Abstract
G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida are true masters of a carefully mediated messianic political theology, and what they share is a utilization of the apocalypse, that is, the conviction that without the apocalyptic genre there would be no concept of history at all. To put it another way, their messianic political theology tarries with a common negative: the apocalyptic nearness of God or the danger of coming too close to the naked divine power.
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Notes
- 1.
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (Peking: People’s Publishing House, 1965), 76.
- 2.
Sanhedrin 98a. See also Midrash Tehilim: “Israel speaks to God: When will You redeem us? He answers: When you have sunk to the lowest level, at that time I will redeem you.” On which Scholem succinctly comments: “the redemption, then, cannot be realized without dread and ruin… There can be no preparation for the Messiah. He comes suddenly, unannounced, and precisely when he is least expected or when hope has long been abandoned.” Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1995), 13, 11. On the concept of khurbn/korban, see Leviticus 26:31: “I will give your cities over to destruction (charbah) and I will destroy (vehashimotyi) your Temples.”
- 3.
The katechon (in Luther’s translation der Aufhalter, “the restrainer”) derives from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2:3–2:8): “And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed”: (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, eds., Bernhard W. Anderson, Bruce Manning Metzger and Roland Edmund Murphy [Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press: 1991]). In Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt creates an entire new political theology based on the concept of the katechon as the one who withholds the advent of the Antichrist representing the forces of lawlessness and disorder and as such is a true fulfillment of Christian religion; see most of all the chapter “The Christian Empire as a Restrainer of the Antichrist (Katechon)” in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 1999), where Schmitt says: “I do not believe that any historical concept other than katechon would have been possible for the original Christian faith” (61). The claim that Paul, unable to wait for the Second Coming any longer, suffered a failure of the messianic nerve and because of that turned toward the figure of the katechon, derives from Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 103. While Schmitt represents the katechonic wisdom of anti-messianic and anti-apocalyptic politics, Taubes constitutes the ideal type of the opposite: a messianic theopolitics that stakes itself on the apocalyptic revelation of God as putting an end to the failed experiment of the world. Hence his famous declaration: “I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is” (ibid.).
- 4.
Compare the classical definition of tsimtsum offered by Gershom Scholem: “Creation out of nothing, from the void, could be nothing other than creation of the void, that is, of the possibility of thinking of anything that was not God. Without such an act of self-limitation, after all, there would be only God—and obviously nothing else. A being that is not God could only become possible and originate by virtue of such a contraction, such a paradoxical retreat of God into himself. By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates creation.” Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 283; emphasis added.
- 5.
The paradigm of tsimtsum as the germ-cell of an alternative theological tradition deriving out of the sources of Judaism is well explained by Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the best twentieth-century Jewish theologians, for whom it means that “infinity contracts itself; eternity concentrates itself in the fleeting and transient, the Divine Presence in dimensions and the glory of God in measurements. It is Judaism that has given the world the secret of tsimtsum, of ‘contraction,’ contraction of the infinite within the finite, the transcendent within the immanent.” Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Man (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 48. In that sense, the tsimtsum paradigm would precede the Christian doctrine of the divine incarnation, but also make it broader, as is indeed the case with Hegel, for whom the incarnation of Spirit/Subject into the Substance/World leads to the dialectical intertwinement of “the infinite in the finite”: a “diminished” presence of the divine within worldly reality.
- 6.
The first version of tsimtsum, in which God “takes in his breath” and restricts his glory for the sake of something else to emerge, derives from Isaiah, as described by Elliot Wolfson in his interpretation of one of the bahiric texts: “The notion of withdrawal, itself withdrawn and thus not stated overtly, is a secret exegetically derived from the verse lema‘an shemi a’arikh appi u-tehillati ehetam lakh le-vilti hakhritekha, ‘For the sake of my name I will postpone my wrath and my glory, I will hold in for you so that I will not destroy you’ (Isa 48:9)… One may surmise that at some point in ancient Israel the notion of a vengeful god yielded its opposite, the compassionate god who holds in his fury.” Elliott Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau. Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 132–3. It is worth quoting the relevant passage of the Dickinson poem at length since it will inform much of my analysis in what follows:Verse
Verse Tell all the truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind.
- 7.
Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel 1971–1978 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 41.
- 8.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 55. For Derrida, the retreat which keeps the distance between transcendence and immanence is also a form of restraint: “Scruple, hesitation, indecision, reticence (hence modesty, pudeur, respect, restraint before that which should remain sacred, holy or safe: unscathed, immune)—this too is what is meant by religio” (ibid., 68).
