion of Wilderson, he argues that there is a unique antagonism between Blackness and the world that calls for the destruction of the world. In using his concept of antagonism, I am not suggesting a general analogy between worker, woman and slave, only suggesting that in a world constituted by nature, capital, gender and race that each of these divisions entails an unresolvable antagonism that exceeds any resolvable conflict. Put another way, each of these divisions denotes an antagonism, but that does not mean that they are all antagonisms in the same way.
125Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, 181.
126Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Cohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 144.
127Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 2.
128Fredric Jameson never actually writes this succinct version and there is some confusion about the saying’s origins. In The Seeds of Time, he observes that ‘[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’ (The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii). He then references the same idea in a later essay, arguing that, ‘[s]omeone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world’ (‘The Future City’, New Left Review 21 (2003): 76). It is not clear if Jameson is in fact referring to his own earlier essay or noting a similar point made by someone else.
129‘Pericapitalist’ is a term that Tsing uses to describe ‘life processes’ outside the direct control of capitalism, such as ‘photosynthesis and animal digestion’. I am arguing that it is necessary to go beyond Tsing to recognize the way that even these processes exist or occur in a world structured by capital (Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 62–3).
130Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 122.
131Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
132Malm, Fossil Capital, 39–40.
133Latour makes this argument in chapter six of Facing Gaia. His argument includes a genealogy of apocalyptic thinking that is similar to the one offered in the next chapter but draws connections between apocalypticism and Gnosticism in order to critique the way religious ideas have shaped the ‘ecological crisis’ (pp. 194–210).
134Roland Boer, ‘Review, Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology’, The Bible and Critical Theory 8, no. 2 (2012): 99. In developing an immanent apocalyptic political theology, I have endeavoured to both eliminate this imprecision as well as respond to Boer’s criticism of apocalypticism. The nature of this immanent apocalypticism will become clearer in Chapter 4.
135Roland Boer, Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 18.
136Boer, Political Myth, 19.
137Boer, Political Myth, 19.
138Boer, Political Myth, 19.
139Boer, Political Myth, 20.
140John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd edn (Grand Rapid, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 2. As Collins notes, it is possible to differentiate between apocalyptic as a noun, ‘literary genre, apocalypticism as a social ideology, and apocalyptic eschatology as a set of ideas and motifs that may also be found in other literary genres and social settings’ (p. 2). These distinctions are further complicated within Collins’s understanding of apocalypse as literary genre by the presence of different forms of apocalypse, such as ‘other worldly journeys’ and ‘ “historical” apocalypses’ (p. 7).
141Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 13.
142Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality (London: Verso, 1999), 48.
143Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 13.
144Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 71.
145Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 61–2.
146Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 83.
147See Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1985).
1Hegel’s philosophy has been rejected for being generally dangerous and prone to totalitarianism. Karl Popper’s infamous reading continues to be one of the most well-known dismissals. See his The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952). Other critiques focus specifically on Hegel’s treatment of gender or race. See, for example, Carla Lonzi, ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’, in Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 275–97; Robert Bernasconi, ‘Hegel at the Court of Ashanti’, in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), 41–63; and Tsenay Serequeberhan, ‘The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, International Philosophical Quarter 29, no. 3 (1989): 301–18. Despite Hegel’s problematic positions, however, engagement with his wider philosophy continues to be a resource for those interested and critiquing and overcoming these divisions. See, for example, the collection edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen, Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Nick Nesbitt, ‘Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution’, Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (2004): 18–33. These critical engagements do not necessarily take the form of redeeming Hegel’s positions. They can also be creative appropriations of concepts in order to develop Hegelian ideas beyond the limits of Hegel’s own work.
2There is a significant body of literature that considers the relationship between Hegel, Joachim and Gnostic traditions. See, in particular, Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Henri de Lubac, La Postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore: de Joachim à nos jours (Paris: Cerf, 2014); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Phoenix Books, 1949); Clark Butler, ‘Hegel, Altizer and Christian Atheism’, Encounter 41 (1980): 103–28; and Clark Butler, ‘Hegelian Panentheism as Joachimite Christianity’, in New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 131–42.
3Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957). Cohn is particularly concerned with millenarian forms of apocalypticism. Millenarianism, millennialism and chiliasm are sometimes used interchangeably as they all emphasize the 1,000-year reign of Christ. Bernard McGinn argues that the sociological study of millennialism, including Cohn’s work, has emphasized the collective, immanent and earthy nature of the phenomenon, so the term chiliasm is better used to refer to the belief in the 1,000-year reign of Christ rather than the social features that often accompany that belief. McGinn is also critical of Cohn’s sociological analysis, arguing that it is crude and reductive. While he notes that the later edition of Cohn’s book addresses some of these concerns, it is the earlier edition that has most influenced the genealogy tradition and that I am citing here. See Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 17n.56, 28–30.
4Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 22–32.
5Yonina Talmon, ‘Pursuit of the Millennium: The Relation between Religious and Social Change’, European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes De Sociologie 3, no. 1 (1962): 137. Talmon specifies that this uneven relation occurs both in societies where population growth or industrialization frustrate traditional ways of life and in societies where industrialization or encounters with new societies introduce new expectations that cannot be fulfilled.
6Thom Brooks explains this alienation in terms of stakeholder theory. ‘The alienated are not merely disinterested like political agnostics but disengaged, and they lack the belief their alienation can or should be overcome. So the political disconnection someone may believe exists between him or her and others will seem fixed and either beyond his or her ability to fix or to care about changing’ (‘Ethical Citizenship and the Stakeholder Society’, in Ethical Citizenship: British Idealism and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Thom Brooks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 131).
7Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 307.
8McGinn, Visions of the End, 126–30.
9Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 109.
10Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the 19th Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 12.
11Indeed, Cohn’s work emerged out of a seminar on apocalypticism at the University of Manchester. Other works associated with the group include E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Norton Library (New York: Norton, 1965) and Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia, 2nd edn (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968). Worsley’s book focuses on a different apocalyptic tradition, cargo cults, but it is notable that he identifies similar social conditions at the emergence of the apocalyptic groups.
12Reeves and Gould, Joachim of Fiore, 2–3.
13Cf. Talmon, ‘Pursuit of the Millennium’, 127. ‘Cohn’s study is extremely erudite and exhaustive. He over-stresses the analogy with modern totalitarian movements, yet this provides mainly a point of orientation and a general frame of reference and does not affect too much the study of medieval movements which stand in their own right.’ Later in the essay she draws attention to his egregious attempt ‘to equate communism and Nazism and treat them as one and the same for the purpose of comparison with millenarianism’ (p. 145).
14Indeed, Svenungsson’s nuanced analysis of these historical connections is one of the great strengths of her book. On this point, see my ‘Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit’, Jewish Culture and History 19, no. 1 (2018): 111–13.
15Daniel Bell, End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960), 285.
16Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993), 288.
17Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), 109.
18Löwith, Meaning in History, 1.
19Löwith, Meaning in History, 1.
20Löwith, Meaning in History, 54.
21Löwith, Meaning in History, 57.
22Löwith, Meaning in History, 57–9.
23Löwith, Meaning in History, 151.
24Löwith, Meaning in History, 154.
25Löwith, Meaning in History, 158.
26Löwith himself was aware of the connections between their works. In a conversation with Hans Jonas, he reportedly said of Occidental Eschatology ‘it’s a very good book. And that’s no accident – half of it’s by you, and the other half’s by me’. Hans Jonas, Memoirs, ed. Christian Wiese, trans. Krishna Winston (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 168.
27Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967). See also Laurence W. Dickey Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Cyril O’Regan, Heterodox Hegel and Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.
28Taubes discusses the Hebrew origins of apocalypticism in Daniel before moving on to New Testament texts. When Löwith goes back to the biblical text, he focuses exclusively on the New Testament. Taubes, and Bloch too, therefore see something Jewish in the Christian apocalyptic tradition.
29Svenungsson, Divining History, 37.
30It is important to express again the point made by Löwith – Taubes, here, is expressing a valid reading of Joachim’s prophecies that nonetheless break with Joachim’s intentions.
31Taubes presents, in a much abbreviated form, the same break between Old and Young Hegelians that Löwith discusses in From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). They concur on the nature of the relation between this division and Hegel himself: the careful balances Hegel strikes between individual/society and religion/philosophy are thrown off kilter by his successors. Löwith’s book returns to these divisions continuously in describing the philosophical shifts that follow Hegel. Taubes describes this same unbalancing as the consequence of Marx and Kierkegaard’s decision to follow one side or the other of these Hegelian oppositions. It should be noted that the depiction of Kierkegaard as an inwardly focused philosopher unconcerned with political issues has been challenged by recent work. For example, see the collection of essays edited by Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Social-Political Thought (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011) and Mark Dooley’s The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). Michael O’Neill Burns’s Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) is particularly significant in exploring Kierkegaard’s political significance through a materialist approach similar to the reading of Hegel I am offering here.
32Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 244.
33In particular, see Angelica Nuzzo’s work on the absolute, spirit, truth and method and Hegel. Nuzzo argues that absolute knowledge, a concept much derided by critics of Hegel, is a concept concerned with determining this necessity. The truth of absolute knowing is not total knowledge of the world but a complete knowledge of knowing (and unknowing). She makes this argument in her essay ‘ “… As If Truth Were a Coin!” Lessing and Hegel’s Developmental Theory of Truth’, Hegel Studien 44 (2009): 131–55. See also her ‘Dialectic as Logic of Transformative Processes’, in Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham: Acumen, 2006), 85–104; ‘The End of Hegel’s Logic: Absolute Idea as Absolute Method’, in Hegel’s Theory of the Subject, ed. David Carlson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 187–205; ‘The Truth of Absolutes Wissen in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: New Critical Essays, ed. Alfred Denker and Michael G. Vater (Amherst: Humanity, 2003), 265–93. This emphasis on Hegel’s philosophy as primarily concerned with the shape of thought itself is key to the set of rereadings that have come to be known as ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretations of Hegel. Concepts like absolute spirit are no longer interpreted metaphysically, but rather articulate Hegel’s concept of a socially embedded form of rationality. See in particular Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For an overview of this approach, see Simon Lumsden, ‘The Rise of the Non-Metaphysical Hegel’, Philosophy Compass 3, no. 1 (2008): 51–65.
34Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 255. H. S. Harris makes the same point, writing, ‘The chapter on “Spirit” began with the immediate identification of the finite consciousness, with an absolute Law that it does not create, generate or legislate for itself but which is, on the contrary, given to it in the natural bonds of its organic morality . . . In the true infinite community of Reason which eventually takes the place of that finite community, the Lawgiver is recognized as the immanent might of Reason itself . . . the adequate embodiment of Reason is an actually infinite community of finite spirits’ (Hegel’s Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 523).
35Quentin Lauer, Hegel’s Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 34.
36Hodgson uses representation across his work on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, including his translations of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Pinkard uses representation or representational thinking in his forthcoming new translation Phenomenology of Spirit. Thomas A. Lewis argues for representation instead of ‘picture-thinking’ in his work on Hegel, religion and politics. See his Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 156–8.
37My emphasis.
