Apocalyptic Political Theology

For Hannah
 Bloomsbury Political Theologies

Series edited by Ward Blanton (University of Kent), Arthur Bradley

(Lancaster University), Michael Dillon (Lancaster University) and Yvonne
Sherwood (University of Kent)

This book series explores the past, present and future of political theology.
Taking its cue from the groundbreaking work of such figures as Derrida,
Agamben, Badiou and Žižek, it seeks to provide a forum for new research
on the theologicopolitical nexus including cutting-edge monographs, edited
collections and translations of classic works. By privileging creative,
interdisciplinary and experimental work that resists easy categorization, this
series not only re-assets the timeliness of political theology in our epoch but
also seeks to extend political theological reflection into new territory: law,
economics, finance, technology, media, film and art. In Bloomsbury
Political Theologies, we seek to re-invent the ancient problem of political
theology for the twenty-first century.

International Advisory Board

Agata Bielik-Robson (University of Nottingham)
Howard Caygill (Kingston University)
Simon Critchley (New School of Social Research)
Roberto Esposito (Scuola Normale Superiore)
Elettra Stimilli (University of Rome La Sapienza)
Miguel Vatter (University of New South Wales)

Titles in the series

The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology, Massimo Cacciari
Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God,
Charlie Gere
Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson
Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy, Elettra Stimilli
Apocalyptic Political Theology, Thomas Lynch
 Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Notes on Translation
Introduction
1 Philosophy, Political Theology and the End of the World
What is political theology?
What is this world that ends?
Conflicts and antagonisms
Imagining the end
Questioning the apocalypse
2 Implicit Political Theology: Reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion
Joachim, Hegel and the end of the world
Representational thought: An outline of Hegel’s philosophy of religion
Hegel’s implicit political theology
Philosophy and the return to representation
Conclusion
3 Spiritual Disinvestment: Taubes, Hegel and Apocalypticism
An introduction to Taubes
Taubes and Hegel
Apocalypticism and the question of history
Taubes and Bloch
Anti-liberal tendencies in Hegel, Taubes and Schmitt
Transcendental materialist readings of Hegel: From Taubes to Malabou
4 Plastic Apocalypticism
Malabou, Hegel and plasticity
Plastic apocalypticism: Taubes and Malabou
The problem of novelty and the rejection of the transcendent
A Blochian supplement
Contingency and plastic apocalypticism
Conclusion
 5 Pessimism and Hope in Apocalyptic Living
Living with the absence of alternatives
Pessimism and surrender
Living towards the end of the world
The end

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Paul Murray, Marcus Pound, Gerard Loughlin and the

Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University for their support and
guidance and to Christopher Insole and Graham Ward for their feedback on
early versions of this work. During this time I was exceedingly fortunate to
have a supportive academic community that challenged me to think about
this project from a variety of perspectives, including Roberto Alejandro,
Tina Beattie, Andrew Brower Latz, Josh Furnal, Marika Rose and Susan
Royal. I benefited from an opportunity to present my apocalyptic reading of
Malabou at an interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Edinburgh. I
am thankful to Michael O’Rourke for this opportunity and to Catherine
Malabou for her remarks.
Liza Thompson was kind enough to listen to my ideas and encourage me
to submit a proposal to Bloomsbury, and Frankie Mace patiently answered
my endless questions. The conversations at the annual meetings of the
International Network for Experimental Philosophy and Theology have
been vital to further developing this project. I am particularly thankful for
Jayne Svenungsson’s willingness to engage in lengthy discussions of the
nature of political theology and apocalypticism. At key moments in the
development of the first and last chapters, Amaryah Armstrong, Daniel
Colucciello Barber and Alex Dubilet were generous enough to engage in
conversation, provide feedback or share their own work.
The last stage of preparing this book coincided with taking up a position
at the University of Chichester. The many discussions I have had with
colleagues there have provided great opportunities to think about the
connections between religion, politics and philosophy. I am especially
grateful to Ruth Mantin, Benjamin Noys, Stephen Roberts and Graeme
Smith. I also benefited from a University of Chichester Research
Development Award that provided the time to finish writing.
Though academia can sometimes feel like a solitary pursuit, one of its
great joys is forging relationships with people who push you in profound
ways and shape the way you think. Though they do not always share my
conclusions, whatever is of value in the following work has been shaped by
Michael O’Neill Burns, Mark Mason, Ulrich Schmiedel, Anthony Paul
Smith and Hannah Strømmen. Words cannot express how much their
friendship and support has meant over the years of trying to figure out what
it means to think the end of the world.
Finally, I am grateful to my parents, who have always encouraged my
desire to pursue my love of philosophy, and to my wife, Hannah, who has
been my partner in this research, as in everything.
 Abbreviations and Notes on Translation

Hegel

All citations give the page number of the English edition first, followed by
the German.
E1–3 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 3 Volumes
The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of
Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by T. F.
Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1991.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia
of the Philosophical Sciences (1830): with Zusätze, translated
by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia
of Philosophical Science (1830) with Zusätze, translated by A.
V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften im
Grundrisse (1830). Werke, 8–10.
ETW Early Theological Writings, translated by T. M. Knox.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Frühe Schriften. Werke 1.
LPR Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, translated by R. F.
Brown, P. C. Hodgson and J. M. Stewart, edited by Peter C.
Hodgson. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
 Vorlesungsmanuskripte I (1816–1831). Gesammelte Werke,
Band 17, edited by Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag, 1987.
PR Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox,
edited by Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008.
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und
Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, Mit Hegels eigenhändigen
Notizen und den mündichen Zusätzen. Werke 7.
PS Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke, 3.
RG1–2 ‘Review of C.F. Göschel’s “Aphorisms: Part One and Two” ’,
translated by Clark Butler. Clio 17, no. 4 (1988): 369–93.
‘Review of C.F. Göschel’s “Aphorisms: Three” ’, translated by
Clark Butler. Clio 18, no. 4 (1989): 379–85.
Berliner Schriften, 1818–1831. Werke 11.
SL Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller. London; New
York: George Allen & Unwin; Humanities Press, 1969.
Wissenschaft der Logik I. Werke 5.
Wissenschaft der Logik II. Werke 6.
W1–20 Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel.
20 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969–1971.

I have modified standard English translations in two key ways. First, the
translator or translators of several texts have chosen to capitalize certain
nouns, particularly Spirit, Knowledge, Subject and the Absolute. This
decision imbues these terms with a potentially metaphysical significance
that I want to resist. Throughout, I have altered these translations
accordingly. Second, Vorstellung has sometimes been translated as ‘picture
thinking’. For reasons that I explain in
Chapter 2, I find this translation limiting and have used ‘representation’
throughout.

Taubes

CS To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, translated by Keith Tribe.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
OE Occidental Eschatology, translated by David Ratmoko. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009.
PT The Political Theology of Paul, translated by Dana Hollander.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

I also drawn on the essays collected in From Cult to Culture. These writings
span 1949–1984 and, though they are arranged thematically in a single
volume, each of the chapters is a stand-alone work and thus cited
individually.

Bloch

AC Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the

Kingdom, translated by J. T. Swann. 2nd edn. London: Verso, 2009.
HT Heritage of Our Times, translated by Neville Plaice and Stephen
Plaice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
PH The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice
and Paul Knight. 3 vols. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Malabou

FH Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, translated

by Lisabeth During. London: Routledge, 2005.
OA The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity,
translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
PD Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction,
Deconstruction, translated by Carolyn Shread. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010.
 Introduction

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

Philosophy, political theology and the end of the

world

Calls for the end of the world inevitably provoke a series of questions:
What is this world? Why should it end? What would it mean to think of
such an ending? A more developed response to these questions will require
passing through Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, but an initial exploration of
political theology, the world and apocalypticism will serve to orient the
following discussion.

What is political theology?

For the purposes of this book, political theology is a methodology focused

on the relationship between political and theological concepts. It seeks to
understand the political history and significance of theological ideas, the
theological history and significance of political ideas and to use theological
ideas to explore the nature of the political.
This approach is clearly indebted to Carl Schmitt while also
complicating his famous, if now clichéd, description of political theology.
While it is true that Schmitt writes ‘[a]ll significant concepts of the modern
theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’, his work is often
reduced to this genealogical approach.1 However, this genealogy is only a
part of his wider work in the sociology of concepts.2 ‘This sociology of
concepts transcends juridical conceptualisation oriented to immediate
practical interest. It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic
structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually
represented social structure of a certain epoch.’3 At times this takes the
form of identifying structural analogies, such as that between the exception
and the miracle.4 At other points, he investigates the limits of specific
political situations and the emergence of novel social structures that initiate
new historical epochs.5 Schmitt’s point is that politics operates within a
political framework that it cannot justify. The structural analogy between
the political and theology is found in beginnings, ends, the dynamics of
change and modes of control.
Even though his approach is more multifaceted than its contemporary
invocations sometimes indicate, it is certainly not without issue. Aside from
the obvious problem of his National Socialism, there are other, more
methodological problems.6 For the purposes of developing a concept of
political theology, the most important is his privileging of the theological.
In critically receiving his work, it is thus particularly important to question
the simplicity of his notion that the theological is converted into the
political.7 Such a framing too readily accepts an easy division between the
theological and the political – a division which is itself both theological and
political. The political and theological are two modes of expressing power.
These modes are interconnected and mutually informing. There is no neat,
linear process of secularization. Theological ideas appear in the political,
not as the result of transformation or importation, but because those ideas
were always already caught up in power relationships and their concomitant
forms of knowledge. The more philosophically inclined political theology
developed here maintains that there is no theological thought isolated from
the political, nor thinking the political in isolation from the theological.
There are, however, discourses that emphasize one or the other.
This form of political theology is thus not concerned with ‘political
religion’. Rather, it focuses on the theological illumination of the political
(and vice versa) as well as the processes by which religion and politics are
divided such that they can be recombined to name a problem. The political
is a discourse of beginnings and endings, transformations and collapses. In
this sense, the political is outside the bounds of politics. It is a zone of
teleological suspensions, exceptions and miracles.8 There is an exercise of
power at the origin of any order that lies beyond that rules of that order. The
preservation of that order legitimates its suspension. Though the day to day
of politics displays symptoms of the political, political theology is
concerned with those symptoms only to gain access to the underlining
condition. It is concerned with the political itself.
Moving beyond Schmitt’s genealogical and analogical forms of political
theology, Taubes offers a more constructive approach. Taubes summarizes
this approach as a ‘working with theological materials’ (PT, 69). He goes
on to describe his method in terms of intellectual history, but his texts show
experimentation as well as historical investigation. Combining Schmitt and
Taubes, political theology is an investigation of the intertwined history of
theological and political concepts in order to utilize those concepts to
critique the world.
Of course, there are other understandings of political theology. Vincent
Lloyd identifies three approaches: broad (the general intersection of religion
and politics), narrow (associated with Schmitt and the legacy of his work)
and sectarian.9 The above definition is most amenable to a narrow,
particularly philosophical form of political theology, but that in no way
discounts these other views. Indeed, there are important overlaps between
this vision of political theology and more sectarian versions of political
theology. For instance, Michael Kirwan offers a political theology
concerned with religion understood as ‘complexes of belief, worship and
action which are deeply embedded in practices and traditions, and which
are felt to be crucial to both individual and communal self-
understanding’.10 This understanding of religion, and the political
significance of practices and traditions, is essential to the implicit political
theology I will later identify in Hegel. However, Kirwan goes on to ask
questions such as: ‘Can a polis exist, be sustained, without God? . . . But
how, then, does such a polity and its leaders avoid placing themselves on
the Messiah’s throne.’11 These questions begin to raise issues of political
religion, straying into more sectarian territory.
Similarly, emphasizing the theological aspect, Andrew Shanks takes
political theology’s essential task to be understanding
 the gospel as a practical basis for the belonging-together of a community. Not just at the level
of all speaking the same religious language, or all operating within a common framework of
symbolism and ritual; but at a much deeper, and broader, level than that. This deeper level is
constituted, partly, by a body of shared experience, underlying and coming to expression in the
symbolism and ritual. And partly it is constituted by a set of shared ethical standards, a general
consensus to what is to be admired and what condemned, or how disagreements are to be
managed and resolved.12

