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2009 98: 52Thesis ElevenAustin Harrington

'Messianicity' in Social Theory? A Critique of a Thesis of Jacques Derrida  

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‘MESSIANICITY’ IN SOCIALTHEORY? A CRITIQUE OF ATHESIS OF JACQUES DERRIDA

Austin Harrington

ABSTRACT Jacques Derrida’s vision of ‘messianicity’ in his book Specters ofMarx and the essay ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” atthe Limits of Reason Alone’ has been widely appreciated by scholars. Yet littlefundamentally critical engagement appears to have been made with someimportant historical-sociological questions raised by Derrida’s ideas in thesetexts. Drawing on earlier reference-points in 20th-century critical theory and soci-ology, the present article argues for some objections to Derrida’s presentationof the significance of religious messianism in modern Western social and poli-tical thought. The central claim defended is that Derrida invidiously marginal-izes some important non-messianistic idioms, sources and traditions of thinkingabout religious history and its bearing on contemporary social and politicalself-understanding.

KEYWORDS chiliasm • Derrida • messianism • theology and social theory• utopianism

In two major writings, Specters of Marx (1994) [1992]) and ‘Faith andKnowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’(2002a [1996]), Jacques Derrida turned the style of thinking he termed ‘decon-struction’ to an analysis of messianistic themes and motifs in Western reli-gious consciousness and its various secular modern political analogues.1 Inso doing, he renewed several longstanding strands of thought in writings bynumerous earlier 20th-century European thinkers, including German-Jewishfigures such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Franz Rosenzweig, TheodorAdorno, Max Horkheimer and Gershom Scholem, as well as some Christiantheologians such as Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. Both Derrida’s textshave received extensive appreciative commentary from scholars, as much

Thesis Eleven, Number 98, August 2009: 52–68SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op LtdDOI: 10.1177/0725513609105483

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from the angle of political thought and criticism as from the standpoint ofreligious ideas and their relation to philosophy.2 However, the present articlewill argue that no satisfactorily critical engagement with Derrida’s texts hasyet been undertaken that evaluates their claims from the perspective ofsome important methodological problems in sociological and social-historicalanalysis. Though there has been no shortage of polemical responses toDerrida’s forays into moral and political philosophy in the last 15 years ofhis life, no contribution appears yet to have addressed Derrida’s statementsabout messianistic religious history and its bearing on contemporary socialand political values in relation to questions of general empirical, phenom-enological and hermeneutical plausibility.

The following reflections proceed first by briefly recapitulating the broadcontours of Derrida’s exposition and its intellectual sources. Three subsequentsections then take issue with aspects of Derrida’s ideas about secularity andsecularization; about time, history, utopia and chiliastic ‘waiting’; and finallyabout modernity and the project of autonomy.

MESSIANICITY AND MESSIANISM

Common to modern messianistic thinking in broadly secular politicalcontexts is a conviction of the meaninglessness of collective liberatory aspira-tions other than in relation to an absolutely disruptive future event of redemp-tion of some kind. A moment of deliverance is said to come at a whollyunknown and unexpected point in the future, and to break with all existinghistorical experience, including all existent institutional authority over defini-tions of the social good. A struggle is proclaimed against false eschatologicaldoctrines that compromise with the existing state of affairs and thereby betraythe hopes of the people, or that proclaim the coming of the perfect futuresociety in ways that sanctify the existing order of time. Teachings of gradualsalvation or eventual coming of the Kingdom are to be rejected for the singu-larly exceptional future event – the Revolution – that installs the true and justsociety once and for all.

Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ (1921) and famouslast ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1939) stand as classic statementsof this idiom in 20th-century Jewish-Marxian thought, blending the Mosaicban on graven images of the one and only God with a precept that the futureperfect society cannot be imagined or represented but at most intimated orevoked by allegory. Inasmuch as the present age cannot help but think incapitalist categories of thought, any representation of the coming of Revolu-tion or any overarching theory of inexorable historical movement must standas an idolatrous and fraudulent betrayal of radical future difference. ForBenjamin and other figures of the non-aligned Western Marxist Left, both19th-century capitalistic liberalism on the one hand, and increasingly thesecond socialist International on the other hand, incarnate false teleological

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narratives of approaching human beatitude through industrial progress andthe spread of science. In both cases, deceptive ideas of the evolution of thehuman race toward salvation are said to occlude the call for radical eman-cipatory action in the here-and-now, in what Benjamin called ‘now-time’ (dieJetztzeit).