- 9.
See Eric Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint. The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5 (Kansas City: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 184–6.
- 10.
On Hegel’s relation to Martin Luther and the Reformed Theology, see most of all Ulrich Asendorf, Luther und Hegel: Untersuchung zur Grundlegung einer Neuen Systematischen Theologie (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982).
- 11.
By endorsing this position, I want to engage in a gentle polemic with the latest turn in Hegelian scholarship which revises the idea of Hegel the dialectical reformer of the world and attempts to reclaim his praise of revolution, championed mostly by Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek rejects the “common perception” according to which “Hegel condemns French Revolution as the immediate assertion of an abstract-universal Freedom” and insists on the repetition of the revolutionary apocalypse now! in the manner of an unstoppable Wiederholungszwang (repetition compulsion) pressing toward the catastrophe, I would like to emphasize the dialectical resumption of the apocalyptic fire in the Hegelian concept of the work as “delayed destruction,” mediating forward between the apocalyptic “fury of destruction” and the passive conservation of the status quo. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 69.
- 12.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118. Henceforth cited in-text as PS.
- 13.
The metaphor of the master/slave dialectic as the best way to approach the evolution of Western metaphysical thought appears very strongly in Adorno’s series of lectures devoted to metaphysics, where he presents Aristotle as the precursor of Hegel, the first thinker to emancipate worldly beings from the service to Platonic Ideas and to give them “permanence and objectivity”: “Aristotle… makes a very strong and legitimate case, based on the argument that all the attributes of the Ideas are derived from the empirical world, on which they live, rather as the rulers lived on the work of their servants or slaves.” Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Polity Press, 2001), 20.
- 14.
Compare Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 545: “It is just this [the rivalry] that Luther… translated into monotheistic terms: He who wanted to be God and it was naturally self-evident for him that man had to want this could only want to be it in place of the one God. Where no equivalence is possible, thinking has to take the form of the desire to annihilate”—which, following Hegel, would be the desire to annihilate the master: this is precisely what the slave is not supposed to do.
- 15.
On the influence of the heterodox religious motives deriving from the so-called Christian kabbalistic milieu on Hegel, see my “God of Luria, Hegel, Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,” in Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy, ed. David Lewin, Simon Podmore, and Duane Williams (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 32–50.
- 16.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 130.
- 17.
Hegel quotes Schiller’s poem Resignation in section 340 of the Philosophy of Right: “The history of the world is the world’s court of judgment.” Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 266.
- 18.
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 429; emphasis added. Henceforth cited in-text as SR.
- 19.
The rabbinic rule of “no longer in heaven,” which places the Torah-Law on earth in the safe distance from God’s miraculous interventions, derives from the talmudic story, told in the tractate Baba Metsia 59b. For the full description of this motif, see Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 130–31.
- 20.
Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 323.
- 21.
Rosenzweig is very well aware of the pitfalls of the total neutralization of the apocalyptic fire, which he calls “Jewish dangers” (SR 429): one of them consists in “squeezing it into the cozy domestic space between the Law and its, the Law’s, people” (SR 430). Thus, while the Christians are endangered by an excessive expansion, which may contaminate their messianic work of the transformation of the worldly reality and make it forget its roots—the Jews are endangered by an excessive contraction of the divine “heat” which they overly domesticate and then, indeed, render useless for the actual world: “Christianity, by radiating outwards, is in danger of evaporating into isolated rays far away from the divine core of truth. Judaism, by glowing inwards, is in danger of gathering its heat into its own bosom far distant from the pagan world reality” (SR 430). The right concept of the Law, as the dialectical bridge between the transcendent heat/fire and the immanent worldly reality, is thus to counteract both, Jewish and Christian, dangers.
- 22.
See Levinas’ description of the Torah as the trace of the transcendent justice from without, which challenges the ontological order here and now: “Being receives a challenge from the Torah, which jeopardizes its pretention of keeping itself above or beyond good and evil. In challenging the absurd ‘that’s the way it is’ claimed by the Power of the powerful, the man of the Torah transforms being into human history. Meaningful movement jolts the Real.” Emmanuel Lévinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 39.
- 23.
In Hermann Diels’ Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, this is fragment nr 64: translation slightly altered after Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Charles Seibert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 4–11, where this aphorism is thoroughly discussed.
- 24.
Jacques Derrida, “Christianity and Secularization,” trans. David Newheiser, Critical Inquiry 47 (Autumn 2020), 139; emphasis added.