Shanks is doing political theology. It is a different conversation.13

Differentiating a narrower, more methodical understanding of political
theology is a clarification, not a dismissal. Emphasizing political theology
as a methodology merely distances this notion of political theology from
analysis of political religion or religious politics. Recent discussions of
political theology are often positioned in relation to the return of religion,
whether that return is greeted as a crack emerging in the facade of Western
liberal order or decried for the same reason.14 While political theology in a
narrower sense can be part of those conversations, it can also operate
without concern for the political views or roles of specific religious
communities.
This differentiation of forms of political theology is particularly
important in the light of recent critiques of political theology. These
arguments often blur any distinction between political theology as a
methodology, as religiously motivated political movements and as
theocracy. The broad question of religion and politics quickly shifts to a
critique of sectarian examples. Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God, for instance,
is an explicit critique of political theology.15 He understands this term to
indicate ‘a primordial form of human thought’ many thought had been
superseded by Western liberal democracy.16 The main concern of his
argument is to analyse the enduring appeal of political theology, particularly
messianic ideas, and the challenges they pose for contemporary politics.17
In Lilla’s condemnation, however, one struggles to identify anything
resembling the narrow form of political theology defined above. There is no
mention of any of the central figures traditionally associated with political
theology, such as Schmitt, Benjamin or Agamben (though he has addressed
Schmitt elsewhere).18
 If Lilla takes aim at political theology in the broader sense, John Gray
strikes closer to the narrower form.19 He frames his critique in terms of
utopianism, millenarianism and apocalypticism rather than political
theology, but the focus of much of his analysis is a familiar historical
account tracing dangerous theological ideas from Joachim of Fiore through
the secularizing influence of Hegel to Marx, National Socialism and other
forms of extremism or totalitarianism. For Gray, these later seemingly non-
religious ideas remain tainted by an original theological sin. Their
theological origins may have been forgotten, mutated by secularization, but
they continue to shape the political imaginary of the West.20
If Shanks is doing political theology, Lilla and Gray are critiquing the
same. Shanks emphasizes the political implications of theology, while Lilla
and Gray argue against the theology’s political implications. Leaving aside
the question of whether Lilla, Gray or Shanks is correct, they all share a
similar configuration of religion or theology and politics. Though Gray’s
analysis is sometimes a kind of political theology in the narrow sense, this
analysis remains focused on the problematic relationship between religion
and politics. For Gray, the concept of a world transforming revolution is
itself religious and hence problematic.21
Lilla’s and Gray’s critiques can thus be split into two veins. First, they
are focused on critiquing political theology in the sense of political religion.
In this respect, there is often insufficient awareness of political theology
beyond political religion, with Lilla in particular reducing the former to the
latter. These critiques are ultimately affirmations of secularism. While it is
true that political religion, theology and political theology all offer
examples of the celebration of the failure of secularism and the
announcement of the post-secular, these categories themselves are subject
to political theological dismantling. Triumphalist, theological forms of post-
secularism risk repeating the flaws of secularization theory in arguing that
religion was waning but has now returned to address the limitations of
Western liberalism.22 By contrast, the political theology I am developing
here is asecular or desecularizing.23 It is not interested in celebrating or
denigrating the relationship between the political and the theological. It
thinks with an indifference to these distinctions. Political theology is not
about offering theological solutions to political problems but maintaining
that the political as such is inseparably mixed with the theological.
Second, Lilla and Gray are concerned with the continuing political
legacy of theological ideas. More specifically, they react to a political
theological critique of liberalism. Both reject the optimism that
accompanies revolutionary ideas and are worried by visions of
fundamentally different social and political orders. Here, their critiques are
more pertinent to a narrow conception of political theology. This tradition
has indeed been marked by a deep ambivalence with regard to liberal
politics. From Schmitt onwards, political theology has accused the liberal
narrative of denying the violence that marks its origins and continuation.
For example, both Schmitt and Benjamin argue, in different ways, that this
violence is not a misapplication of liberal principles but endemic to the
political. Lilla’s and Gray’s rejection of political theology is thus rooted in
real concerns, even if that rejection is muddled by a mixing of terms and
traditions.
These concerns are shared by those who focus more exclusively on
political theology in the narrow sense. For instance, Jayne Svenungsson has
recently argued for a theopolitics defined in opposition to political theology.
Yet, there is still an ambiguity regarding the concept of political theology
that complicates her survey of prophetic practice, messianism,
apocalypticism and political theology. Svenungsson is arguing in favour of
a ‘ “theopolitical” interpretation of the prophetic motif, invoking a form of
justice that does not allow itself to be reduced to any existing political
order, in contrast to has come to be known as “political theology” – the
tendency to use theological claims to support a specific political agenda’.24
Though she returns to this definition of political theology as ‘theologically
sanctioned politics’, her focus is on politics in the most general sense, rather
than particular states, parties or other organizations.25 In this sense, she
remains less concerned with political religion or religious politics, and more
on the political as such.
 As with Lilla and Gray, Svenungsson offers a critique rooted in a
definition of political theology that misses key aspects of Schmitt, Taubes,
Benjamin and other central figures that have come to define this narrower
political theology. Their work is not a theologically legitimated politics but
an analysis of the political as such that reveals its structural analogy to
theology. Yet, again paralleling Lilla and Gray, at the heart of this critique is
a rejection of political theology’s suspicion of liberalism. Svenungsson
wants to defend a concept of divine justice, but one that is part of an
intrahistorical process of redemption rather than an external apocalyptic
intervention.26 Theopolitics offers an unachievable, transcendent and divine
justice that endlessly interrogates any and all concrete political
arrangements. It has faith in this process of interrogation as a means of
achieving justice. Contra Taubes, Benjamin, and other apocalyptic political
theologians, law and order are the preconditions of emancipation rather than
obstacles to be overcome.27 Where Svenungsson departs from Lilla and
Gray is her integration of theological perspectives into this vision of a legal
and political progress oriented at a justice it can never ultimately realize.
Considering Schmitt, Taubes, Benjamin, Agamben as well as Derrida,
Badiou and Žižek, it becomes clear that there is something happening in a
body of literature that escapes these critiques of political theology – an
element irreducible to the various forms of theologically legitimated
politics. Thinking about political theology in terms of method, rather than
focusing on the relationship between religion and politics, helps clarify this
ambiguous issue. This methodological political theology can then be used
to analyse the ways that politicized theologies are rooted in political
theological perspectives but without reducing political theology to this
concern. This form of political theology concentrates on the historical and
contemporary significance of the analogy between theology and the
political.28 It is interested in the political limitations of any politics and the
way those limitations are negotiated, repressed or confronted.
This approach, in its focus on these limitations, must still respond to
critiques that identify an ambivalence, suspicion or hostility to liberalism.
For even the more methodological forms of political theology, liberalism
often stands for a politics that denies the political. Political theology’s
fascination with the problems of origins, limitations and exceptions means
that it is often focused on disruption, revolution, messianism and,
occasionally, apocalypticism. From this perspective, it offers thoughts on
how to think about the pervasive forms of injustice that persist in an era
defined by at least nominal commitments to liberal ideas.
Whether or not Lilla’s, Gray’s and Svenungsson’s critiques of political
theology’s suspicion of liberalism are fair depends on how one views this
era. If gradual and intrahistorical progress within the existing order is
capable of rendering the world more just, then Svenungsson is right to
emphasize slow change and the importance of continuity.29 If something
more intrinsic is wrong with the world, then it is necessary to investigate
the resources of apocalypticism.

What is this world that ends?

Evaluating political theology’s critique of liberalism thus requires an

account of the world. The possibility of change within the world depends on
the nature of both the change and the world. What is it that makes the world
a world rather than a political economy, ideology or social reality?30 And
what kinds of change are possible within that world? This section lays out
an initial account of this world, for understanding the peculiar hope of its
end requires addressing the nature of the world itself.31 Such a clarification
is especially necessary given recent critiques of the notion of world.32
Schmitt’s analysis of the transformation of the earth33 into a global legal
order provides a political theological starting point. His notion of the nomos
shows the constitution of the world through the organization of land, people
and things. Expanding on Schmitt, I argue that this organization occurs
through a set of divisions that can be summarized by the terms nature,
capital, gender and race. These divisions do not operate independently but
are shaped through a series of complex intersections. These intersections
are the difference between an arbitrary set of relations and the enduring
configuration worthy of the name ‘world’. These divisions are not divisions
within the world – they are the world. It is this inescapable configuration
that presents the question of the end.