Writing at the end of the 20th century after the fall of the Eastern com-munist bloc, Derrida revisits these motifs in a disquisition on the new ‘marketevangelism’ of Western capitalism, evoking a world-wide condition of techno-economic modernity driven by Western cultural forces that hollow out localsources of meaning and orientation and mutate into a global secular ideologyof material progress. ‘Globalatinization’ (mondialatinisation) is the neologismDerrida coins to portray this condition or process insofar as it reveals a ‘strangephenomenon of Latinity and of its globalization’ (F 66), or a ‘strange allianceof Christianity, as the experience of the death of God, and teletechnoscien-tific capitalism’ (F 52). A new ‘hyper-imperialism’ (F 66), he declares, hasarisen on the foundations of the Kantian Enlightenment, laying bare a certainWestern-centred ‘juridico-theologico-political culture’ at work in the UnitedNations, in the ‘international community’ and in George H. W. Bush’s ‘newworld order’ (F 79).

In this depiction, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the LastMan (1991), inspired by Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s philosophyof history, emblematizes a new kind of dominant ‘teleo-eschatological’ dis-course that binds Lockean liberalism to ‘Hegel’s state of universal recog-nition’, most overtly with its message of ‘good news’ and a ‘Promised Land’of peace and prosperity brought by the spread of capitalism and liberaldemocracy (S 59, 60).

But Derrida adds that new kinds of ‘war for the “appropriation ofJerusalem”’ today also extend to forms of religious revivalism that rise up inthe ethical vacuum created by the twin presence of communist and capitalistideologies in contemporary collective memory and experience (S 58). Newforms of religious mobilization respond to a felt sense of decadence andvacuity in the global capitalist world order – but they react to this emptinessin no less illusory ways. They stand as instances of ‘mere messianism’, asagainst a more profound comprehension of ‘messianicity’. The latter, Derridaaffirms, is to be considered something ‘older than all religion, more originarythan all messianism’ (F 56), for it, unlike all hitherto existing messianist con-sciousness, signifies a ‘necessarily indeterminate abstract, desert-like experi-ence that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other’ (S 90):

The messianic, or messianicity without messianism . . . would be the openingto the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but withouthorizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of theother can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming.. . . The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and . . . it ought, exposingitself so abstractly, [to] be prepared (waiting without awaiting itself) for the

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best as for the worst. . . . This messianic dimension does not depend uponany messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs properly tono Abrahamic religion (even if I am obliged here, for essential reasons of lan-guage and of place, of culture . . . to continue giving it names marked by theAbrahamic religions). (F 56)

Derrida’s ‘other’ messianic figure thus draws strategically on a combi-nation of secular philosophical contents with Judaic religious moments, in aclaim to subvert ‘globalatinization’ as a predominantly Judaeo-Christian andat the same time secularized configuration. The Judaic moment for Derrida,however, expresses no historically positive religious essence or substance,instead standing abstractly for a pure idea of ‘alterity’, from which all peoplesof the world might gain solidarity and inspiration in their struggles with afalsely self-universalizing world order of power.

Derrida in this respect can be said to stand in a line of European thinkersof Jewish parentage from Moses Mendelssohn to Marx, Freud, Durkheim orArendt, who seek to formulate universalistic principles of social and politicalenlightenment while at the same time including an excluded ‘Jewish other’that nevertheless cannot be essentialized as distinctly Jewish. Derrida’s twowritings conjugate this undertaking with a raft of additional motifs borrowedfrom The Communist Manifesto (the famous opening words), from Freud’sessay on ‘The Uncanny’, from Levinas’s ‘face of the Other’, from Nietzsche’sUntimely Meditations, from Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion,from Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and from Shakespeare’sghost of the father and ‘time out of joint’ in Hamlet.

Underpinning all these motifs is a central thesis derived from MartinHeidegger’s quasi-apocalyptic vision of the desuetude of ‘positive religion’insofar as all existing religions seek to place Being (das Sein) under the signof a highest name or ‘logos’ or set of metaphysical ‘onto-theological’ categoriesof representation – categories which, according to Heidegger, fundamentallyconceal and obscure the truth of Being more than they reveal it. Derrida’s‘messianicity without messianism’ here imitates Heidegger’s distinction be-tween authentic fundamental-ontological ‘revealability’ (Offenbarkeit) andtraditional scriptural revelation (Offenbarung ). Following Heidegger, Derridasuggests that only when recourse to positive revelation is abandoned will themore primordial ‘revealability’ of Being in religion become intelligible again(F 56). Only when traditionally authenticated sacred writing is ‘de-structed’ or‘deconstructed’ will the presence of an ‘absolutely other being’ beyond repre-sentation become glimpsable again. A veritably messianic consciousness there-fore consists in waiting for something like Heidegger’s Ereignis or ‘Event’ or‘happening of Being’ – for an unforeseeable and incalculable moment of the‘now’ that bursts through ordinary monotonous time and thereby illuminatescertain ‘transcendental’ or ‘fundamental ontological’ structures of historicity.