- 25.
While commenting on Kant’s ethics, Michael Rosen does not hide his fear of the apocalyptic terror which it openly endorses: “The austere slogan of retributivism was always: let justice be done although the world perishes (fiat justitia, pereat mundus). Kant’s position seems even harsher—let justice be done even if we have to create a hell for it to be done in”: Michael Rosen, “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” in Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus, ed. F. Rush (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 13.
- 26.
Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (1984), 22. Henceforth cited as APO.
- 27.
Derrida was always critical of Hegel, perhaps to the point of being “unfair to Hegel”—especially in the 60’s when he wished to inscribe the poststructuralist turn into the anti-dialectical rebellion of the students of Alexandre Kojève, most of all Georges Bataille, but also later, when he fell under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas, who saw in Hegel the destroyer of the transcendence and the main source of the historicist error in twentieth-century philosophy. Yet, already Derrida’s concept of différance is a paradigmatic example of poststructuralist “dialectics beyond dialectics” which constantly tarries with the Hegelian legacy under the auspices of the Bataillean dictum that opens Derrida’s essay on “Hegelianism without reserve”: “Hegel did not know to what extent he was right.” Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1978), 317. In what prima facie appears as a sympathetic reported speech, Derrida laughs with Bataille at Hegel’s thrifty ways of economizing every bit of negativity in the process of work and creating the “slavish” world of meaning: “The notion of Aufhebung… is laughable in that it signifies the busying of a discourse losing its breath as it reappropriates all negativity for itself, as it works the ‘putting at stake’ into an investment, as it amortizes absolute expenditure” that aims at “the absolute sacrifice of meaning: a sacrifice without return and without reserves” (ibid., 324). Yet, the more he matures, Derrida is no longer willing (if he really ever was) to subscribe to the Kojèvian apology of the master and his unbound self-expenditure/jouissance at the expense of the slave’s choice of life and survival, which invests in the “permanence and objectivity” of this world and, in order to do so, must “amortize”—diminish and harness—the apocalyptic powers of the masterly desire. Ultimately, therefore, Derrida ends up in the position that, for Bataille, would indeed appear “laughable”: a certain unavowed “Hegelianism with reserve” where the negative becomes restricted by the higher imperative of the world’s survival. On the poststructuralist reckoning with Hegel, see Małgorzata Kowalska, Dialectics Beyond Dialectics. Essay on Totality and Difference, trans. Cain Elliott and Jan Burzyński (Lausanne: Peter Lang, 2015).
- 28.
See also Derrida on Kant in the 1998 text, “The History of the Lie”: “Everything must be sacrificed to this sacredness of the commandment. Kant writes, ‘To be truthful [wahrhaft; loyal, sincere, honest, in good faith: ehrlich] in all declarations is, therefore, a sacred [heiliges] and unconditional [unbedingt gebietendes] commanding law of reason [Vernunftgebot] that admits of no expediency whatsoever.’” Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 45.
- 29.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 22.
- 30.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 35; emphasis added.
- 31.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The 9th Duino Elegy: “But because being here is a lot: because everything here/ Seems to need us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way/ Concerns us.”
- 32.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 100.
- 33.
The last words of Derrida, which he scribbled right before his death, were: “Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival”: Jacques Derrida, “Final Words,” trans. Gila Walker, in The Late Derrida, eds. W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 244.
- 34.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201.
- 35.
Wahrheit tötet: Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 190. See Derrida’s comment on Nietzsche’s statement, deriving from his 1973 seminar: “the truth is suicide in its structure”: Jacques Derrida, Life Death, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 153.
- 36.
The rejection of Absolute Knowledge as modelled on the advent/restitution of parousia—the Light of Lights as the absolute presence—is the fundamental difference which sets apart Derrida from Hegel who ultimately cannot resist the allure of the main Christian symbol of the Second Coming. In “The Pit and the Pyramid,” the essay from the Margins devoted to the Hegelian semiology, Derrida criticizes Hegel’s conception of the sign as the “time of referral” in transition between the original and the final presence, whereas he wants to transform it into a time of deferral which suspends and “subverts every kingdom”: “The time of the sign, then, is the time of referral. It signifies self-presence, refers presence to itself, organizes the circulation of its provisionality. Always, from the outset, the movement of lost presence already will have set in motion the process of its reappropriation.” Derrida, Margins, 71–72.
- 37.
Derrida, Acts of Religion, 289.
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Bielik-Robson, A. (2023). Apocalypse. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_17
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