Schmitt: From earth to world by way of law

Schmitt is fundamentally concerned with the imposition, maintenance and
protection of order. One of his key names for this order is nomos: the
‘Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent measures, for the first
land-appropriation understood as the first partition and classification of
space, for the primeval division and distribution’.34 As Schmitt explains,
the nomos is an order governing ‘appropriation, distribution and
production’ instituted by power.35 It is ‘a matter of the fundamental process
of apportioning space that is essential to every historical epoch – a matter of
the structure-determining convergence of order and orientation in the
cohabitation of peoples on this new scientifically surveyed planet’.36 This
apportioning begins with an appropriation of land that institutes a complex
social, economic and political order. The concrete division of the earth and
the organization of people that is the origin of the very law that now
perpetuates that order. Nomos takes the earth and makes it a world through
a process of divisions and distributions that are just as fundamental as the
physical world in which we live.37
Schmitt’s nomos is defined first in terms of land, then sea and finally air
(with brief nods to the possibilities of space). This nomos is thus a question
of the governing of terrain or space. He is particularly concerned with a
spatial, political and legal order that exceeds the state but is still
Eurocentric.38 The sea, for example, is initially an anarchic space that
gradually becomes subject to a law that is not simply imposed unilaterally
but emerges in the course of developing relations among empires.39
Schmitt’s account of nomos helps develop a concept of the world in two
ways. First, nomos captures the connection between earth and the world.
Sovereignty requires territory; power is rooted in material appropriation.40
However, this connection is not fully developed by Schmitt as he is
concerned with the way that nomos divides the earth. This focus ignores the
way that nomos becomes part of the earth. It is not enough to describe
nomos as it acts on material reality – nomos and material reality shape one
another.41 Analysing the relationship between nomos and material reality
from only one direction, as will be clear later in this section, makes the
nomos seem more fragile than it is.
Second, Schmitt’s discussion of nomos reflects his anxiety about the
possibility of its collapse and the shape of the nomoi to come. Nomos of the
Earth, as well as Schmitt’s later work on the partisan, are fundamentally
works reflecting an anxiety about the contingency of this nomos. He is
conscious of the fact that the emergence of new ages entails new nomos.42
Yet, even more terrifying is the prospect that the nomos will be
overwhelmed – order will give way to the chaos that it struggles to contain.
This anxiety is most clear in his discussion of the katechon. Schmitt
argues that the historical Christian empire was always aware of its end. It
was shaped by the promise of eschatological fulfilment and the desire to
delay its arrival. For although the end ushers in the Kingdom of God, it
equally heralds a time of judgement and destruction. It is this delay, the
preservation of the continuity of the imperial world, that is its defining task.
‘The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the restrainer:
katechon. “Empire” in this sense meant the historical power to restrain the
appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon; it was a power
that withholds.’43 The end will come, but the empire fights to delay that
end.44
Schmitt raises this concern about the possibility of the end in
relationship to utopian ideas as well. In the midst of a discussion of England
and changes within maritime law, he offers a passing remark on Thomas
More’s Utopia. Again, the passage reflects Schmitt’s awareness of the
contingency of the nomos, ‘manifest in this book, and in the profound and
productive formulation of the word Utopia, was the possibility of an
enormous destruction of all orientations based on the old nomos of the
earth’.45 Though this notion of utopia is never connected to katechon or the
chaos it entails, Schmitt clearly associates destruction and utopia. For
Schmitt, all order is haunted by the possibility of collapse. As Julia Hell
argues, such anxiety about the endings of empires is not uncommon. Yet
Schmitt’s work is marked by a particular ‘apocalyptic urgency’.46
This katechonic anxiety is flawed in two ways. First, his identification of
threats to the nomos is predictably problematic. For Schmitt, the naming of
the enemy of the nomos is foundational to the possibility of international
law.47 He uses the katechon to explore an imperial fear, so the locus of that
anxiety is the real or perceived enemies of empire.48 Schmitt understands
the enemy as the collective other or stranger. The war against the enemy is a
war between peoples.49 His declaration that ‘[w]ar is the existential
negation of the enemy’ is chilling when viewed in the light of his Nazism.50
Nomos and katechon can still be used to think both the world and its end,
but it must be done in the shadow of Schmitt’s own use of those concepts.
Second, he underestimates the ability of the world to persist. Underlying
Schmitt’s dynamic account of nomos is a fundamental continuity. Empires
rise and fall, but there is always an empire. True, the transition of power
from one empire to the next is often a violent and destructive process, but
nonetheless it is the preservation of a distinct form of power. Even as the
division between land and sea changes, it is not a radically new
relationship, but a reconfiguration and expansion of recognizable modes of
rule. He is right to recognize the possibility of the end of the world, but too
quick to declare its advent. ‘The world survives.’51
Schmitt himself seems to recognize this point to a degree, cautioning
those who see the end on the horizon.
The new nomos of our planet is growing irresistibly. Many see therein only death and
destruction. Some believe that they are experiencing the end of the world. In reality, we are
experiencing only the end of the former relations of the land and sea. To be sure, the old nomos
has collapsed, and with it a whole system of accepted measure, concepts, and customs. But
what is coming is not therefore boundlessness or a nothingness hostile to nomos.52

And yet, Nomos of the Earth concludes with Schmitt’s concern about the
anti-political tendencies of globalization and liberalism. He is torn between
the assertion that what appears as the possibility of utter annihilation and
chaos is really just another coming nomos and the fear that, perhaps this
time, the destruction will be real.
 It is this second flaw that necessitates a deeper exploration of the world.
While Schmitt helpfully describes the way that nomos converts the earth to
a world, his account of this process must be deepened. The earth has been
divided (land, sea and air), but imperial conquest and the friend/enemy
distinction are insufficient explanations for the shape that the world has
taken. The nomos that divides the world is also itself a feature of that same
world. The appropriation, distribution and production of land, sea and air
(as well as the human and other-than-human bodies that live on and in these
territories) are not merely surface alterations but fundamental
transformations of the world they made and are making. What Schmitt fails
to recognize is the materiality of nomos. Understanding the materiality of
these processes and the manner in which they constitute a world will
require naming a new set of divisions. Thinking through these new
divisions, it becomes apparent that the world will not end as easily as
Schmitt fears.
To move beyond the divisions of land, air and sea, I argue that the
contemporary order is divided according to nature, capital, gender and race.
With the exception of gender, these divisions are already present in Schmitt,
but only occasionally. There is passing acknowledgement that land
appropriation is a question of capital and the taming of nature. This process
of land appropriation is racialized; whose land can be appropriated by what
means depends in part on one’s position in the racial hierarchy.53 Like
Schmitt’s land, air and sea, these divisions are fundamentally about
appropriation, distribution and production, but it expands Schmitt’s focus
on land to include bodies. It is these relations between land and bodies that
constitutes a world.
Discussing how these divisions make a world is difficult and
contentious. For one, why should these divisions be taken as constitutive
rather than a wider or completely different set of relations? Sexuality and
religion, for example, would seem to be key to understanding the world.
The divisions of nature, capital, gender and race are particularly significant
in three ways. First, as will be explained below, they take a particularly
oppositional form. These are antagonistic divisions, leading towards a
‘Manichean worldview’.54 Second, they incorporate many other divisions.
While sexuality is not reducible to questions of gender, nor religion to race,
understanding these four divisions provides resources essential to analysing
those divisions. Finally, nature, capital, gender and race are deeply related
such that it is impossible to tell the story of one without incorporating the
others. This interrelatedness is not reductive. Race cannot be reduced to the
division of capital, but a full account of race requires an account of capital.
In addressing each of these divisions, the others are slowly pulled in. As
such, this process of gradual mixing will be the model for the following
outline of the world. In discussing nature, the consequences for gender
emerge. Then the parallels (and differences) between gender and race reveal
something of the nature of capital, all of which returns the conversation to
the topic of nature. In the course of this discussion, an ontology capable of
describing the relationship between nomos and materiality will gradually
take shape.

Nature and capital

Nature is the natural starting point. The divide between humanity and
nature is often essential to the definition of the human. The gender and
racial hierarchies that come to define the world draw on this essential
division. To be less than human is to be more of nature.
In recent years, the designation of the present geological epoch as the
‘Anthropocene’ has taken on a significant role in shaping humanity’s
conceptions of its relationship with the rest of nature. The term designates
the epochal shift from the Holocene to an age in which humanity has taken
on a geologically significant role.55 Dating this transition is understandably
difficult, but Paul Crutzen, who first proposed the term, has suggested that
the shift occurred between 1800 and the 1950s.56 By the mid-twentieth
century, humanity had created its own geological epoch.
The term and debates about dating immediately generate questions that
extend beyond nature itself to questions of capital and intrahuman
differences. Clearly a long series of developments, from the discovery of
fire to the burning of fossil fuels to the Industrial Revolution, led to this
shift. Conceiving of these changes in terms of the Anthropocene risks
eliding that the series of events affected different groups of people
differently. The intensified consumption of fossil fuels during the Industrial
Revolution was an uneven process inaugurated by an incredibly small
group of people. ‘Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world
invested in steam, laying the foundation stone for the fossil economy; at no
moment did the species vote for it with feet or ballots, or march in
mechanical unison, or exercise any sort of shared authority over its own
destiny and that of the Earth System.’57 The Anthropocene, in describing
humanity’s impact on the Earth, artificially unites humanity. Culpability is
distributed much more equally than the wealth generated by the processes
primarily responsible for climate change.
In other words, considering ‘humanity’s’ relationship to nature requires
investigating the way that the Industrial Revolution and capitalism divided
some humans from other humans and nature. As Jason Moore argues, the
capitalist economy was and is reliant upon ‘cheap nature’.58 Cheap food,
cheap energy and raw materials are all taken from an uncompensated
nature.59 The basic human relationship to nature is one of expropriation.
For Moore, the Anthropocene can thus be more accurately described as the
‘Capitalocene’. Humanity’s impact on the environment is due to its reliance
on fossil fuels and that reliance is inextricably caught up with capitalism.
Without the energy provided by fossil fuels there is no capitalism and the
spread of capitalism accelerates their usage.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in
particular, has argued that there are two flaws with this critique of the
Anthropocene. First, he argues that ‘leaving aside the question of
intergenerational ethics that concerns the future, anthropogenic climate
change is not inherently – or logically – a problem of past or accumulated
intra-human injustice.’60 Chakrabarty readily admits that there is an
inequality of consumption and waste, but argues that it is reductive to
explain all aspects of climate change by an appeal to capitalism.61 While it
may indeed be reductive to reduce all aspects of climate change to capital,
Moore, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg convincingly argue that the
climate change being experienced today is inextricably linked to the form of
the global economy. As Malm argues, that form and its reliance upon fossil
fuel was imposed on a large percentage of the world’s population.62
Responding to Charkrabarty’s objection requires taking into consideration
the way that capital is related to nature, both now and historically, as well as
the way that capital shapes other key forms of social relations (or non-
relation). In other words, it requires an account of the world.
The relationship between nature and capital is particularly important for
providing such an account. First, it is nature, more than any other division
that reveals the inescapability of the world. As will become clear in the
following sections, the world names a set of intersecting material and social
relations.63 Second, as the terms Anthropocene and Capitalocene indicate,
human actions are both part of nature and capable of changing that nature.
As Moore, Malm and Hornborg demonstrate, this vision of nature is
essential to the relations named by ‘capital’. The emergence of an economy
rooted in fossil fuel was from its inception connected to uneven
development and the exploitation of labour. The antagonism is not between
humanity and nature, but between some humans, other humans and nature.
The damages of climate change will be unevenly distributed.64

Gender
To expand this account of the world beyond nature and capital, it is useful
to view Moore’s discussion of cheap nature and Malm and Hornborg’s
critique of the Anthropocene narrative within the context of Silvia
Federici’s analysis of capitalism, gender and race. Federici argues that the
human–nature relationship directly shapes European (and eventually North
American) views of women and informs the shifting notions of race that
accompany colonial expansion. For Federici, the process of primitive
accumulation is central to the transformation of these relationships. The
rapid privatization of land, through both the enclosure of public land and
colonialism, not only intensified existing relations and enabled new means
of extracting value from the natural world, it also transformed social
relations.65 While this is obviously true in terms of labour, it may be less
obvious how these changes shifted ideas about gender and race.
With regard to enclosures, Federici tracks numerous ways that land
expropriation impacted the lives of women in Europe.66 Most crucially,
women were deprived of the commons, a space of at least limited social
autonomy, which made it increasingly difficult to find ways to support
themselves outside of reproductive labour.67 As the market became the
determiner of value, this reproductive work, the literal production of the
worker, became increasingly devalued.68 By the time this process
culminated in the emergence of the full-time housewife in the nineteenth
century, the implications of this devaluing become clear: ‘the separation of
production from reproduction created a class of proletarian women who
were as dispossessed as men but, unlike their male relatives in a society that
was becoming increasingly monetarized, had almost no access to wages,
thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic
dependence, and invisibility as workers.’69 The willing transformation of
some humans’ relationship to nature disrupts other humans’ relationships to
each other and nature.
The shift in humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature brought about
by the move from production for use to the money economy (capital) also
introduced new and intensified forms of sexually differentiated labour
(gender).70 ‘Proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for
the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction, and
a communal good.’71 As work became increasingly defined in terms of the
wage, women’s labour was defined as non-work, ‘a natural resource,
available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink’.72 For
Federici, this change marks the key difference between gender dynamics
under capital and the unequal relations of earlier periods. Though such
inequality is undeniable, ‘women’s subordination to men had been
tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other
communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves
became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource,
laying outside the sphere of market relations.’73 As Federici’s language
reflects, it is not only nature that provides the cheap labour necessary for
the functioning of capital. The transitions during the period of primitive
accumulation simultaneously mark the emergence of the world of the
Capitalocene and effect ‘a unique process of social degradation that was
fundamental to the accumulation of capital and has remained so ever
since’.74
As women’s labour became as economically vital as it was
uncompensated, it became ever more important for the state or church to
regulate women’s bodies. In particular, the European population crisis of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lead to increasingly brutal
punishments for women who do not reproduce or who in any way challenge
the stability of the patriarchally ordered home.75 The primary means of
recognizing the indispensable role of women was the severity of the
persecution that accompanied any deviation from that role. Federici finds
this same anxiety around women’s shifting roles and the regulation of the
body at the heart of European and North American witch-hunts. ‘The witch-
hunt condemned female sexuality as the source of every evil, but it was also
the main vehicle for a broad restructuring of sexual life, that conforming
with the new capitalist work-discipline, criminalised any sexual activity that
threatened procreation, the transmission of property within the family, or
took time and energies away from work.’76
Federici notes that these gender issues are often viewed in isolation from
other concurrent developments. She draws connections between the
expropriation of communal lands and the way that witch-hunts
‘expropriated women from their bodies’.77 The relationship between these
changes in conceptions of nature, capital, gender and race too often go
unnoticed.
It should . . . have seemed significant that the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the
colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures,
the beginning of the slave trade, the enactments of ‘bloody laws’ against vagabonds and
beggars, and it climaxed in that interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist
‘take off’ when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also
consummated its historic defeat.78
To overlook the connections between these changes is to miss the
emergence and sedimentation of the world.
This parallel between nature and gender has of course long been a
central thesis of ecofeminist critique.79 Federici’s contribution is to position
the connection between gender and nature within the development of
capitalism. There are certainly forms of pre-capitalist patriarchy, but the
world she describes is one of the mutual reinforcing divisions of nature,
gender and capital.