Derrida’s contribution reactivates in these ways a longstanding ethos ofreflection on nihilism as a condition of modernity. But for Derrida, as for

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many other post-war French readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger (such asE. M. Cioran, Maurice Blanchot or Pierre Klossowski and others), nihilismconnotes not so much an experience of exhaustion, vacuation or definitive‘end’ as a certain fleeting chance of beginning, of a certain ‘perhaps’ or peut-être of redemption. The ‘nothing’ in this sense hints at a possible (but notassured) opening to renewal, where ‘the end’ of Judaeo-Christian-Hellenicmetaphysics stands possibly for another endeavour of belief, where ‘mean-inglessness’, ‘disenchantment’ and atheism become conditions on whichappropriate responses to transcendent Being might for the first time makethemselves heard in the modern age.

In ways to some extent comparable to Derrida, the Austrian-Jewishthinker Jakob Taubes, who returned to Europe in the 1970s and taught inBerlin until his death in 1987, argued that modern nihilism in this sensepoints back to the teachings of St Paul about the fallenness of creation andabout man’s search for righteousness (see Taubes, 1993). Decisive for Taubesin this sense were the following key verses from the Epistle to the Romans:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing withthe glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longingfor the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected tofutility; not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hopethat the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtainthe freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the wholecreation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation,but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly whilewe wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved.Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But ifwe hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom. 8, 18–25)

Taubes’s linkage of Pauline messianism to secular modern themes inthe writings of thinkers such as Max Weber and Benjamin as well as Tolstoycan be compared in certain ways to Derrida’s Specters of Marx.3 Neverthe-less, it can be argued that both Taubes’s and Derrida’s and other 20th-centuryvariants of messianistic social thought invite criticism in a number of connec-tions.4 The following considerations concentrate on some difficulties withDerrida’s formulations in particular.

MESSIANICITY AND SECULARITY

One significant initial difficulty bears on Derrida’s conception of thestatus of the secular in contemporary conditions of globalization. This stemsfirst of all from a way in which Derrida’s account of globalizing experiences,and of more general processes of modernity, tends to lack an empiricallyspecific chronological framework. Prima facie, his explanatory apparatusevokes a rather crudely generalizing ‘secularization theory’ of the genesis of

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modern structures of social life – in ways that many empirical sociologistsand historians of religion would today find highly questionable.5 As a whole,his synopsis appears to assume one master process of secularization thaterupts from a predominantly Christian origin and then issues in variousglobal secular ideologies of cognitive progress.

Admittedly, Derrida appears in one passage to disavow any across-the-board secularization thesis. He writes, for example, that at present ‘nothingseems . . . more imprudent than a self-assured discourse on the age of dis-enchantment, the era of secularization, the time of laicization’ (F 100). Twolines earlier, he also writes of a messianic ‘law of untimeliness [that] inter-rupts and makes history . . . and opens the very space of faith’ and thereby‘designates disenchantment as the very resource of the religious’ (F 100).

One notices in this passage, however, that Derrida here uses the terms‘disenchantment’ and ‘secularization’ essentially synonymously, suggestingthat the only respect in which he considers contemporary global life not toinhere in secularity is in its susceptibility to interruption by messianic ‘un-timeliness’. It would thus appear that in Derrida’s account anything that isnot authentically ‘messianic’ counts as secular or secularized. This seems toelide secularization as an historically empirical process with a concept of‘the secular’ as a general order of ordinary non-messianic time. Derrida’sassumption therefore seems to be that all concretely existing religious prac-tices and beliefs that fail to satisfy an authentically messianic criterion cannotbe considered to break with the secular-secularized world: instead they mustbe deemed mere surface reactions to secularity or functions of secularity andparts within it. This then appears to reduce both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist religious conduct to mere reactive tokens of a dominantimperialist world order. All institutionally existing religious traditions wouldappear to collapse into a purely extremist category of pathological responsesto destabilized ways of life.

Derrida’s unqualified picture here appears to be driven at bottom byseveral highly disputable conceptual conflations at play in the neologism‘globalatinization’. One can certainly agree that global political and economicpower emanates more today from countries of ‘the West’, or from Europe andNorth America, than from any other region or civilizational constellation ofthe world. But to equate globalization tout court, including global economic,political, legal and scientific integration, with Judaeo-Christian ‘Latinity’ is –even for purposes of heuristic provocation – little short of ridiculous.

Equally problematic is Derrida’s rhetorical association of reason, knowl-edge and science with ‘techno-science’. He writes: ‘we associate here reasonwith philosophy and with science as technoscience . . . knowledge as pro-duction, know-how and intervention at a distance, teletechnoscience thatis always high-performance and performative by essence’ (F 66). Derridalaudably aims to deconstruct any strict demarcation between reason andreligion or knowledge and faith in order to show how the two domains