38It is this broad sense of political theology that has been the focus of recent work on Hegel, politics and religion. Lewis’s Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel is the most important recent analysis of the political significance of religion as representation. These themes are also taken up in the collection edited by Angelica Nuzzo, Hegel on Religion and Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013) as well as the volume co-edited by Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis, Hegel & the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). This more recent work builds off the legacy of earlier research on religion and politics in Hegel, such as Dickey’s Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 and Walter Jaeschke’s essay ‘Christianity and Secularity in Hegel’s Concept of the State’, Journal of Religion 61, no. 2 (1981): 127–45.
39Malcolm Clark, Logic and System: A Study of the Translation from ‘Vorstellung’ to Thought in the Philosophy of Hegel. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) and Kathleen Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). For additional context on Hegel’s understanding of representation in relation to his philosophical contemporaries see Louis Dupré, ‘Religion as Representation’, in The Legacy of Hegel: Proceedings of the Marquette Hegel Symposium 1970, ed. J. J. O’Malley et al. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 137–43.
40Clark, Logic and System, xi.
41Magnus deals with a number of Derrida’s texts, but most significantly, for the task of this present work, Jacques Derrida, ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Jacques Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Though she does not discuss Derrida’s work on messianism, her refutation of Derrida’s critique also bears on the differences between his messianism and Malabou’s plasticity. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006). I address Malabou’s critique of Derrida and develop a plastic apocalypticism in Chapter 4.
42Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 9.
43Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 181. My emphasis.
44Clark, Logic and System, 38.
45Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 34.
46Clark, Logic and System, 128.
47Clark, Logic and System, 40.
48Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 33.
49Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 33.
50Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 213.
51Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 31.
52Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 2.
53Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 116.
54This section of the Philosophy of Right is particularly pertinent as it highlights the major tension in Hegel’s assessment of religion – the same features of religion that make it necessary also make it dangerous. Only a few lines later, Hegel comments on the subjectivity of religion and cautions that this may lead to a negative attitude which ‘may give rise to the religious fanaticism which, like fanaticism in politics, discards all political institutions and legal order as barriers cramping the inner life of the heart and incompatible with its infinity . . . But since even then decision must somehow be made for everyday life and practice, the same doctrine which we had before [subjectivity of the will which knows itself to be absolute] turns up again here, namely that subjective ideas, i.e. opinion and capricious inclination, are to do the deciding’ (PR §270: 245/418–9).
55Thomas A. Lewis, ‘Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion in Recent Hegel Scholarship’, Religion Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 571.
56George Di Giovanni, ‘Faith without Religion, Religion without Faith: Kant and Hegel on Religion’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 41, no. 3 (2003): 367. For Di Giovanni, this matrix is composed of those actions and self-understandings that require the total commitment of one’s being.
57In this regard, Hegel anticipates many of the themes of contemporary religious studies. Lewis develops and expands this insight in his Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion & Vice Versa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
58Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 156.
59John W Burbidge, ‘Hegel’s Open Future’, in Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris, ed. Michael Baur and John Edward Russon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 185. See also, Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 182, 208.
60Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 78.
61Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 96.
62Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 97.
63Thomas A. Lewis, ‘Religion and Demythologization in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Dean Moyar and Michael Quante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 194–5.
64Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 91–2.
65Karl Friedrich Göschel, Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen im Verhältnisse zur christlichen Glaubenserkenntniss: ein Beytrag zum Verständnisse der Philosophie unserer Zeit (Berlin: E. Franklin, 1829). In addition to this review, Hegel makes a complimentary reference to the work in the first paragraph on revealed religion in the Encyclopaedia: ‘God is God only so far as he knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God. – See the profound elucidation of these propositions in the work from which they are taken: Aphorisms on Knowing and Not-knowing, &c., by C.F.G’ (E3, §564: 298/374).
66My emphasis.
67G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 538.
68Lewis makes much the same point, though his focus is on the transformation of ideas in relationship to religious communities (Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 14).
69Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 209.
1The relationship between Schmitt and Taubes is a matter of some debate. From Taubes’s own work, including his letters, it is clear that Schmitt is an important figure, but there is still the question of how much Schmitt’s work influenced Taubes’s thinking. Jamie Martin argues that while they consider many similar themes, Schmitt only features in Taubes’s later writing. Earlier in his career, Taubes carefully avoids interaction with Schmitt. Martin worries that focus on their later correspondence has distracted from a more careful consideration of Taubes and his own distinctive intellectual context (‘Liberalism and History after the Second World War: The Case of Jacob Taubes’, Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 1 (2017): 133). Martin’s position is an outlier, though. While their relationship is not as simple as direct influence, Taubes’s political theology is in many ways written against Schmitt’s. Their intellectual relationship thus precedes their personal encounter. See, for example, Marin Terpstra and Theo de Wit’s ‘ “No Spiritual Investment in the World as It Is”: Jacob Taubes’s Negative Political Theology’, in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, ed. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 327.
2There is relatively little secondary literature on Taubes. In addition to the material discussed below, see the brief biographical sketch included in Martin Treml’s ‘Reinventing the Canonical: The Radical Thinking of Jacob Taubes’, in ‘Escape to Life’: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile, ed. Eckhart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 460–5.
3Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, ‘Introduction to the German Edition’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, by Jacob Taubes, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), xxi. For a systematic overview of Bloch, see Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982). Hudson’s study does not treat religious issues with as much depth as one might expect given the nature of Bloch’s philosophy. For these issues see Roland Boer’s work, especially Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009), 1–55, and Political Myth.