Race
As indicated by Federici’s references to colonialism and slavery, these
divisions intersect with race as well. The founding of European capitalism
and colonial expansion were dependent upon ‘the subordination and
exploitation of their own women, on the exploitation and killing of Nature,
on the exploitation and subordination of other peoples and their lands’.80
The concept of nature as beneath humanity and ripe for exploitation informs
understanding of both gender and race and that exploitation is essential to
the flourishing of the form of capitalism that eventually assumes global
dominance. Federici draws attention to the parallels between attitudes
towards women and ‘Indian savages’. In both instances, degradation and
terrorization are part of a sustained project of expropriating labour (in the
case of women) and land (in the case of indigenous people).81 The parallels
are clear – these categories are considered inferior due to being more ruled
by nature, not yet having been liberated by Enlightened rationality (or not
being capable of such liberation).82 There are similar connections between
gender and other racial classifications. ‘For the definition of Blackness and
femaleness as marks of bestiality and irrationality conformed with the
exclusion of women in Europe and women and men in the colonies from
the social contract implicit in the wage, and the consequent naturalization of
their exploitation.’83 Both groups are considered untrustworthy or fickle
and the sexual powers of both groups are to be feared. Women, for example,
were judged more prone to witchcraft due to their inability to control their
sexual urges.84 In the seventeenth century, the devil became Black and his
race became associated with ‘an abnormal lust and sexual potency’.85
Federici touches on the figure of the slave, but recent work in the theory
of race and Blackness goes much further in examining anti-Blackness as
constitutive of the world. Perhaps the strongest version of this argument
comes from Frank B. Wilderson III who argues the exclusion of Blackness
from the sphere of the human is essential to the structure of the world – ‘No
slave, no world.’86 This exclusion is what Wilderson and others, following
the work of Orlando Patterson, call social death:87
Blackness, refers to an individual who is by definition always already devoid of relationality.
Thus modernity marks the mergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire
race appears, people who, that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as
losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the
world.88

Blackness is not like other racial categories. For Wilderson, it does not hold
the hope of other racial positions or the focus of other forms of oppression.
The liberation of the slave is not analogous to the liberation of women, the
indigenous or the worker.89 In fact, ‘the so-called great emancipatory
discourse of modernity – Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual
liberation, and the ecology movement’ rely on ‘grammars of suffering’
derivative of but separated from the position of the slave.90 Nancy Fraser
makes a similar argument, showing that the Marxist emphasis on the
exploited worker does not sufficiently consider the expropriation of
racialized subjects that is constitutive of capitalism. By tracing ‘historical
regimes of racialized accumulation’, Fraser moves her analysis beyond the
figure of the worker.91
Yet, Wilderson’s Afro-pessimism goes even further than Fraser’s
argument that racialization is a precondition for capitalist exploitation,
arguing that ‘the structure of the entire world’s semantic field . . . is sutured
by anti-Black solidarity. Unlike the solution-oriented, interest-based, or
hybridity-dependent scholarship so fashionable today, Afro-pessimism
explores the meaning of Blackness not . . . as a variously and unconsciously
interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural
position of noncommunicability.’92 Here Wilderson echoes Fanon’s analysis
of the Holocaust. For Fanon, ‘the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness.
He is not wholly what he is.’93 While the exclusion of Blackness from the
world is constitutive of the world, other divisions (what I will discuss as
conflicts in the following section), no matter how violent or prolonged,
remain ‘little family quarrels’.94 Both Fanon and Wilderson see these fights
as taking place within humanity, while Blackness remains excluded.
While the logic of capital can explain some elements of race as a
constitutive division within the world, Wilderson’s analysis of anti-
Blackness reveals a libidinal element that exceeds the economic.95 He
describes this excess as the gratuitous violence of slavery. While in earlier
periods of history most people were susceptible to gratuitous violence,
Wilderson argues that in the late Middle Ages this violence begins to ‘mark
the Black ontologically’.96 In light of this marking, this constitutive
exclusion, Wilderson, citing Fanon citing Aimé Césaire, reaches an
apocalyptic conclusion: the only thing worth starting is the end of the
world.97
Wilderson’s analysis of race shows that the divisions of nature, capital,
gender and race are connected in their constitution of the world, but they
are neither analogous nor reducible to one another. The racial division of
the world brought about by slavery cannot be reduced to capital, but, along
with the racial divisions of colonialism and settler colonialism, it is coeval
with capital.98 Capital without these divisions is inconceivable, but aspects
of patriarchy, racism and ecological destruction precede and escape the
logic of capital. Yet it is also true that capital shapes the function of each of
these divisions today. Even if capitalism cannot explain slavery, it is still the
case that slavery and the colonial system it enabled was essential to the
industrialized capitalism that has come to define the world.99

The ontology of the world

Much more could be said about each of these divisions, both individually
and as they overlap and intersect with one another. There are debates within
the attempts to theorize each division, questions of logical and historical
priority and different conceptions of the relationship between divisions. The
purpose of this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive account nor to
adjudicate between perspectives but to indicate the general shape of the
world. Combining Schmitt and this account of nature, capital, gender and
race provides this overview. Schmitt provides the history of the legal and
political transformation of the earth into a world through processes of
appropriation, distribution and production. That history leaves out or
insufficiently develops how territory and bodies are selected as
appropriable, the way that identities determine distribution and the different
forms of productive labour: slave, housewife and worker. There are two
levels of analysis: territory versus culture; the political, legal and economic
versus the libidinal.
The effort of combining these two levels results in an ontology of the
world. The material division of territory, bodies, libidinal fears and
vulnerability to gratuitous violence interweave to create a whole. Nancy
Tuana formulates this kind of ontology in terms of the ‘viscous porosity of
the categories “natural,” “human-made,” “social,” “biological” ’ that are
materially related in an ‘interactionist ontology’.100 As the above account of
the world argues, the interpenetration of these categories does not collapse
into an undifferentiated unity. Rather than abandoning these categories, they
can be reframed within a wider unity – not the static unity of the Western
metaphysical tradition, but a dynamic, interactionist unity.101 The result is
an ‘ontology that rematerializes the social and takes seriously the agency of
the natural’.102 This materialization of the social is the key to the
combination of the two modes of analysis.
Take the earlier discussion of nature as an example. Malm and Hornborg
argue that climate change ‘has arisen as a result of temporally fluid social
relations as they materialise through the rest of nature’.103 Thinking about
climate change within the framework of the Capitalocene requires not only
considering how human actions impact the rest of nature, but the way that
those actions actually change nature.104 This material mixture of nature and
the social, cultural and political does not mean that these distinctions cannot
still serve an analytical purpose.105 Understanding that human actions are
themselves part of nature and that there are other actors responding to
climate change is the first step in taking the agency of the natural seriously.
It is to grasp the material nature of what Anna Tsing calls ‘multispecies
world making’.106 Likewise, race may not be a biological category, but the
consequences of historical racial formation is not just ideological, but
material.107 The world was and continues to be constituted by the ‘emergent
interplay’ of these categories.108
Looking forward to the next chapter, Tuana’s ontology can also be
expressed in Hegelian terms. World spirit, for all the vitriol its various
deployments have rightly attracted, is about nature becoming self-
conscious. Human subjectivity is the world thinking itself.109 While nature
and spirit are often read as opposed in Hegel, this is too simplistic. As
Angelica Nuzzo argues, ‘spirit’s liberation from nature is more precisely its
liberation within (and with) nature.’110 While Hegel himself would not go
as far as Tuana’s viscous porosity, his notion of spirit is one that is
necessarily in an ongoing entanglement with nature.111 Though he preserves
a hierarchy between spirit and nature, taking this ongoing entanglement as a
dependency on nature allows for a more porous interpretation of Hegel.112
This rejection of hierarchy is also the key difference between this
account of the world and Heidegger’s.113 His understanding of world is
similar in emphasizing ‘the worldhood’ of Dasein’s environment and the
way that a series of relations come to form a whole that provides the often-
invisible background against which humans live.114 Yet in claiming that
‘the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming’,
he fails to think through the deeper form of interaction described by
Tuana.115 Though his inclusion of the stone and animal in his account of the
world challenges the denigration of the ‘natural world’ in much of Western
philosophy, he still upholds what Philip Tonner describes as ‘transcendental
anthropocentrism’ in which the wider world is reduced to its significance
for Dasein.116
Tuana’s ontology is also helpful in highlighting the contingency of these
material and social relations without denying their reality. Nature, capital,
gender and race are similar in that they all mark constructed but naturalized
distinctions. Nature is conceived in opposition to ‘the human’ or culture,
but both the human and cultural are natural. Nature simply is what is. Or as
Sally Haslanger puts it, ‘If we endorse a broad naturalism that takes the
world to be a natural world that includes as part of it social and
psychological events, processes, relations and such, then it would seem that
to be non-natural (at least within the empirical domain) is to be
nonexistent.’117 Capital divides the world into worker and owner. Race
splits the world into Black and white. Gender poses woman against man.
These binaries may be socially constructed and culturally determined, but
they are not individually chosen. Masculine and feminine are assigned.
Rejection of these labels does not undo the initial assigning or remove their
social implications. Racial classifications can be discarded, but that does
not change the fact that the world racializes people.