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effectively interpenetrate or ‘contaminate’ one another in various ways. Thushe writes of ‘the interconnectedness . . . of knowledge and faith, techno-science and religious belief, calculation and the sacrosanct’ (F 90). But themanner in which Derrida carries out this deconstruction often so exaggeratesand stylizes its object of reference as to shoot far wide of empirical historicalrealities. To install ‘technoscience’ here in a position of covert affinity to beliefis to evoke both a highly restricted rationalistic idea of science (hubristic self-worshipping scientism) and an almost purely fideistic or near-irrationalist ideaof the religious. A dramatically polarized dichotomy deliberately occludes arole both for religiously sensitive practices of scientific inquiry on the onehand and for scientifically educated cultures of religious belief on the other.Derrida volunteers very little comment on comprehensions of religious lifein the human sciences, including interpretive non-reductionist sociology,ethnology and empirical historical scholarship – apart from a few rather capri-cious remarks on treatments of religion in the work of the French linguist andphilologist Émile Benveniste (F 68–9, 73–4). Derrida even goes so far as tosuggest that use of the very word ‘religion’ performatively violates all non-scientific and non-Latinate objects of its empirical reference.6 Understandingsof religion in the human sciences in his account thus appear to be no morethan collaborators in a ‘teletechnoscientific’ complex of ‘globalatinization’.

Derrida discusses virtually no empirically specific cases of religious lifeor religious historical institution. Indeed a need for a humanistically concretestudy of religion appears to be ruled out a priori in his account by the merefact that empirically specific religious life in history can only count as ‘ontic’historicity in Heidegger’s sense. Against such a presumption, it should beemphasized that it is not necessary to think of all religious history tout courtin terms of ‘positivity’ or merely ‘ontic’ categories of existence in order tobe able to criticize dogmatic, essentialistic or literalistic forms of religiousself-understanding. Further, it can be observed that, like Michel Foucault,Derrida appears to hold that no humanistic scientific study of religion canbe practised that is not itself wrapped up in a merely ‘ontic’ anthropocen-tric metaphysics of some kind (Foucault’s ‘anthropological slumber’). Conse-quently, Derrida’s presentation would appear to be unable to permit anyrole for scholars and intellectuals capable of mediating in public life betweenthe extremes of positivistic techno-scientific naturalism on the one hand andreligious fundamentalism on the other. Critical interpreters of religion in thispicture can only be either traditional clerical elites or modern technocraticscientistic elites on the model of Saint-Simon’s or Comte’s secular high-priestsof the ‘religion of humanity’.

It would appear, then, that Derrida largely conflates internal methodo-logical norms of scientific rationality with more institutional aspects of the useof scientific knowledge in contexts of technology, economy and adminis-tration.7 One might arguably say that, to this extent, Derrida repeats the samehyperbolical overextension of Max Weber’s rationalization thesis at play in Max

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Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944–7),tendentially reducing scientific self-understanding to self-mythologizing andcollapsing truth-claims into power-effects. Problems of the self-sacralizationof science and self-sacralization of reason in this way take on the guise ofa kind of transhistorical discursive constant.8

It can be suggested that in each of these connections, Derrida employsa tactic of first constructing a ‘binary opposition’ where no such oppositiontruly exists in empirical reality to anything like the extent he suggests, beforethen proceeding to dismantle the opposition in a rhetorical performance ofconceptual pyrotechnics. His analytical strategy in this way is both artificiallyto separate and artificially to elide. To evoke a grand messianic Event thatintroduces ‘difference’ into the world, he must first homogenize and un-differentiate the space of historical sociological reality. In order to dismantlethe black-and-white, he must first paint the real historical scenery of practices,beliefs and institutions in black-and-white. In deliberately stylizing, accentu-ating, exaggerating and caricaturing social-historical reality in this way, hisapproach triggers some insights, but just as often distorts and obscures.Instead of examining phenomena of affinity, coalescence and confusion be-tween science and belief as historically definite sociological formations, hepresents them as structural semiotic constants – which only a messianic‘absolute singularity’ can transcend.

MESSIANICITY AND HISTORY

Derrida writes that ‘one does not know if the expectation prepares thecoming of the future-to-come or if it recalls the repetition of the same’, sincethere is no ‘concluding in advance, without reducing in advance both thefuture and its chance’. Messianicity therefore implies ‘a messianic extrem-ity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event . . . can exceed, at each moment, thefinal term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of anyhistory’ (S 37). Perfect justice and democracy cannot ‘retain the temporal formof a future present’ or ‘a future modality of the living present’ (S 65). It canonly be

this absolutely undetermined messianic hope . . . this eschatological relationto the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot beanticipated. Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does notexpect yet or any longer . . . the absolute surprise of the arrivant . . . the eventthat cannot be awaited as such, or recognised in advance. (S 65)

To this we may reply with several questions. How far can one ‘wait’for something that cannot be ‘awaited’? Can one wait without waiting forsomething? Can there by any waiting that does not imply an intentional objectof some kind? Can waiting take a pure intransitive form? Must all object-directed waiting pre-empt the ‘alterity’ of the awaited? Must every ‘horizon