4Anson Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism’, New German Critique 34 (1985): 78. As will be seen shortly, one difference between Taubes and these others is that Taubes sees his work as resolutely modern. He offers an immanent critique of modernity for modernity’s sake, rather than developing a position in opposition to modernity. His position is not as firmly opposed to modernity as Benjamin, for example. Thus, Rabinbach’s description of this period of thought as ‘radical, uncompromising, and comprised of an esoteric intellectualism that is as uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamoured of apocalyptic visions’ (p. 80), is less applicable to Taubes than Benjamin and Bloch. As the title suggests, Rabinbach’s essay deals mostly with Benjamin, Bloch and, to a lesser extent, Luckás, as instrumental figures in the development of a messianism that broke with the more predominant options of assimilationist Judaism or Zionism. Much of his description captures themes congruent with Taubes’s contribution to this distinctive version of twentieth-century Jewish thought, even though Taubes is not explicitly mentioned.
5Bloch thus occupies a space in between Taubes and the rest of this tradition, sharing Taubes’s deep exploration of the theological and religious traditions while also attending to art. For example, Bloch discusses musical theory in The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) and theorizes folklore in Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). While it might seem pertinent to include Benjamin in my broader discussion of apocalyptic political theology, he differs from Taubes and Bloch in that Hegel plays a different role in his philosophy (on this role, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)). Most importantly, Hegel does not occupy the same place in Benjamin’s conception of political theology and he does not emphasize Gnostic and apocalyptic tendencies within Hegel’s work.
6Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 101.
7Mohler was a right-wing thinker with whom Taubes corresponded. The letter was circulated amongst Mohler’s acquaintances and eventually read by Schmitt, who seconded Taubes’s appraisal of theologians. ‘Taubes is right: today everything is theology, with the exception of what theologians talk about’ (CS, 26). The circulation of the letter ultimately led to a meeting between Taubes, the left-wing Jew, and Schmitt, the Catholic defender of National Socialism. The details of this exchange are found in To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
8In Occidental Eschatology, Taubes relies solely on Baur, Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), in other writings he cites Herbet Grundman, Hans Jonas and Eric Voeglin. See, in particular, the essays contained in Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
9Jacob Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology: A Philosophical Analysis of Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology (1954)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 177.
10Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 177.
11Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 178, my emphasis.
12Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 188.
13Vattimo claims that global society is on the verge of the ‘Age of the Spirit’ understood as a cosmopolitan community that emerges out of Christianity but breaks with its hierarchical structures and outdated metaphysics: ‘To understand modernity as secularization, namely as the inner and “logical” development of the Judeo-Christian revelation, and to grasp the dissolution of metaphysics as the manifestation of Being as event, as its philosophical outcome, means to read the signs of the times, in the spirit of Joachim of Fiore’ (Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36). In one of his more well-known statements on religion, Žižek writes, ‘My claim is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach – and vice-versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience’ (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 6.) Žižek’s statement is more dramatically phrased, but the underlying Hegelian logic is the same as Taubes’s – it is only by arriving at the materialist consequences of religious thought that religious truth can be adequately comprehended. Žižek’s frequent theological provocations could thus also be understood in the light of Hegel’s two-way relation between concept and representation.
14Jacob Taubes, ‘The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism (1971)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 62, emphasis mine. Taubes also defends allegorical readings in The Political Theology of Paul where he argues that Paul uses allegorical readings of Hebrew scriptures (pp. 44–6).
15Taubes, ‘Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism (1971)’, 62. In a more practical vein, in The Political Theology of Paul he suggests the creation of chairs in Old Testament, New Testament and Church History within departments of philosophy in order to combat the isolation of the departments (p. 4).
16Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler use this notion of ‘contamination’ to define their understanding of contemporary continental philosophy of religion: ‘The task here is simply that of finding a way to perform a philosophical operation upon theological material, while retaining something properly philosophical. Here philosophy turns outwards, both as a critical operation on theology and as a liberation of aspects of religion from their own theological contamination’ (‘What Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?’, 2). They also hold out the possibility of ‘an aggressive alternative: a complementary philosophical contamination of theology. Experimentation here risks a disintegration of the philosophical body, in order to disturb theology’s ideological and orthodox identity (that is, to contaminate it). What is at stake in both cases is a practice of philosophy which avoids dissolving into theology or becoming a tool of theological thought’ (p. 2). Equally, it is the case that theology should not become merely a tool of philosophical thought. Rather, political theology in the Taubesian vein is an example of Smith and Whistler’s proposed ‘experimenting on and with theological and religious material’ (p. 4).
17Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity: The Jewish Perspective’, New Blackfriars 94, no. 1050 (2013): 189.
18Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 189–90. David Kolb makes a similar claim, though focusing on Hegel’s understanding of civil society as a distinctly modern phenomenon. For Kolb, Hegel critiques civil society in the name of the freedom which only a reformed civil society can sustain. See Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
19Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191.
20Taubes, ‘Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism (1971)’, 67.
21Mike Grimshaw, ‘Introduction: “A Very Rare Thing” ’, in To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, by Jacob Taubes, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), xvii.
22Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xxiv.
23Jacob Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method: Some Reflections on the Methodological Principles of Tillich’s Theology (1954)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 205.
24Tina Beattie, ‘Nothing Really Matters: a Bohemian Rhapsody for a Dead Queen’, in Theology after Lacan: The Passion for the Real, ed. Marcus Pound, Clayton Crockett and Creston Davis (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 34.
25Jacob Taubes, ‘Culture and Ideology (1969)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 275.
26Taubes, ‘Culture and Ideology (1969)’, 265.
27Karl Marx, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 6, Marx and Engels: 1845–1848, trans. Jack Cohen et. al. (New York: International Publishers, 2005), 176.
28Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 178.
29Taubes, ‘Culture and Ideology (1969)’, 264.