Conflicts and antagonisms

Nature, capital, gender and race summarize the set of relations that
constitute the world. In considering the materiality of these relations, it
becomes clear that the world is not something chosen but something
individuals are positioned by. Humans and the rest of the nature are subject
to the world and this world is both violent and inescapable. Establishing this
violence and inescapability is key to understanding the need for apocalyptic
thinking. Objections to apocalypticism often focus on its violence and
destruction. Yet these objections often speak of the world as if it is not
already violent, not only in the sense of arbitrary interpersonal violence but
also in the sense of the violence inherent to the divisions that are the world.
To return to Schmitt’s language, the katechon is neither passive nor pacific.
Even if this violence is acknowledged, however, one could hold out hope
for an alternative rather than call for the end of the world. There could be
different arrangements of material and social relations. Societies can
gradually change. Communities can conceive of alternative ways of living
together, becoming examples of ecologically responsible, egalitarian, non-
gendered and deracialized forms of life. Apocalypticism should have good
reasons for rejecting these hopes. Considering the nature of violence and
the inescapability of the world will result in a more precise understanding
of the divisions – nature, capital, gender and race. These are not merely
conflicts within the world but antagonisms that define it.
As the discussion of gender and race shows, the divisions constitutive of
the world entail violence that is often gruesome and interpersonal. Yet the
world is violent in another sense – the world itself is violent. Slavoj Žižek
differentiates these modes of violence by referring to the first as subjective
and the second as objective. Subjective violence can be policed. Charges
can be filed and punishments handed out. Objective violence, on the other
hand, is more difficult to address. Objective violence can itself take the
form of the law and police.118 It is this second that is the violence of the
world: ‘the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of
dominance and exploitation, including the threat of violence’.119 It is a
habitual violence that accompanies being in the world. Rob Nixon describes
this mode of violence as ‘slow violence’: ‘a violence that occurs gradually
and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across
time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as
violence at all . . . a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous,
but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing
out across a range of temporal scales’.120 It is this often imperceptible,
dispersed, ‘normal’ violence that is the violence of the world.
The reason that nature, capital, gender and race are so important for
thinking the world is that these are spheres of objective or slow violence.
There are clearly forms of interpersonal racism or gender-based violence,
but these divisions are also violent in ways that remain invisible (to many
people) in the process of constituting the world.121 In moving from thinking
of these divisions individually to considering the ways they overlap and
intersect, the world becomes an intractable problem. How does one address
climate change without reinforcing racial or economic inequalities? How
can economic issues be addressed without re-entrenching racial tensions?
Attempts to redress oppression or inequality may not only result in
unintended consequences but the mutually reinforcing nature of these
divisions also reveals the difficulty of addressing any one. ‘Solving’ gender
inequality would involve rethinking the functioning of capitalism as a
whole, because the uncompensated domestic labour of women is essential
to sustaining monetarily recognized labour of workers.122 The same is true
for nature – capitalism predicated on cheap nature is unsustainable.
Rethinking humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature requires rethinking
the fundamentals of economic life.
In positing that these divisions are forms of objective or slow violence
that constitute the world, I am arguing that they are not merely unresolved
tensions and conflicts. They are what Wilderson calls antagonisms: ‘an
irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of
which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the
positions’.123 Humanity cannot be reconciled with nature, for it is the
opposition to nature which is definitive of humanity. It is human rationality
and volition in contrast to instinctual animality and the cold determinism of
nature, that defines the enlightened and Enlightened (hu)man. To change
humanity’s relationship to nature is not a matter of recycling, driving hybrid
cars and walking to the farmer’s market. It is the obliteration of a humanity
that is anything more than natural. Similarly, the relationships between
worker/owner, Black/white and masculine/feminine are not dialectical.124
There is no possibility of resolution. These terms are defined in opposition
to one another. To anticipate the discussion of Malabou, the world is plastic.
It is plastic in the sense of malleable, for the world has clearly seen
changes. Yet, plasticity also has an explosive sense and there are limits to
the malleability of the world.
These limitations mark the world as inescapable. It takes the form of a
totality with no beyond or outside. Daniel Colucciello Barber makes this
point, arguing that the world ‘presents itself in two moments – as the given
and the as the possible . . . it serves as the name of the already existent, or
of that which may be subjected to critique, but it likewise serves as the
name of the alternative that is imagined or invoked (even if only implicitly)
by such a critique’.125 As Malabou will show, that is not the same as
claiming that there is no hope or no possibility of something new. Rather, it
is to claim that such hopes and possibilities must be hopes and possibilities
that are not of this world. Or, as Benjamin says through Kafka, ‘there is an
infinite amount of hope, but not for us’.126
Apocalypticism is rooted in this conviction that it is not just aspects of
this world, but this world itself that is unethical.127 There is no world
underneath these antagonisms. It is not the world, on top of which is laid
capitalism, sexism, racism and other ideological formations. Those
formations, in their complex intersection, are the world. There is a saying,
often attributed to Frederic Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of
the world than the end of capitalism.128 This sentiment is redundant – the
end of capitalism would be the end of the world. There is no remainder not
positioned in relation to capital. There are pre-capitalist, ‘pericapitalist’ and
post-capitalist forms of life and exchange that are not yet capitalism or
resist capitalism, yet these are all still positioned in relation to capital.129
This world is hegemonic, but not homogenous. All people do not all
exist in the same relation to the world. There are different versions of racial
logics, but there is no world outside of racial logic. That logic is tied to a
conception of nature, human and other-than-human, that is employed to
differentiate people according to a hierarchical system. That hierarchy
legitimates practices of appropriation, distribution and production. Different
people have different conceptions of nature, but those conceptions exist in a
world structured by capital’s configuration of nature. The ecological
consequences of this configuration are not equally distributed, but follow
established patterns of inequality: capital, gender and race. Put another way,
there may be ‘many worlds in the World’,130 but they all exist in relation to
the discipline of the world. The globalized nature of capitalism combined
with the material manifestations of the social, political and economic
relations required by and shaped by capital – the Capitalocene – means that
there is nothing left untouched.
Even those positions that seem to exist outside of the relations of capital
live in capitalism’s world. Take, for example, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s
perspectivism.131 As he explains, in certain Amerindian cosmologies, the
nature–human relationship is reversed. Rather than a universal nature
experienced by different species (human, jaguar, macaque, etc.), there is a
universal humanity differentiated by its experience of a multitude of
natures. Yet even this perspectivism cannot escape the hegemony of the
world. The jaguar may be a human, but the jaguar is a human in a world
where the ice caps are still melting.
As Malm, describing the connection between nature and capital,
explains,
[t]he fossil economy has the character of a totality, a distinguishable entity: a socio-ecological
structure, in which a certain economic process and a certain form of energy are welded
together. It has some identity over time . . . A person born today in Britain or China enters a
preexisting fossil economy, which has long since assumed an existence of its own and
confronts the newborn as an objective fact. It possesses real causal powers – most notably the
power to alter the climatic conditions on planet Earth.132

The world is a dynamic whole, to return to Tuana’s language, that is both a

set of constitutive antagonisms and the conditions of possibility for
conceiving responses to those antagonisms. And as both Tuana and
Haslanger show, these antagonisms are material. There is objectivity to the
world. It imposes itself on all living and non-living things. To be real,
material and objective does not mean necessary in any ontological sense.
These antagonisms are necessary, but only necessary for the world. If one is
willing to abandon the world, new, if indefinable, possibilities become
possible. The world can be rejected, but this rejection requires more than
updating ideas or shifting social attitudes. It is a real and material change.
The possibility of this change is the focus of apocalyptic political
theology. As Bruno Latour argues, there is a form of apocalypticism that
historicizes the world, revealing its contingency.133 It is a reminder that
humanity has not, in fact, reached the end of history. Apocalypticism is thus
not concerned with meteors destroying the Earth. It is not necessarily
interested in climate change, strictly speaking. Rather, apocalyptic political
theology explores the essentially traumatic process of addressing the
antagonisms that constitute the world. These material and social relations
cannot be resolved within the world, because they are the world. This
impasse requires imaging the end of the world – a traumatic end that
exceeds the legitimizing discourses of ethics and politics (understood in
opposition to the political). Such an end is the possibility of other
possibilities.

Imagining the end

There are a number of ways of living in a violent and inescapable world.

One is to accept this situation and develop social and political projects
within its constraints. Or, one can hold out hope for the redemption of the
world. Such hope can take a variety of utopian forms, including
messianism. Finally, one can apocalyptically reject the world. Recent
political theology has focused on the eschatological or messianic, often
defined against apocalypticism. Much as the term political theology has
come to be used to cover a diverse set of concerns, eschatology, messianism
and apocalypticism have become increasingly ambiguous. In philosophical
writing, the distinctions between these terms can become obscured, but as
Svenungsson’s critique of political theology demonstrates, whether one
adopts messianic or apocalyptic has significant political consequences.
Indeed, Roland Boer critiques Taubes for this lack of precision.134 While
Boer may be right that the distinction between these terms is at times elided
in Occidental Eschatology, Taubes nonetheless develops a distinctive and
philosophically rich apocalyptic political theology. I will return to an
exploration of Taubes’s idiosyncratic version of apocalypticism in later
chapters, but a more general definition of apocalypticism in contrast to
these other concepts will provide context for that discussion.
Roland Boer, in his work on political myth, differentiates between these
eschatology, messianism and apocalyptic perspectives. He defines
eschatology as concerned ‘with the transition from the present, somewhat
undesirable age to another that is qualitatively better by means of an
external agent, who usually turns out to be God.’135 Messianism is a
subcategory of eschatology, one in which ‘a particular individual, divinely
appointed and directed, effects the transition from old to new.’136 Finally,
the ‘apocalyptic refers to both a means of interpretation and a body of
revealed knowledge, acquired by divine message or on a journey to the
heavens.’137 Boer notes that apocalypticism is characterized by dualisms
and ‘is usually a sign and an expression of intense political and social
oppression’.138 The need for deliverance coupled with dualisms results in a
dependence on an external, divine intervention, replicating messianism’s
problematic reliance on transcendent intervention.139
While Boer’s initial differentiation of these concepts is a useful starting
point, he is primarily concerned with narrow theological definitions that
stem from the biblical tradition rather than tracing how the concept has
developed over time. As John J. Collins points out in his Apocalyptic
Imagination, frequent, vague use of ‘apocalypse’ across a number of fields
has resulted in a wider meaning.140 Collins, more open to this expanded
range of meanings, argues that a ‘movement might reasonably be called
apocalyptic if it shared the conceptual framework of the genre, endorsing a
worldview in which supernatural revelation, the heavenly world, and
eschatological judgment played essential parts’.141 Similarly, Malcolm Bull
embraces this more diffuse meaning, comparing ‘apocalyptic’ to ‘epic’.142
It is commonplace to refer to an ‘epic’ event without this usage entailing all
the nuances of that literary genre. In the same way, the term apocalypse has
expanded beyond its biblical and theological origins, no longer referring
only to the Jewish and Christian traditions. Bull thus agrees with Collins
that ‘apocalypse’ denotes a diverse group of related literary forms and
comes to refer to a group of related but distinguishable historical
movements.143
Bull goes further than Collins, however, and argues that apocalypse is a
universal feature of human societies. To make this argument, he shifts from
considering apocalypse theologically to considering the term’s
philosophical, psychoanalytic and theoretical meanings. He understands this
universal apocalypticism as the reinclusion of excluded elements of society.
Drawing on Kristeva’s notion of the abject, he argues,
The reversal of customary taboos embodied in apocalyptic may extend beyond the disregard
for taboos in millenarian cults, and the identification of eschatological confusion with the
 dissolution of the taboo. There is much to suggest that the genre is not just a revelation of the
dissolution of taboos, but itself a taboo revelation. What is seen in apocalyptic vision is more
often than not a series of symbols embodying what is otherwise prohibited.144