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of expectation’ ‘totalize in advance’, as Derrida puts it (S 37)? Derrida clearlyrejects Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological language of ‘intentional objects’and ‘horizons of expectation’.9 Indeed he considers the very concept of a‘horizon of expectation’ to be suspect on the grounds that any such horizonmust necessarily not only frame its object but also pre-constitute this objectin some way. Any horizon of expectation, he contends, necessarily cancelsthe possibility of surprise within a horizon. Derrida in this sense repudiatesReinhart Koselleck’s thesis of phenomenologically meaningful interconnectinglinks between horizons of expectation and ‘spaces of experience’ (Koselleck,2004). Derrida denies that a future object of experience can be anticipated ina way that is not absolutely predetermined by the anticipation. Derrida thusdisowns Koselleck’s, Paul Ricoeur’s and others’ general phenomenologicalprecepts that past historical experience shapes present attitudes to the futurein ways that open up conceivable possibilities of future experience withoutalso inevitably circumscribing or curtailing these possibilities (cf. Ricoeur,1988). This, one might say, is the extremely phenomenologically stylizedgloss he wants to give to Paul’s messianic ‘hope that is seen is not hope’(Rom 8, 25).

One can generally agree with many aspects of Derrida’s criticisms ofHusserlian philosophical vocabulary, in line with the broader linguistic turnof 20th-century philosophy. However, in the particular case at issue, it is notclear that deconstructionism plausibly captures the phenomenally specificcharacter of messianic waiting and ‘tarrying’ in real historical settings. It is notclear that to await x is always, necessarily or ‘grammatologically’, to predicatex as F, or to tie x to a set of fixed attributes. Nor is it obvious that gram-matical use of the future perfect tense in linguistic speech inherently compro-mises the possibility of surprise. ‘Precedence’, it should be emphasized, isnot predetermination or predestination (cf. S 91). To ‘create a precedent’ isto create a possible future experience, but not its necessity. Nor is an act thatrules in one future possibility necessarily to rule out all other future possi-bilities. To expect that a past development might continue to unfold more orless analogously in the future is not ipso facto to seek to force it to do so.10

Francis Fukuyama’s reading of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’sphilosophy of history clearly informs much of Derrida’s anathematization ofthe syndrome he calls ‘teleo-eschatology’. It is right that Derrida should askthe reader to take Fukuyama’s book seriously for at least documentary,ideology-critical reasons. Probably no other book, with the sole exceptionof Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996), appears to have exercisedas pervasive and sensational an influence on neo-conservative formulationsof American foreign policy objectives in the last decade of the 20th centuryas the sole remaining super-power after the end of the Cold War.11 However,the problem is that Derrida crudely generalizes from this intellectual straw-man to all instances of evolutionary social theorizing tout court, therebyentirely ignoring a swathe of wholly non-ideological, technical sociological

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conceptions of developmental historical processes and theories of modern-ization – from Durkheim to Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, Habermas, S. N.Eisenstadt, Robert Bellah or Jeffrey Alexander, to name only a small sectionof the academically eminent contributors.12 Nor is it obvious that Hegel’sphilosophy of history itself needs to be interpreted in the highly truncatedmanner Derrida evokes, relying on a caricature of ‘dialectic’ as somethinginseparable from the menace of totalizing logical systems and political totali-tarianism.13

Related to these issues is the highly invidious place that Derrida accordsto phenomena of tradition and insitutionalization in social-liberatory strugglesthrough history. Derrida writes of an other messianic International that would‘call to the friendship of an alliance without institution’ (S 86). He goes onto say that an ‘emancipatory promise’ in this sense ‘is not and ought not tobe certain of . . . any kind of program as such’ (F 56, S 75), for anything thatdid not ‘entail the greatest risk . . . would not be faith but rather programmeor proof, predictability or providence, pure knowledge and pure know-how,which is to say annulment of the future’ (F 83).

One must ask, however, whether any act of institutionalizing the ‘eman-cipatory promise’ by an institution such as a church, a sect, a party, a tradeunion or a welfare state inevitably entails ‘program’, ‘design’, ‘providence’or ‘annulment of the future’? Must every ‘planning’ of the ‘social question’automatically yield totalitarian planning, as Derrida – to some extent alsolike Hannah Arendt in On Revolution (1963) – implies?

Derrida assumes that this must be so, but the conclusion does not followfrom the premise. A social-liberatory tradition or institution of struggle neednot, as tradition and institution, betray a struggle a priori. It may do socontingently, for historically specific reasons, but not for any ‘grammato-logically structural’ reason. It can be suggested that Derrida largely assimilatesthe concept of tradition or heritage to that of repetition or ‘iterability’.14 Hewould appear not to allow for any kind of reflectively progressive, cumula-tive or transformative emancipatory movement through history that is noteither repetition in disguise or pure conservation. His picture does not allowfor actors to act critically and radically toward a tradition while also remain-ing relatively within tradition as such. Tradition in this picture must alwaysbe negated absolutely, never repaired, reformed or transformed in any piece-meal way without some derogatory implication of ‘pragmatism’. Relationshipsto the past thus in general take on the aspect of debt-relationships, where‘debt’ implies bondage and spectral ‘eternal return’ (after Nietzsche and Freud)in ways said to jeopardize the possibility of autonomous self-determination.