30Jean Hyppolite makes this point in his discussion of the relationship between Hegel and Marx. ‘Hegel retains the notion of alienation even within his conception of the Absolute. It is only in appearance that the Absolute transcends contradiction, that is, the movement of alienation. There is no synthesis for the Absolute apart from the presence of a permanent internal antithesis. Indeed, it is natural to think that Absolute Knowledge still contains alienation, along with a movement to transcend it . . . The Spirit is the identity of Logos and Nature, though the opposition between these two moments is always present within it, even if continuously transcended. In Language, the expression of this notion of the Absolute is the Hegelian Aufhebung. For Marx, on the other hand, there is in history a definitive synthesis that excludes the permanence of the antithesis.’ Studies on Marx and Hegel, trans. John O’Neill (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 86.
31Adrian Johnston, ‘Points of Forced Freedom: Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism’, Speculations IV (2013): 94.
32Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), xxiii.
33This series of refutations focusing on the relationship between actuality and idea also reiterates, in a different form, Magnus’s insight from Chapter 2 concerning the persistence of sensuousness in the symbolic.
34Jacob Taubes, ‘Theology and Political Theory (1955)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 230. Taubes is not the only Jewish Messianic thinker to struggle with this tension. Rabinbach includes it as one of the defining characteristics of this form of thought. Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 86.
35Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 192.
36Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 193. While I ultimately disagree with Bielik-Robson, we are agreed on the nature of the world; the combination of Schmitt’s analysis of nomos and my account of nature, capital, gender and race is a more fully described version of this naturalized, hierarchical, spatialized and ideologically stabilized form of power.
37Svenungsson, Divining History, 22–3.
38Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 193.
39Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 196.
40Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 197. Rabinbach, whom Bielik-Robson cites throughout, is again useful on this point: ‘the cataclysmic element is explicit and consequently makes redemption independent of either any immanent historical “forces” or personal experience of liberation’ (Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 86).
41The question of the redemption of the world is a constant problem for Christian theodicy and animating force for Gnosticism. On the philosophical issues it presents, see Quentin Meillassoux, ‘The Spectral Dilemma’, Collapse IV (2008): 261–76. Malabou offers a reading of Meillassoux’s argument for the necessity of contingency in Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 353–60. She focuses on Meillassoux’s mathematical rather than apocalyptic notion of contingency, which she finds ultimately unable to provide the possibility of genuine alterity.
42Rabinbach identifies a similar relation to nature in Bloch, describing it in quite Hegelian terms: ‘History for Bloch is predicated on a future oriented knowledge that transcends the empirical order of things, that does not take flight in false images or fall prey to naturalism, but is directed beyond the existing world toward a yet unrealized “messianic goal” ’ (Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 100).
43Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 198.
44‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 85.
45Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 86. This linking of messianism and apocalypticism is at odds with more recent political theology. As seen in the first chapter, and as will become even more important in the next, the opposition between messianism and apocalypticism is often couched in terms of the former’s rejection of the latter’s violence.
46Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 87.
47Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 87. Rabinbach thus confirms Bielik-Robson’s claim that Taubes offers a ‘polemical alternative’ to Karl Löwith’s thesis on secularization in his Meaning in History (Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191).
48This ambiguity is also addressed in his discussion of connections between National Socialism and German mystic and pagan traditions (HT, 48–62).
49On the complexity of Marx’s critique of religion, see Alberto Toscano, ‘Beyond Abstraction: Marx and the Critique of the Critique of Religion’, Historical Materialism 18 (2010): 3–29.
50Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191.
51See Hudson, Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, 31–49. As Hudson makes clear, Bloch’s connection to both Marxist theory and Communist politics was never simple. He inevitably advocated positions that were at odds with main-line positions. This perpetual heterodoxy is also highlighted in Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’.
52Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xvii.
53Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xi.
54Marx, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, 489.
55Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xxxi. Grimshaw’s point mirrors Žižek’s claims about objective and subjective violence. Liberalism’s denunciation of subjective, interpersonal violence is dependent upon an objective level of violence that maintains the societal norms which in turn provide the baseline for measuring subjective violence. See Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile, 2008), 9–15.
56Karin de Boer, ‘“Democracy Out of Joint?” The Financial Crisis in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, Hegel Bulletin 33, no. 2 (2012): 37. While I am using de Boer’s work to describe an anti-liberal tendency within Hegel, that does not mean that de Boer argues for an anti-liberal position or that Hegel’s philosophy is thoroughly anti-liberal. De Boer is not concerned with rejecting liberalism but with offering a critical assessment of its limitations. Her concern is that a liberal democracy that privileges individual rights above all else is incapable of meeting contemporary crises. The internal tensions of liberalism have thus generated a tragic political situation. In addition to ‘Democracy Out of Joint?’, see her ‘Hegel Today: Towards a Tragic Conception of Intercultural Conflicts’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3, nos 2–3 (2007): 117–31 and ‘A Greek Tragedy? A Hegelian Perspective on Greece’s Sovereign Debt Crisis’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2013): 358–75. On Hegel’s own complex relationship to liberalism, see Part 2 of Dominic Losurdo’s Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). As Losurdo shows, it is not that Hegel is straightforwardly anti-liberal but that there are anti-liberal aspects to Hegel’s philosophy.
57In Hegel’s remarks on this paragraph, he explores this point further: ‘the individual is a genus, but it has its immanent universal actuality in the next genus. – Hence the individual fulfils his actual and living vocation for universality only when he becomes a member of a corporation, a community, etc.’ (PR, §308r: 295/477).
58Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4.
59Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 23.
60de Boer, ‘Democracy Out of Joint?’, 39.
61As Bielik-Robson writes, ‘modernity can be regarded as the most religious of all epochs, precisely in its consciously historiosophic emphasis on the messianic transformation of our earthly conditions, aiming at achieving a better, more meaningful, freer life here and now. In its attempt to achieve this goal, modernitas walks a thin line between messianism and nihilism, which, for Taubes, is not necessarily a bad thing’ (Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 192).