Apocalyptic (and other messianic and eschatological) movements are often

antinomian. The approaching end dissolves social and political norms.
Chaos erupts in anticipation of the coming end of order. Bull argues that the
work of Mary Douglas and others establishes that this order is rooted in
binary classifications.145
If apocalyptic is a revelation of the contradiction and indeterminacy excluded at the foundation
of the world, then what is revealed may require a particular form of revelation. In societies
where bivalence is assumed to be natural, the undifferentiated is inaccessible to normal
patterns of thought, so access can be gained only by means that circumvent the accepted modes
of cognition. Conversely, in these circumstances any supernatural revelation of hidden secrets
is liable to disclose a world of contradictions and indeterminacies. The more strictly binarity is
maintained, the more contradictions and indeterminacies there are to disclose – hence perhaps
apocalyptic’s affinity with dualism.146

Bull self-consciously extends his definition of the apocalyptic beyond its

Jewish and Christian origins.147 In doing so, he contrasts his position with
Christopher Rowland’s work on apocalypse. Rowland’s more traditional
approach places a greater emphasis on the genre’s Jewish and Christian
origins and the shared sense of direct revelation. Yet, his privileging of the
original meaning underplays how these ideas are mutated and deployed.
The question is not so much what apocalypse meant, but what are the
different ways that it has had meaning and what could it mean for us now.
Bull does not dismiss the question of origins, but offers an abstract
philosophical engagement with theological ideas. He sees apocalypse as an
idea that emerges in the process of making sense of the world. What
initially appears as divine revelation becomes a logical category employed
by humanity in its self-understanding. He uses theological concepts to
critique the world. In other words, he does political theology.
As established earlier in this chapter, the world is constituted by the
antagonisms of nature, capital, gender and race. These antagonisms are
binaries: nature/human, worker/owner, woman/man and white/Black. The
disruptive revelation at the heart of Bull’s theory of apocalypse no longer
has to come from an external divine agent. The apocalyptic revelation
comes from the return of the excluded. It is brought about by the socially
dead, those who are subjected to ‘invisible’ forms of violence and those that
the world is structured not to see. Such a revelation does not just
apocalyptically threaten the existing order; it also illuminates the nature of
that order. The revelation of the truth of the world is simultaneously a
demand for its end.

Questioning the apocalypse

This chapter has provided an outline of apocalyptic political theology.

Political theology, in the narrow sense, is a method of philosophical
thinking that uses theological concepts to critique the world. That world is
constituted by the material and social relations that can be summarized in
terms of nature, capital, gender and race. That world is violent and
inescapable, for those relations are not conflicts within the world, but
antagonisms that are the world. To envision the end of this world is to
consider the traumatic return of the excluded or the interruption of the
socially dead. This apocalyptic thinking is not a vision of a new world, but
an imagining of the conditions in which a new world would become
possible.
Of course, one can reject this account of the world by rejecting the
concept of world as such or by disagreeing with the notion of an
inescapable world constituted by the divisions of nature, capital, gender and
race. There is much more that could be said about this world and this brief
account may not be persuasive to everyone; it is clearly informed by a set of
social and political views, the defence of which lies beyond the scope of
this book. Moreover, it draws upon a range of Spinozist, Hegelian, Marxist,
psychoanalytic, post-humanist and other perspectives that share
interconnected and interactive ontologies, but differ substantially in how
they develop those ideas. While this account of the world is incomplete, it
at least shows why the revelation of the nature of the world might be an
apocalyptic revelation.
 Even for those unconvinced by the specifics of this account, apocalyptic
political theology can still offer a critique of the world. For one, it is not
dependent upon the details of my discussion of nature, capital, gender and
race, but rather a materialist concept of world – the notion that the world is
a constructed and cohesive sense of meaning that is not only discursive but
also embedded in the inescapable materiality of social, political and
economic relations. The world is what allows meaning. It is both what is
and what is possible. The features of this world are necessary for us, but
they are not necessary as such. Confronted with such a world, the hope of
alternatives must pass through the trauma of the end.
This initial summary of apocalyptic political theology has raised three
questions that will occupy the rest of this book. First, there is a persistent
question about the nature of political theology. In order to philosophically
employ theological concepts, it is necessary to develop a political theology
that engages in the ‘sociology of concepts’ and then uses those concepts to
think and critique the world. While this chapter differentiated this form of
political theology from other broad or sectarian approaches, it remains to be
seen how exactly such a political theology operates. What notions of
theology and philosophy does such a method require? Is theology
subordinated to philosophy? It is for this reason that I turn to Hegel. He not
only offers philosophical resources for reflecting on the relationship
between theology, politics and philosophy, but those resources are an
important part of the history of considering the possibility of dramatic
transformations of the world.
Second, while Bull provides some insights into thinking of an
apocalyptic disruption without a divine agent, it remains too difficult to
envision how this works. If the world is both what is and the possibilities of
what is, how can one conceive of novelty? Apocalypticism has been
critiqued for its reliance on an external, divine agent. The task for the
ensuing chapters is to provide a more detailed account of this immanent
apocalypticism. This view of the end maintains the connection between
destruction and the possibility of the new, but without the intervention of a
transcendent force.
 This connection between destruction and novelty is the final question.
Apocalypticism, as I will continue to show, is often dismissed as overly
pessimistic and fixated on violence and trauma. Even if the above account
of the world is convincing, it may be that apocalypticism rushes to the most
hopeless conclusions. There are other utopian, messianic or progressive
ways of confronting this violent and inescapable world. And, if one is
convinced by this apocalyptic view, what then? What does it mean to live
apocalyptically? Does it result in a form of quietism or resignation? Or,
more worryingly, perhaps it confirms the fears of Lilla, Gray and
Svenungsson and leads to totalitarian or absolutist political projects.
 2

Implicit political theology: Reading Hegel’s

philosophy of religion

In the first chapter, I used Lloyd’s typology to argue that there is a narrow
form of political theology that can be contrasted with both broad (political
religion) and sectarian approaches. This narrow approach includes Schmitt,
Taubes, Benjamin, Bloch, Agamben and others. I also provided an ontology
of the world and argued that this narrow form of political theology offers
resources for thinking about why this world should end.
Turning to Hegel as a resource for this work might be surprising for two
reasons. First, if Hegel is the Hegel of teleological history and absolute
knowledge, it is not immediately obvious what he has to offer to
apocalyptic thinking. Further, having defined the world in terms of nature,
capital, gender and race, it may seem suspect to turn to someone whose
treatment of nature, gender and race is increasingly regarded as deeply
problematic.1 Second, while Hegel offers wide-ranging thoughts on
theology, religion, philosophy and politics, much of this work could be
described in terms of broad or sectarian approaches to political theology.
Hegel thinks religion plays an important social, political and ethical role.
He also describes the social, political and ethical consequences of certain
theological ideas and offers philosophical reflections on theological
doctrines. There is a great deal of literature evaluating Hegel’s discussion of
these theological themes and that conversation has come to dominate
consideration of religion within Hegel scholarship. It could thus seem
strange to appeal to Hegel in order to develop political theology in a narrow
sense.
 This chapter seeks to address both these concerns. First, I argue that
there is an established genealogy of apocalyptic thought that draws
connections between early Christianity, Joachim, Hegel and Marx. This
genealogy is important for those critical of political theology in the broad
sense (Lilla, Gray and, to some extent, Svenungsson) as well as those who
find Hegel a resource for developing a narrow political theology. Whether
Hegel appears as hero or villain in these historical narratives, something –
usually unspecified – happens to theology in Hegel. In these narratives,
Hegel is positioned between Joachim of Fiore and Marx as a point at which
the relationship between politics and theology (or religion) is transformed
in a way that is dangerously conducive to extreme political positions.
Though some of these genealogies offer simplistic readings of Hegel, they
nonetheless capture an underlying truth about his philosophy: he develops a
notion of the relationship between philosophy and theology that allows for
philosophical experimentation with theological concepts. In this implicit
political theology, these concepts become resources for thinking about and
against the world.
Second, I offer a detailed account of this implicit political theology
through a reading of Hegel’s philosophy of religion. The central claim of
Hegel’s philosophy of religion is that religion is a form of representational
thinking. Religion is thus a form of thought and that form of thought is
politically significant. Religion shares a truth with philosophy, but this truth
is thought differently. It is this relationship between religion as
representation and philosophy, and philosophy’s subsequent freedom to
think the world through religion, that is the root of Hegel’s political
theological significance. If Schmitt offers the sociology of concepts and
Taubes a more inventive critique of the world through theological ideas,
then Hegel offers an explanation of how these two approaches are related.

Joachim, Hegel and the end of the world

The critiques of political theology discussed in the previous chapter are

rooted in a genealogy of messianic and apocalyptic thought. This genealogy
is not unique to Lilla, Gray and Svenungsson but stems from a wider
tradition of reflecting on the histories of apocalyptic and millennial
movements or shifts in the philosophy of history. Examining this
underlining historical narrative will show how Hegel has come to occupy a
key role in developing themes within political theology. This genealogy is
also key to establishing Hegel’s role within Taubes’s and Bloch’s political
theologies. Establishing this role is vital – political theology may entail
philosophical experimentation with theological concepts, but it is not a
decontextualized experimentation. Placing Hegel in the development of the
relationship between apocalypticism and the political provides the
necessary backdrop for an analysis of Hegel’s implicit political theology
and how that method can illuminate Taubes’s work.
While the details of this genealogy vary, there are few consistent figures:
Jesus, Paul, Augustine and Joachim de Fiore. Thomas Müntzer also
frequently makes an appearance. Eventually, this lineage arrived at the
events and names associated with modern political utopias or revolutions:
the French Revolution, Marx, Communism and National Socialism. This
narrative describes a transformation: theological ideas become secular and
political. Much in keeping with Schmitt’s most popular formulation, the
idea of revolution turns out to be a secularized version of eschatological,
messianic or apocalyptic ideas. Hegel is a central character in this story. In
particular, the connection between his philosophy and the theology of
Joachim de Fiore becomes key to understanding Hegel’s role in the
development of political theology.2
One of the most influential historical accounts positing this connection is
Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium.3 Cohn focuses on European
millennial movements between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries and the
story he tells is an indicative example of efforts to establish a historical
connection between medieval eschatological ideas and twentieth-century
political movements. Cohn’s work is important for two reasons. First, he
describes the general social conditions of millennial movements. Second, he
links together Joachim, Hegel, Marx and totalitarianism. The story he tells
then becomes a template for later critiques of revolutionary political ideas.
 Cohn outlines the social and political contexts conducive to millennial
views. These ideas tend to gain traction in communities that experience
extreme unbalance as they transition from agricultural to more industrial
economies. Previous social orders, built around normalized relations
between peasants and lords, begin to break down as social mobility
increases. Resultant tensions are only exacerbated by increasing population
growth and movement. Cohn concludes that poverty and oppression do not
provide a sufficient seedbed for millennialism. It is the insecurity caused by
shifts in social and political relations that must be added in order for
apocalyptic movements to emerge.4 Or, as Yonina Talmon explains, the
‘predisposing factor was often not so much any particular hardship but a
markedly uneven relation between expectations and the means of their
satisfaction’.5 Radical conditions are required for radical ideas to emerge.
Though Cohn does not make the connection, there is a clear parallel
between the sociological analysis of these conditions and Hegel’s
description of the Rabble. For Hegel,
The lowest subsistence level, that of a rabble of paupers, is fixed automatically, but the
minimum varies considerably in different countries. In England, even the very poorest believe
that they have rights; this is different from what satisfies the poor in other countries. Poverty in
itself does not turn people into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty
a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the
government, etc. (PR, §244z: 221)