In these connections it is instructive to compare Derrida’s accountwith Karl Mannheim’s classic sociological analysis of chiliastic conscious-ness in Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim, 1985 [1929]).15 Mannheim identifiedchiliastic belief as one type of utopian consciousness among others, along-side 18th-century bourgeois liberal-humanitarian consciousness, 19th-century

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conservative Restorationist consciousness, and early 20th-century revolution-ary socialist consciousness (pp. 184–213). Referring in part to Thomas Münzer’s16th-century German peasants’ uprising, Mannheim observed that

what the chiliast expects is unification with the ‘now’ . . . all existing timeremains undifferentiated for him. His concern is not really with the millennialkingdom itself but rather that it should be here and now and should arise outof the earthly as a drastic change of fortune. The promising of the future thusserves no purpose of delay but solely that of creating a point beyond ordinaryoccurrences from which one can lie in wait for the great leap at the appointedmoment. (p. 189)

The chiliast, Mannheim added, seeks a ‘singular creative principle ofimmediate presence, as the longed-for breakthrough to the new world’(p. 189). Like the modern anarchist revolutionary, the chiliast burns all bridgesto any historically existent process of becoming, in favour of tarrying for theutopia that breaks in ‘from an absolute “outside”’ (pp. 189, 190). Chiliasmthus ‘has no organ for becoming; it knows only the abrupt moment, themeaning-drenched “now’’’ (p. 190). Chiliasm expresses ‘neither a concept ofthe path nor a concept of development but only the swelling and ebbing oftime’ (p. 195). The chiliast’s ultimate concern lies with ‘a qualitative differ-entiation of time’ (p. 196).16

Comparing different types of utopian consciousness, Mannheim arguedfor the need for a ‘qualitatively, historically and socially differentiated conceptof utopia’. It was important, he suggested, to distinguish the ‘relatively utopian’from the ‘absolutely utopian’, or the ‘relatively unrealizable’ from the ‘abso-lutely unrealizable’ (p. 174). History needed to be understood in a way that‘joins the becoming of the utopia with the becoming of the “existent”’ (p. 174).It was necessary to ‘comprehend the relationship between the existent andutopia as a “dialectical” one’ (p. 174).

What Derrida’s account lacks, one might suggest, is precisely such a‘dialectical’ understanding of the entwinement of utopia and reality. In Derrida’spicture, any kind of liberatory cooperation, interaction or compromise withexisting institutional power must count as ‘capitulation’, ‘betrayal’ or ‘collab-oration’. Any shortfall in pursuit of a liberatory end can only ever be absolute,never relative, partial or provisional. Any institutionalization of social strugglemust count by definition as its defeat.

Derrida cites neither Mannheim’s text nor the two most important earlierclassic sociological studies of churches, sects and political parties and theirrelationships to existing temporal authority, on which Mannheim and innu-merable other sociologists have perpetually drawn: Max Weber’s Economyand Society (1920) and Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teachings of the Christ-ian Churches (1912). Instead of analysing ways in which grassroots socialmovements that become organized and institutionalized tend to lose theirinitial impulses of creative spontaneity over time in terms of sociologically

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structured regularities in historically specific contexts of interaction, Derridapresents them as universal transcendental features inherent in the use oflanguage as such.

MESSIANICITY, THEOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY

It can be suggested that insofar as Derrida’s figure of ‘globalatinization’appears to suppose a general ‘secularization thesis’ of the process of moder-nity, it calls to mind several aspects of Karl Löwith’s formulation of this thesisin his book Meaning in History: The Theological Origins of the Philosophy ofHistory (1949). As is well-known, it was Löwith, another reader and studentof Heidegger, who first explicitly advanced the proposition that modernideas of progress in science and politics reflect ‘secularized forms’ of Judaeo-Christian theological eschatology.

Derrida, however, engages neither with Löwith’s book nor with anyaspect of the argument of the single most important critical response to Löwithpropounded by Hans Blumenberg in 1966 in The Legitimacy of the ModernAge (Blumenberg et al., 1983; cf. Harrington, 2008). Entirely sidestepping acomplex German-based debate about eschatology and modernity amongother readers of Heidegger, Derrida would appear to hold that modern social,political and scientific transformation finds its cognitive legitimacy not in anyintrinsic validity-content of its own but only in an indirect oblique relation-ship of messianic negation. Derrida’s position would appear to be that secularmodernity, in its very nullity and ontological decadence, can and should beaffirmed to the extent that its very emptiness opens up a possibility ofmessianic breakthrough. But it can be objected that a purely oblique, esotericor quasi-Gnostic rapport to modernity of this kind lends his argumentation aquality of something problematically instrumental, where modernity can beaffirmed as a value only insofar as it stands for something non-valuable: onlyinsofar as its badness hastens, triggers or unlocks an ultimate redeeming Goodat the appointed messianic hour. The reader is thus pushed always into aposition of having to make a decision between mutually exclusive antithesesand antinomies: between either ideological ‘teleo-eschatology’ or messianicrupture; between either infernal iterability or ‘absolute singularity’. It can beobjected that too many mediating possibilities go awry in this roll-call of nega-tions. Derrida’s rhetoric of différance drives his argument toward an extremeopposite of positive empirical historicity, such that any idea of mediation andsynthesis between conflicting positions becomes tantamount to a totalizingassimilation or difference-erasing harmonization.