62This returns to Brooks’s idea of stakeholders, discussed in Chapter 2. Those who identify as members of a society ‘believe that any problems are best resolved within the system rather than without . . . the essential concern is whether persons identify themselves as having a stake in the political community or not. Some may believe they do not have a shared stake and can “opt out” in a position we might call political exceptionalism, which is rooted in alienation.’ Thom Brooks, Punishment (London: Routledge, 2012), 145.
63Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, ‘Afterword’, in The Political Theology of Paul, by Jacob Taubes, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 121.
64Johnston’s most sustained development of these ideas is in Žižek’s Ontology. He further explores these ideas in Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. In this latter text he also differentiates transcendental materialism from vitalist materialisms represented in much of New Materialism and feminist materialisms. For a more condensed explanation of the key themes of Johnston’s materialism, see ‘Points of Forced Freedom’, 8.
65Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
66Karl Marx, Marx & Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 3, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: 1843–1844, trans. Jack Cohen et al., 229–346 (New York: International Publishers, 2005), 296–7.
67Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 275.
68Indeed, Hegel’s understanding of nature, specifically the view that emerges in the transition between the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind in the Encyclopaedia is central to Johnston’s philosophical project.
69Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191.
70Taubes, ‘Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism (1963)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 30.
71Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 235.
72This understanding of the relationship between religion and philosophy is an overarching argument of Magnus’s work Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit. See, in particular, the section on spirit’s self-determination (235–7).
73See, in particular, his ‘Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising Materialism’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 19 (2008): 166–88.
74Taubes, ‘Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism (1963)’, 30.
75Boer, Criticism of Heaven, 451.
1Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity: The Jewish Perspective’, New Blackfriars 94, no. 1050 (2013): 191.
2In recent years, Malabou has gradually turned from the development of the concept of plasticity in this sense to the concept of ‘neuroplasticity’. See her What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), and The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). While the two explorations of plasticity are clearly related, and the connection between biology, freedom and the subject is pertinent to the ontology of the world developed in the first chapter, I am focusing on her engagement with Hegel so as to draw out the resonance between her work and Taubes. For the connection between her two explorations of plasticity, including the link to transcendental materialism, see her collaboration with Adrian Johnston in Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
3While differing on the implications of Hegel’s understanding of possibility and contingency, the basic outlines provided by Houlgate and Burbidge are two of the most significant explanations of the relevant passages of the Science of Logic. Stephen Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, The Owl of Minerva 27, no. 1 (1995): 37–49, and John W. Burbidge, Hegel on Logic and Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Both make reference to Dieter Henrich’s classic essay ‘Hegels Theorie über den Zufall’ in his Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971). I return to this discussion later in the chapter.
4Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 13.
5Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, ‘Introduction to the German Edition’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, by Jacob Taubes, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), xxii.
6Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method: Some Reflections on the Methodological Principles of Tillich’s Theology (1954)’, In From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 208.
7Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 210. Drawing a connection between Hegel and Tillich is not surprising given the latter’s engagement with German Idealism. The nature of religion and theological method, however, is a point of particular confluence. See Merold Westphal, ‘Hegel, Tillich, and the Secular’, Journal of Religion 52, no. 3 (1972): 223–39.
8Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 210.
9Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 210–11.
10Jacob Taubes, ‘Notes on Surrealism (1966)’, in From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 120.
11Taubes, ‘Notes on Surrealism (1966)’, 107.
12Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 208.
13My emphasis.
14It is important to note that Hegel is talking about pure, abstract being and nothing. As he explains later in the section, any determination which would enable one to distinguish between the two would shift the conversation to determinate being and determinate nothing (SL, 92/5:95).
15Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality (London: Verso, 1999), 104.
16Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 109.
17Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 25.
18Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 193.
19Malabou makes a similar point in The Ontology of the Accident: ‘Destructive plasticity enables the appearance or formation of alterity where the other is absolutely lacking. Plasticity is the form of alterity where the other is absolutely lacking. Plasticity is the form of alterity when no transcendence, flight or escape is left. The only other that exists in this circumstance is being other to the self’ (p. 11).
20Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1949), 54–9.
21Non-contemporaneity is a translation of the German Ungleichzeitigkeit, which is also sometimes translated as non-synchronicity. Both translations are acceptable, but I will use non-contemporaneity throughout for the sake of consistency.
22John Russon develops a reading of Hegelian ‘non-synchronous temporalities’ that is in some ways similar to this treatment. Russon does not discuss Bloch, but he is developing an open reading of Hegel in which ‘[t]he past and the future are not “out there” as existent, alien realities that we somehow have to get to. The past and the future are always of the subject, of spirit. What we have seen from looking at spirit is that history is that identity as accomplishment, and what we have seen from looking at the thing and the body is that the future is precisely what those identities make possible’ (‘Temporality and the Future of Philosophy in Hegel’s Phenomenology’, International Philosophical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2008): 67). Russon even cites Malabou as offering a similar reading of temporality in Hegel. Russon, however, emphasizes the non-synchronous temporality as a division that occurs within the subject – it is the difference between the temporalities of the subject as living body and the subject as living spirit (p. 66). Bloch’s non-contemporaneity denotes an intersubjective phenomenon and while there is a sense of difference between humanity as it is and humanity as it could be, this difference does not map on to a body/spirit division.