The Rabble does not form as the result of poverty but through a
profound sense of alienation.6 Throughout the rest of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, the Rabble appears as something that must be contained and
controlled. Apocalypticism emerges at the moment the Rabble move from
feeling alienated by society to desiring the destruction of a society that they
have come to see as essentially unjust. For Cohn, these conditions result in
irrational, revolutionary political fantasies.
For where revolutionary chiliasm thrives best is where history is imagined as having an
inherent purpose which is preordained to be realised on this earth in a single, final
consummation. It is such view of history, at once teleological and cataclysmic, that has been
presupposed and invoked alike by the medieval movements described in the present study and
by the great totalitarian movements of our day.7
 This connection between medieval movements and contemporary
political fantasies is Cohn’s second important contribution. His
identification of Joachim, a twelfth-century Calabrian prophet, as a key
figure in the genealogy of apocalyptic and revolutionary thought continues
to shape the construction of this tradition. Joachim is regarded as one of the
most significant apocalyptic figures of the Middle Ages and his division of
history into three ages forms the connection between more ancient forms of
apocalyptic thinking and contemporary political manifestations of that
tradition. He prophesized that the defeat of the Antichrist would bring about
a spiritual age.8 This spiritual period, lived out on earth, would be one in
which humanity’s relationship to law and God was profoundly transformed.
Cohn thinks Joachim would be dismayed by the political gloss his
theological vision has received.
Horrified though the unworldly mystic would have been to see it happen, it is unmistakably the
Joachite phantasy of the three ages that reappeared in, for instance, the theories of historical
evolution expounded by the German Idealist philosophers Lessing, Schelling, Fichte and to
some extent Hegel; in August Comte’s idea of history as an ascent from the theological
through the metaphysical up to the scientific phase; and again in the Marxian dialectic of the
three stages of primitive communism, class society and a final communism which is to be the
realm of freedom and in which the state will have withered away.9

His description of the connection between the idea of three ages, modern
philosophy and the arrival of ‘totalitarian’ thought and politics means that
the irrationalities of millennialism can also be found in contemporary
movements. For Cohn, this irrationality is located both in its ecstatic
character and its belief in the ability to bring about unlikely or impossible
realities. These fantasies, as Cohn so often calls them, are borne of
situations in which there are no options. Only the apocalyptic provides a
means of organizing and deploying the energies necessary to create hope
where none seems possible.
There are reasons to be suspicious of the neatness of Cohn’s historical
narrative. In particular, his readiness to link Joachim to every political
invocation of the number three has been criticized by historians. Marjoree
Reeves and Warwick Gould developed a set of criteria by which to
determine whether or not a particular figure could be described as a
Joachimist. This criteria centred on the questions ‘in what forms did a direct
knowledge of Joachim’s doctrine reach nineteenth-century thinkers, who
made conscious use of it, and how did they handle the sources from which
they derived their knowledge?’10 While these questions might seem
simplistic, Reeves and Gould were responding to a post-World War II
resurgence of interest in Joachim and his connection to contemporary ideas
of progress and revolution.11 Analysis of this connection was and remains
problematic due to similarities between Joachim and other prophetic voices.
Especially treacherous, in the opinion of Reeves and Gould, is the lazy
connection between tripartite divisions of history and Joachim. Citing John
Passmore and Henri de Lubac as examples, they describe how Lessing,
Fichte, Schelling, Marx, Comte and Hitler have all been connected to
Joachim largely by this unstable bridge.12
In both its strengths and weaknesses, Cohn’s narrative is an illustrative
example of the genealogy connecting medieval apocalyptic movements and
contemporary politics. He helpfully identifies commonalities between the
religious movements and later secular movements. Less helpfully, the actual
connection between the two is asserted rather than substantiated. An affinity
of ideas does not necessarily indicate an actual connection. The parallels he
identifies are significant, but he fails to provide sufficient analysis of how
these ideas travel from marginal medieval sects to Stalin. This connection is
further weakened by his broad conception of totalitarianism, which includes
Fascism, National Socialism and Communism.13
Despite these sometimes tenuous connections, Cohn’s narrative has
become a touchstone for the critique of political theology (in the widest
sense of the term). His work is the precursor to that of Lilla and Gray,
though Svenungsson provides a corrective account of the relationship
between Joachim, German Romanticism and German Idealism.14 For
contemporary critics of fanatical, apocalyptic or ‘political theological’
ideas, establishing the link between medieval religion and the desire for
fundamental social and political change undermines the latter’s legitimacy.
This strategy appears even in the work of those otherwise disinterested in
such political theological issues. Daniel Bell, for example, in his influential
argument that liberal democracy has exhausted all political alternatives,
writes,
From the sixteenth-century chiliast, burning with impatient zeal for immediate salvation, to the
twentieth-century American labor leader, sunning himself on the sands of Miami, is a long,
almost surrealist jump of history. Yet these are antipodal figures of a curving ribbon which
binds all movements that have sought to change the hierarchical social order in society.15

So Cohn identifies an affinity between ideas but is unable to establish

that this affinity is the result of an underlying intellectual tradition. In some
ways, whether or not there is an actual historical connection between
Joachim and German Idealism is irrelevant. Later political theologians and
their critics both construct a tradition tying together these historical
movements. For the purposes of reflecting on apocalyptical political
theology, Cohn is an important voice in that process of construction.
Though he rushes to lump together disparate forms of political movements
under the umbrella of totalitarianism, he correctly identifies an anarchic or
revolutionary potential within these apocalyptic ideas. In this sense too, he
anticipates Lilla, Gray and Svenungsson in objecting to the anti-liberal
aspect of apocalypticism. It would be anachronistic to describe Joachim or
other apocalyptic movements of the Middle Ages as anti-liberal, but it is the
anti-liberal features of contemporary political movements that he traces
back to that period. In the most recent edition of The Pursuit of the
Millennium, Cohn concludes the book by observing that
There are aspects of Nazism and Communism alike that are barely comprehensible, barely
conceivable even, to those whose political assumptions and norms are provided by a liberal
society, however imperfect . . . Such beliefs seem grotesque, and when one hears them argued
they can give one almost the same uncanny feeling as a paranoiac expounding his private
systematised delusion. Yet in reality their strangeness springs from the fact that they are rooted
in an earlier and forgotten age. However modern their terminology, however realistic their
tactics, in their basic attitudes Communism and Nazism follow an ancient tradition – and are
baffling to the rest of us because of those very features that would have seemed so familiar to a
chiliastic propheta of the Middle Ages.16

While Cohn establishes a key narrative describing the transmission of

this ‘ancient tradition’, in that version Hegel occupies a marginal position.17
It is not clear why Cohn differentiates Hegel from the rest of the German
Idealists that he claims are influenced by Joachim. The separation is
particularly confusing given Cohn’s emphasis on Marx, whose
understanding of history is clearly developed in relationship to Hegel’s
philosophy. Whatever reasons for this aspect of Cohn’s argument, other
tellings of this story offer Hegel a more central role.
Karl Löwith, for example, offers a similar account, though he is
concerned with the philosophy of history rather than millenarian
movements. He describes his Meaning in History as a succinct summary of
the philosophy of history as a ‘practice’. Löwith understands this practice to
consist of the ‘systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance
with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and
directed toward an ultimate meaning’.18 He argues that this reading of
history is ‘entirely dependent on the theology of history, in particular on the
theological concept of history as a history of fulfilment and salvation’.19
Löwith presents the development of this relation between the philosophy of
history and theological ideas of history in reverse from Burkhardt to the
biblical text. That long historical journey passes through Hegel.
For Löwith, Hegel obscures the fact that his view of history is really just
‘the pattern of the realization of the Kingdom of God, and philosophy as the
intellectual worship of a philosophical God’.20 Hegel’s history is
theological in two senses. First, it preserves the providential directionality
of Christianity. Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ guides the actions of
individuals, who think they are acting of their own will, in order to achieve
the realization of absolute reason. In this sense, Hegel’s history is ‘secretly’
Christian, philosophically papering over theological concepts. Second, the
figure of Christ is central to Hegel’s history. ‘With Christ the time is
fulfilled, and the historical world becomes, in principle, perfect, for only the
Christian God is truly spirit and at the same time man. This principle
constitutes the axis on which turns the history of the world.’21 For Löwith,
the connection between the philosophy of history and theology is so
profound that Hegel is actually the last philosopher of history. After Hegel,
Christianity’s dominance of the organization of history begins to break
down. Löwith is critical of Hegel’s philosophy, arguing that it
problematically assumes the possibility of a speculative philosophy
realizing the Christian faith or even the possibility of such a realization.22
As Löwith argues, these theological aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of
history have clear parallels to Joachim. Meaning in History provides a more
thorough description of Joachim’s teaching than Cohn and this
thoroughness enables a greater understanding of these parallels as well as
the important differences between their conceptions of history. While Hegel
may adopt a similar pattern, Joachim’s version of the end is both more
traditional and more radical. He is more traditional in that he preserves a
greater continuity with the Catholic church of his age. At the same time,
there is a greater anarchism to his final age, which includes ‘the liquidation
of preaching and sacraments, the mediating power of which becomes
obsolete when the spiritual order is realized which possess knowledge of
God by direct vision and contemplation’.23 Like Cohn, Löwith also explains
the connection between these ideas and later political moments.
The political implications of Joachim’s historical prophecies were neither foreseen nor
intended by him. Nevertheless, they were plausible consequences of his general scheme; for,
when Joachim opened the door to a fundamental revision of a thousand years of Christian
history and theology by proclaiming a new and last dispensation, he questioned implicitly not
only the traditional authority of the church but also the temporal order. His expectation of a last
providential progress toward the fulfilment of the history of salvation within the framework of
the history of the world is radically new.24