In juxtaposing a counter-hegemonic ‘Judaic other’ to ‘globalatinization’as a predominantly Christian-secular ideology, Derrida gives little explana-tion as to how his own ideas about alternative conjugations of religious andsecular moments of understanding address problems of ‘historical genesis’and ‘normative validity’ (or Genese and Geltung in German). He can give

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little concrete sense of how a moment of alternative religious particularityinterrelates empirically, historically and ‘dialectically’ with claims to secularnormative universality. The messianic universal in his picture instead remainspeculiarly abstract in nature, compelled to deny any aspect of concrete (Judaic)genealogical positivity out of a misplaced fear of inevitably confusing claimsto normative validity with merely particularistic aspects of historical genesis.Extreme abstraction from empirical historicity is thus the price exacted forthe juxtaposition of ‘messiancity’ and ‘mere messianism’.

Derrida cannot, like Mannheim, countenance a possibility of ‘relativeutopias’ or ‘multiple utopias’. In his picture, only one absolute utopia, onesingular breakthrough, is conceivable. Like Georg Lukács in History and ClassConsciousness (1922), Derrida, though he shares nothing of Lukács’s secular-ized Judaeo-Christian communistic metaphysics (imported by Lukács to someextent from Dostoyevsky), retains a certain humanitarian universalist objec-tivism, where all inter-civilizational and inter-religious historical relativity isabstractly transcended under a single invariant axis – in Lukács’s case, underthe axis of class; in Derrida’s case, under the axis of messianic writing.

To take issue with Derrida’s presentation in this way is not to assertthat messianistic thinking possesses no intrinsic value for social theory. It isonly to criticize a certain tendency of this thinking – a tendency prominentin Derrida’s contribution but also latent in the thought of earlier representa-tives of the genre, including Benjamin, Bloch and Adorno – to overgeneral-ize or overextend messianistic figures of thought at the expense of other waysof understanding how theologico-religious sources can imprint themselveson structures of contemporary social and political self-understanding.17

Admittedly, messianistic thinking in social theory amounts less to a demon-strable ‘thesis’ than to a broad style, language or idiom of thought; as such,it cannot in any sense be ‘refuted’ or ‘falsified’. But messianistic thinking insocial theory can nevertheless be contextualized, qualified and critically eluci-dated alongside other ways of construing inputs from theologico-religiousintellectual history in contemporary social and political thought. Arguablygreater consideration deserves to be given in this light to less emphaticallynormative ways of defining relationships to theologico-religious history insocial theory, and greater scope deserves to be accorded to disciplines of thehuman sciences – including sociology, anthropology and empirical historicalscholarship – in illuminating various kinds of interaction between politicalnormativity and theologico-religious normativity in contemporary debate. Tocall for greater distance and detachment in the human sciences in this wayis not to invoke a value of scientific autonomy purely for its own sake, butrather for the sake of a more comprehensive, more judicious and moreencompassing understanding of the intelligent influence of theological andreligious ideas on contemporary social and political values and norms.

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Austin Harrington is Reader in Sociology at the University of Leeds andResearch Associate at the Max Weber Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlicheStudien at the University of Erfurt, Germany. His publications include Art and SocialTheory: Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics (Polity Press, 2004) and Modern SocialTheory: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005, editor). He is completing amanuscript on conceptions of Europe and Europeanism among German liberal socialthinkers in the years of the Weimar Republic. [email: austin.harrington@uni-erfurt.de;a.harrington@leeds.ac.uk]

Notes1. Page number references to these texts are preceded hereafter by the letters ‘S’

and ‘F’ respectively.2. On political connections, see notably Sprinker (1999) and Bewes (2001); on

more religious themes, see especially De Vries (1999); also Caputo (1997), Caputoand Vattimo (2007), Kochi (2002), Mason (2006), Minister (2007), Raschke (2005),Sherwood and Hart (2005), Sussman (2005), Wise (2001).