23Bloch also uses the opportunity to draw the contrast between the On-high and From-below: ‘The more the situation of the peasants and ordinary urban citizens worsened, and the more visibly on the other hand mercantile capital and territorial princedom succeeded and the purely feudal empire, founded on economic modes of the past, disintegrated, the more powerfully the prophecy of a new, an “evangelical” age necessarily struck home; in the case of Münzer as peasant – proletarian – petit-bourgeois battle-cry against increased exploitation, in the case of Luther, of course, as the ideology of the princes against central power and the Church’ (HT, 118).
24Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 61.
25See also Bloch’s discussion of transcending without the ‘transcendent-hypostasizing’ in his earlier sections on the development of biblical hermeneutics (AC, 39).
26Ben Anderson, ‘ “Transcending without Transcendence” Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope’, Antipode 38, no. 4 (2006): 700.
27See Markus Gabriel’s Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (London: Continuum, 2011) and Žižek’s work in The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) and Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012). They also have collaborated on Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum, 2009). Quentin Meillassoux explores contingency in relation to his concept of divine inexistence. He develops a philosophical defence of contingency in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2010), and uses his understanding of contingency to defend the notion of an inexistent God in ‘The Spectral Dilemma’. Extracts detailing this ‘divinology’ are available as an appendix to Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). There is a striking parallel between Bloch’s claim that ‘[t]he idea of the Creator-of the-world as well as of its Lord, had to retreat continually before that of the Spirit of the Goal, who has no fixed abode. – All the more so, the more the Promised Land beyond the desert was still conceived of in terms of Egypt. The more the Canaan here-and-now was disappointing, in accordance with a God who is himself not yet what he is: who is only in the future of his promise-to-be – if he should keep his word – and in no other way’ (AC, 81) and Meillassoux’s contention that only an inexistent God is congruent with a demand for justice. Further, the language of divine inexistence recalls language prevalent in Gnostic traditions. Similar ideas connecting Meillassoux and Žižek are developed in Michael O’Neill Burns, ‘The Hope of Speculative Materialism’, in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 316–34.
28Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 38.
29Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 39.
30Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 41.
31Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 42.
32Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 43.
33Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 44.
34Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 45.
35Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 47.
36Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 48.
37Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 49.
38Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 49.
39John W. Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 23. In his review of Malabou’s The Future of Hegel, William Dudley argues that one of the missed opportunities of the book is engagement with the Anglo-American work done on themes of openness and contingency in Hegel’s philosophy. He specifically mentions Kolb and Burbidge, both of whom will feature in this section. I am indebted to Dudley’s review for drawing attention to these connections. See William Dudley, ‘The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (Review)’, Notre Dame Philosophical Review (2006), http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25128-the-future-of-hegel-plasticity-temporality-and-dialectic/.
40Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 12.
41Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 9.
42Translation modified from Miller’s.
43Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 64.
44Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 62.
45Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 6.
46John W. Burbidge, ‘Hegel’s Open Future’, In Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris, ed. Michael Baur and John Edward Russon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, 182.
47Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 464.
48Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 467.
49Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 467.
50Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 468.
51Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology, 102–3. Gabriel’s argument is not that Hegel is right, but that Hegel claims being has a necessary form. This point is part of his larger argument for Schelling’s superior philosophy of contingency. ‘If I claim that the necessity of 2 + 2 = 4 could be otherwise, and even that any logical necessity could be otherwise, I am not saying that it is arbitrary to believe that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5. I am only claiming that the possibility of revision is built into every belief system. And even if mathematics were the attempt to map an eternal realm of laws (whatever that might mean), it would have to map it, and that is to say it would have to consist of claims. Claims are finite, because they are determinate, and determinacy entails higher-order contingency, as I hope to make plausible in this chapter against Hegel’s claim to a closure of the indeterminacy of determining’ (p. 103).
52Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, 24.
53Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 464.
54Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 464.
55As Hudson explains, ‘concrete utopia and the new metaphysics are synonymous: transcending without Transcendence. There is no mythological “Transcendence” and no need for other-worldly assumptions, because the world itself contains immanent reference to a possible perfection towards which it is driving, and a forward driving transcendere pervades the process forms’ (Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982), 99).
56Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 48.
57Others continue to argue for eschatology or messianism. Graham Ward, for example, reaches a similar conclusion, but finds the latter term appropriate: ‘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’s Messianic Reasoning and Its Politics’ in Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic, ed. Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher (London: Continuum, 2010), 91).
58Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 106.
59Clayton Crockett and Catherine Malabou, ‘Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology’, Political Theology 11, no. 1 (2010): 30.
1Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 50.
2Schmitt, Crisis of European Democracy, 71.
3Jayne Svenungsson, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 176.
4Saidiya V. Hartman makes this point in regard to reparations for slavery. Regarded by many as an extreme and unattainable attempt to make amends for American history, Hartman identifies the political problem at its core. For her, ‘reparations seem like a very limited reform: a liberal scheme based upon certain notions of commensurability that reinscribe the power of the law and of the state to make right a certain situation, when, clearly, it cannot’ (Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘The Position of the Unthought’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 13, no. 2 (2003): 198).
5Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). She defines the matrix as ‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’ (194n.6).
6Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 181–2.
7Svenungsson, Divining History, 178.
8Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4.
9China Miéville, ‘The Dusty Hat’, in Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories (London: Macmillan, 2015), 243. While Miéville uses serf rather than slave, his visceral choice of imagery should be read in the light of Wilderson’s concern that ‘the image of the Slave as an enabling vehicle that [animates] the evolving discourses of . . . emancipation’ (Frank B. Wilderson III Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 19). Wilderson argues that even the emancipation of the slave is appropriated to fund the discourses of other struggles. The concrete liberation of the slave, the end of race, must therefore be at the centre of any invocation of the image of the slave.
10Thomas More, Utopia (London: Verso, 2016), 72–3.
11Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2016), 20.
12Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 20.
13Solnit, Hope in the Dark, xii.
14It is worth noting that the sources of this pessimism – queer theory and Afro-Pessimism – both come from positions that Solnit argues have benefited from progress. As she argues, ‘In the past half century, the state of the world has declined dramatically, measured by material terms and by the brutality of wars and ecological onslaughts. But we have also added a huge number of intangibles, of rights, ideas, concepts, words to describe and to realize what was once invisible or unimaginable’ (Hope in the Dark, 13). She cites marriage equality as evidence of the improvement of society (p. xiv).
15To be clear, this reading of Edelman and Wilderson is not an effort to uncover theological determinations of their positions (an all too common practice when theology of any kind engages with other disciplines). Nor am I arguing that Edelman and Wilderson offer the same pessimism. The argument is simply that both oppose the future of the world in a way that can inform an apocalyptic disposition.
16James Bliss, ‘Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 48, no. 1 (2015): 86.
17On the park and bus station, see José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
18Edelman, No Future, 75. It is worth recalling Federici’s argument that fears of witches and other persecutions of women focused on reproduction. Infanticide, abortion, contraception and the incantations of witches were diabolical in their disruption of the reproduction of the future.
19Edelman, No Future, 4.
20Edelman, No Future, 17.
21Edelman, No Future, 25.
22Non-reproductivity has long been a theme in condemnations of homosexuality as deviant. Of course, suspicion of the childless is not only limited to homosexuality. For example, there was widespread controversy over Andrea Leadsom’s suggestion that the future UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, lacked a real stake in the future because she does not have children. See Sam Coates and Rachel Sylvester, ‘Being a Mother Gives Me an Edge on May – Leadsom’, The Times, 9 July 2016, and Ashley Cowburn, ‘Andrea Leadsom Attacked by Tory MPs over “Vile” and “Insulting” Comments on Theresa May’s Childlessness’, The Independent, 10 July 2016.
23Edelman, No Future, 30.
24Nina Power, ‘Non-Reproductive Futurism: Rancière’s Rational Equality against Edelman’s Body Apolitic’, Borderlands 8, no. 2 (2009): 15.
25Power, ‘Non-Reproductive Futurism’, 2.
26Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
27Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 13.
28Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 83.
29Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 91.
30Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 175.
31Edelman, No Future, 48, 101.
32Edelman, No Future, 30.
33Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 7.
34On the queer hope enabled by non-reproductive futurity, see Bliss, ‘Hope Against Hope’.
35Kara Keeling describes something similar in her exploration of the poetry of the future. She writes of an impossible possibility that ‘is a felt presence of the unknowable, the content of which exceeds its expression and therefore points toward a different epistemological, if not ontological and empirical, regime’ (p. 567). See ‘Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 578.
36Keeling, ‘Looking for M – ’, 578.
37Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 9, 10, 20, 49–50. On the specific limitations of Marxism for thinking about the position of the slave, see Wilderson’s ‘Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?’, Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225–40.
38Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 9.
39Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 49.
40Howard Caygill discusses this approach in his philosophical investigation of resistance and the work needed to cultivate the ability to exist in a state of resistance. Though he has greater hope in a constructive response to the world than apocalypticism, his notion that resistant subjective ‘do not enjoy the freedom of possibility, but only a bare capacity to resist enmity and chance’ and are in some ‘sense already dead’ describes the form of subjectivity shared by apocalyptic dispositions (On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 98). Barber also discusses this same idea by analysing the difference between tiredness and exhaustion in Deleuze. ‘With tiredness . . . possibility persists. Such possibility is evidently marked by failure . . . With exhaustion, or the failure to possibility, things are quite different. This is because exhaustion challenges the very existence of possibility . . . The failure indexed by exhaustion is the failure to inhabit a frame in which possibility would even exist’ (‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, 205n.25).
41Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 338.
42Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 66.
43Hartman and Wilderson, ‘The Position of the Unthought’, 187.
44Hartman and Wilderson, ‘The Position of the Unthought’, 187.
45Fanon’s famous meditation on violence traces the absolute necessity for violence, but also the ways that ‘unsuccessful’ violence can reinforce colonial power and ‘successful’ violence haunts those who forge a new society in the wake of colonial rule. Violence is tragic in its necessity. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2014), 1–51. On the post-revolutionary legacy of violence, see Caygill, On Resistance, 103.
46George Yancy makes precisely this point in his discussion of teaching white students about race. Even the best students, after deep introspection, reassume the sense of autonomy and agency needed to fix the problem of agency. They ‘presume that when it comes to the complexity and depth of their own racism, they possess the capacity for absolute epistemic clarity and that the self is transparent’ (‘Looking at Whiteness: Tarrying with the Embedded and Opaque White Racist Self’, in Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012), 168).
47Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 11.
48Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 22.
49Lauren Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 63 (2007): 33.
50Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015), 225.
51Bliss, ‘Hope Against Hope’, 94.
52It is inevitable in this discussion to cite Adorno’s much-quoted line, ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’ (Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 39).
53I explore the political implications of Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham in relation to Hegel in ‘Hegel and Fear and Trembling’, in Facing Abraham: Seven Readings of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, ed. Frederiek Depoortere (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 31–50.
54In Kierkegaard’s telling of his story, the knight is male, so I am preserving his gendered language.
55Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Repetition, trans. Howard V. Kong and Edna H. Kong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 43.
56Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 46.
57For this notion of the expressible within the world, see Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’.
58Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 39.
59Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 38.
60E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 2. He describes those who make up millennial sects as ‘a pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world’.
61Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), 48.
62Toscano, Fanaticism, 49.
63Jimmy Carter, ‘Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: “The Malaise Speech” ’, The American Presidency Project, 15 July 1979. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=32596 (accessed 15 December 2017).
64Carter, ‘Address to the Nation’.