3. Taubes interprets a range of modern social critics and writers, from Tolstoy toBenjamin and Weber, as ‘modern Marcionist’ thinkers, in the sense that theyreproduce aspects or motifs of the Gnostic theological thinking of St Paul’sheretical interpreter Marcion about the separation of God the Redeemer fromGod the Creator and the collapse of the created world into a state of vanityor nothingness (‘subjected to futility’), from which then arises the longing toescape in hope for redemption, to flee the prison-house of the bad world orto flee the ‘iron cage’, in Weber’s famous image. Weber’s cage or shell (Gehäuse)is thus the state of ‘doom’ (Verhängnis) generated by the ‘disenchantment ofthe world’ and the retreat of the religious meanings that once gave shape towork in worldly vocations, in the Beruf – the latter word in turn being theGerman word used by Luther to translate St Paul’s ‘calling’ to ‘justification byfaith alone’ (see Taubes, 1993, 1996; also Faber, 2001, 2007; Derrida, 2002b [onBenjamin]).

4. One of the most important critical responses to Taubes, for which space doesnot permit consideration here, is Hans Blumenberg’s (1964, 1971).

5. See notably the studies by Casanova (1994), Gorski (2000), Martin (2005), Joasand Wiegandt (2007), to name only a few representative contributions.

6. ‘The world today speaks Latin (most often via Anglo-American) when it author-izes itself in the name of religion. . . . Religion circulates in the world . . . likean English word that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States.Well beyond its strictly capitalist or politico-military figures, a hyper-imperialistappropriation has been underway now for centuries’ (F 64, 66).

7. Derrida asserts that a ‘structural performativity . . . binds from its very inceptionthe knowledge of the scientific community to doing, and science to technics’(F 80). Derrida cannot here accept anything like a distinction between a ‘tech-nical cognitive interest’, allied mostly to the natural sciences, and a more‘practical cognitive interest’ – an ethical or action-educating interest – properto the human sciences, in the manner proposed by Habermas (1971). Inanother sense, one might say that Derrida cannot accept that some understand-ings of religion might be sensitively empathic and technical at the same time.

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8. Note also that Derrida refers to leading critics of religion in modern thoughtas comprising ‘a certain filiation Voltaire-Feuerbach-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud-(andeven)-Heidegger’ (F 65) – naming only the most militantly atheist and materi-alist of figures.

9. Cf. Husserl (1964). Derrida’s starting-point is clearly Heidegger’s association ofHusserl’s conception of intentionality with a Cartesian metaphysics of conscious-ness that transforms the situated, language-mediated character of being-in-the-world into subject-object epistemology.

10. At times, Derrida’s exposition veers on the edge of coherence. He proscribesany concept of horizons of expectation; yet he also writes of an attitude of‘messianic opening to what is coming’ (S 65). What, one might ask, is the latterif not the former?

11. Fukuyama’s teacher, it should be remembered, was Leo Strauss, himself a closefriend of Kojève in the 1950s. Cf. Anderson (2006).

12. One might well say that Talcott Parsons’s evolutionary modernization theorygeneralized problematically from post-war American advanced industrial societyand capitalist democracy as a point of convergence for all developing societies.But one cannot say that Parsons’s theory stood for any kind of secularizedteleo-eschatological apology for Western capitalism, even if it is an interestingbiographical fact that Parsons was born to a Congregationist family andeducated in the Protestant milieu of American New England.

13. Derrida writes of Marx’s reference to the ‘holy witch-hunt’ against communistsas denouncing ‘a Hegelian neo-evangelism’ (S 100) – here using the term‘Hegelian’ in distinctly cavalier fashion. Against what he calls ‘the onto-theo-archeo-teleological concept of history’ (S 74), Derrida appeals to ‘a thinking ofthe event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic thatdistinguishes or opposes effectivity or actuality . . . and ideality’ (S 63). But onemust ask here why any mere distinction between ‘actuality and ideality’ shouldbe such an evil, and whether any normatively meaningful historical changecan be comprehended that does not draw on a distinction of this kind. Notevery such distinction entails a state of affairs as problematic as Hegel’s famousequation of the rational and the real in the Preface to The Philosophy of Right(‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’; Hegel, 1952: 10). Onecan understand the historically actual to be relatively rational, and the rationalto be relatively historically actualized – but not absolutely so.

14. ‘Axiom: no to-come without heritage and the possibility of repeating. No to-come without some sort of iterability’ (F 83).

15. All page references in the following two paragraphs are to this text.16. Referring to Gustav Landauer’s Die Revolution of 1923, Mannheim noted that,

for Landauer, ‘a placing of the essential accent of value in utopia and revolu-tion blocks the possibility of the visibility of any kind of evolutionary momentin the realm of the historical and institutional. . . . [H]istorical change is nothingother than an always renewed liberation from every topos. . . . Only in utopiaand in revolution is true life to be found; the institutional order of existenceis always only the evil remainder, left over after the utopia and revolution haveebbed away. Thus the path of history leads from one topos via utopia to thenext topos, and so on’ (Mannheim, 1985: 173–4).

17. For an overview of alternative idioms of theological sensibility in social theorysee Harrington (2006).

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