Or again, ‘Joachim, like Luther after him, could not foresee that his
religious intention – that of desecularizing the church and restoring its
spiritual fervor – would, in the hands of others, turn into its opposite: the
secularization of the world which became increasingly worldly by the very
fact that eschatological thinking about last things was introduced into
penultimate matters.’25 For Löwith, this means that German Idealism,
Marxism and the Third Reich are all perversions of the original theological
intentions of Joachim, but connected to Joachim nonetheless. This
connection is the ground of a new kind of history. This new history is
contrasted to the view of traditional theology, represented for Löwith, as for
Taubes and Bloch, by Augustine. Traditional Augustinian, that is
institutional, Christianity writes history with an eye for self-preservation;
put differently, the history of Christianity is the history of the Church. Hegel
is a Joachimist in seizing upon a different notion of the history of
Christianity.
Cohn and Löwith thus offer two versions of the same underlying
narrative: the conversion of theological ideas about history into secular
political concepts. In both, this development runs from traditional forms of
Christianity to Joachim through Hegel to Marx. Both are critical of this
tradition, expressing concerns about these connections between the
theological and the political.
This same historical narrative, and much of the same interpretation, is
shared by those who find these connections resources for critique and hope
rather than causes for concern. The anarchic and revolutionary potential that
worries Cohn and Löwith energizes Taubes and Bloch. For this latter pair,
Joachim plays a central role in a genealogy that leads to Hegel and then
fractures into the two alternatives of Kierkegaard and Marx.
Taubes links Hegel and Joachim early on in his discussion of the nature
of eschatology (OE, 12). While the narrative is the same, Taubes offers his
distinctive apocalyptic interpretation of Hegel. After critiquing both
historicism, which he associates with conservative Hegelians, and the
‘ideology of progress’, Taubes offers a rival understanding – an apocalyptic
ontology rooted in both the Joachimist tradition and Hegelian philosophy
(OE, 13). For this apocalypticism, history is the period that stretches
between creation and redemption.
In contrast to Löwith, Taubes places Hegel at the periphery of, if not
outside, traditional theological understandings of history.26 If for Löwith,
Hegel was the last philosopher of history because he was the last to
maintain the Christian notion of universal history, in Taubes’s account
Hegel and Marx reinaugurate a form of thinking lost due to Christianity’s
submission to Aristotelian and Scholastic logic (OE, 35). This lost form of
thinking had also been preserved by others, which Taubes describes in later
sections, but it takes on a new, reinvigorated form in Hegel’s philosophy.
This form of thought is dialectics. ‘Dialectical logic is a logic of history,
giving rise to the eschatological interpretation of the world’ (OE, 35). This
connection between eschatology and dialectics is not accidental in Hegel’s
philosophy, but essential to understanding its implications. ‘Apocalypticism
and Gnosis form the basis of Hegel’s logic, which is often discussed but
seldom understood. The connection between apocalyptic ontology and
Hegelian logic is neither artificial nor an afterthought’ (OE, 36). Taubes
relies on Bauer’s famous work to justify this claim, but subsequent research
by Laurence Dickey, Cyril O’Regan and Glenn Alexander Magee has
continued to develop the understanding of Hegel’s relationship to mystical,
gnostic and other heterodox traditions.27
Taubes presents two interlinked genealogies: one theological and the
other philosophical. Like Löwith, he traces this theological tradition back to
biblical texts. Taubes works through Daniel, Jesus, the Gospel of John,
Paul, into the early Christian church and Origen.28 In this early Christian
period, the focus is on apocalyptic ideas. Following Origen, however,
Augustine introduces a fundamental shift in the Christian church’s view of
eschatology. ‘Instead of the concept of universal eschatology, individual
eschatology emerges. The destiny of the soul is central and the End Time is
eclipsed from the last day of human life . . . Universal eschatology, which
bears within it the expectation of the Kingdom, from now on appears within
the Christian sphere of influence as heresy’ (OE, 80). This first section of
his theological genealogy concludes with Joachim, who relocates the
promises of universal eschatology to a new age. They are inscribed within
history rather than beyond it. Taubes is thus in agreement with
Svenungsson’s description of Joachim’s theology as a form of ‘non-
eschatological apocalypticism’.29 This transferral breaks with the
underlying Augustinian metaphysics that dominated medieval Christianity’s
understanding of history.30 His genealogy resumes with Thomas Müntzer
before jumping to Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, the text that
transfers the chiliastic sense of history from Joachim to Hegel and German
Idealism. For Taubes, Lessing’s text ‘is the first manifesto of philosophical
chiliasm’ (OE, 86). The end of history, Joachim’s third age, becomes
Hegel’s kingdom of the mind. The left Hegelians, like the Joachimists,
devote themselves to the realization of this kingdom of the mind on earth. It
is this ‘on earth’ that essentially links Joachim and Hegel, their mutual
‘equation of the history of the spirit with the course of world history’ (OE,
93).
Taubes then shifts to a philosophical history of the same ideas. This
history includes Leibniz, Lessing and Kant before again arriving at Hegel.
Working from the principles of love and freedom, which are identical in the essence of the
spirit, Joachim and Hegel construct world history from the perspective of an end to fulfilment.
They both consider the history of the spirit to be synonymous with the course of history. Just as
Joachim’s exegesis interprets the metaphysical fate of Christ, including the resurrection, in
terms of a historical dialectic, Hegel, too, in his philosophy of religion, builds his dialectical,
historical speculations on the foundation of death and resurrection. (OE, 162)

Taubes concludes his study with the splitting of the Hegelian legacy by
Kierkegaard and Marx. He treats both as valid heirs of Hegel, the former
turning Hegel’s philosophy inward to the subject, the latter directing it
outwards into society.31
Bloch, like Taubes, claims a strong connection between Joachim and
Hegel. His Atheism in Christianity is effectively a political theological
genealogy, suggesting that Christianity’s destiny is its own end. Again, the
links between Joachim, Hegel and Marx are essential to this story. Bloch
divides Christianity into two basic tendencies: religion of the On-high and
religion from below (AC, 13–15). These correspond to two contrary aspects
of the biblical text: creation and apocalypse. The task taken up by Bloch is
the ‘detective work’ of discerning which texts and ideas fall into each of
these categories (AC, 57–70). He runs through an analysis of recent (for
him) biblical hermeneutics before beginning his own interpretation of the
text. Compared to Taubes, Bloch’s treatment of both Joachim and Hegel is
brief. His reading of the Old and New Testaments, though, is littered with
references to Origen, Joachim, Müntzer, Hegel and Marx. Bloch is less
focused on drawing actual, historical connections than Cohn, Löwith and
even Taubes. Rather, they are presented as key figures of the tradition of
realizing Christianity from below in opposition to that of the On-high.
 While Bloch’s discussion of Hegel is slightly more sustained than his
treatment of Joachim, the specifics of neither are of particular concern to
him at this point. Bloch is important here not for his insights into Joachim
and Hegel but for the interpretation he offers of the tradition as a whole.
Bloch develops a reading quite similar to Taubes, though one that remains
implicit underneath his reading of the biblical text. If for Taubes, the
essential thesis of this genealogy is the ever-greater realization of the
identity of the history of spirit and the history of the world, Bloch’s insight
is the reframing of the history of theological development given this
identity. Rather than dismissing mythology or religion, Bloch returns to it
convinced of this identity to reread the tradition of Christianity.
What is clear is that for Taubes and Bloch, as well as many others, Hegel
transforms theology in a key way. Whether the genealogy connecting early
Christianity, Joachim, Hegel and Marx is regarded as a dangerous source of
extreme ideas or a resource for utopian or revolutionary ideas, Hegel is
there. For Taubes and Bloch, Hegel is not secularizing theological concepts,
but the theological is not unadulterated for having passed through Hegel. If
he is to be a resource for the development of an apocalyptic political
theology, the precise nature of this transformation needs to be made clear.
Only with that understanding in place, can I turn to thinking apocalyptically
with Taubes and Malabou.

Representational thought: An outline of Hegel’s philosophy of

religion

Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are consistent themes

from Hegel’s early writings through to the end of his life. Across this body
of work, Hegel repeatedly returns to the social and political significance of
religion as a distinct mode of consciousness. Religion not only plays a key
role as a ground for the emergence of philosophy, it is essential to the
development and maintenance of the ethical community or Sittlichkeit. This
ethical community is the end goal of Hegel’s political thought and, in many
ways, his whole philosophical project.
In order to understand this wider political significance, it is necessary to
understand the difference between religion and philosophy. Religion and
philosophy share a truth but differ in the way that truth is thought.32
Whereas philosophy is concerned with truth in its abstract form, religion
grasps the same truth in the form of representations. Philosophy’s task is to
understand this difference. In this sense, philosophical thinking develops
out of religion’s self-understanding. By tracing this development, the nature
of religion, philosophy and their relation will become clearer.
Hegel explains the relationship between representational thought and
philosophy by tracing the movement from art through religion to
philosophy. In the Encyclopaedia he writes,
Whereas the vision-method of art, external in point of form, is but subjective production and
shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes, and whereas religion, with its
separation into parts, opens it out in representation, and mediates what is thus opened out;
philosophy not merely keeps them together to make a totality, but even unifies them into the
simple spiritual vision, and then in that raises them to self-conscious thought. Such
consciousness is thus the intelligible unity (cognized by thought) of art and religion, in which
the diverse elements in the content are cognized as necessary, and this necessary as free. (E3,
§572: 302/554–5)

Here, philosophy is the means of raising religious thought to the level of

self-consciousness. What religion considers a narrative of separate moments
linked together through a process of historical unfolding, philosophy
comprehends conceptually and in its unity. From the perspective of religion,
these moments are external. For Hegel, the paradigmatic example is the
Incarnation. The birth, life and death of Christ and Pentecost are presented
as historical events by Christianity. Philosophically they are representations
of necessary modes in the development of self-consciousness. The route for
attaining this self-consciousness in relation to religious ideas is explained in
the following paragraph of the Encyclopaedia. ‘Philosophy thus
characterizes itself as a cognition of the necessity in the content of the
absolute representation’, which in the religious representations is presented
in the form of ‘first the subjective retreat inwards, then the subjective
movement of faith and its final identification with the presupposed object’
(E3, §573: 302/555). The story of the Incarnation is really the story of
subjectivity that encounters an externality that drives thought inward,
beginning a process that culminates with the realization that the God ‘out
there’ is not external at all.
These dense passages are essential to grasping the relationship between
philosophy and religion. As much of recent Hegel literature has argued, his
main goal is to demonstrate the necessary shape of thought itself.33
Religious representation is one specific form of thought, consisting of a
distinct configuration of self-consciousness, the subject–object relation and
the absolute.
Hegel offers a similar explanation at the beginning of the section on
religion in the Phenomenology. Earlier sections of the text deal with
religion, ‘although only from the standpoint of the consciousness that is
conscious of absolute notion; but absolute notion in and for itself, the self-
consciousness of Spirit, has not appeared in those “shapes” ’ (PS, §672:
410/495). To use terminology Hegel employs elsewhere, spirit has appeared
as object but not yet as subject. Religion in its broadest Hegelian usage,
including natural religion, religion in the form of art and revealed religion,
marks a decisive move from relating to the absolute as an externality to an
understanding of the absolute as something immanent to the sphere of
human activity. Terry Pinkard offers a succinct summary:
Hegel’s point is that we regard as divine, as the object of awe and reverence, that which we
take to be the ‘ground’ of all belief and action, and that which we take to have absolute value;
the concept of the divine is not at first identical with the concept of self-founding humanity, but
in working out the insufficiencies of its previous accounts of itself, humanity as ‘self-conscious
spirit’ comes to realize that identity, to see the divine as implicit in its own activity of reflection
on what it can take as divine.34

Again, the same themes are present: religion regards something as external,
other and infinite in relation to the finite self. The narrative core of the
Phenomenology is the gradual realization of the divine within the
subjectivity of human community.
 So religion and philosophy share a truth. Philosophy understands this
truth conceptually and realizes that the divine and human are identical,
while religion thinks this truth through representations. ‘Representation’ is
a translation of the German Vorstellung, a term that, as is often the case
with Hegel, presents some challenges.35 Miller, in his translation of the
Phenomenology, uses ‘picture-thinking’. While picture-thinking captures an
aspect of representation, it has overly visual connotations. I follow Peter
Hodgson, Terry Pinkard and others in preferring representation.36 This
alternative term allows for a wider range of meanings. Representations can
be ideas or feelings; indeed, representation in both these senses is essential
to understanding religion’s role in Hegel’s philosophy.
Hegel explains this understanding of Vorstellung as a mode of spirit’s
self-consciousness.
So far as Spirit in religion represents itself to itself, it is indeed consciousness, and the reality
enclosed within religion is the shape and the guise of its representational thought. But, in this
representational thought, reality does not receive its perfect due, viz. to be not merely a guise
but an independent free existence; and, conversely, because it lacks perfection within itself it is
a determinate shape which does not attain to what it ought to show forth, viz. Spirit that is
conscious of itself. If its shape is to express Spirit itself, it must be nothing else than Spirit, and
Spirit must appear to itself, or be in actuality, what it is in its essence. (PS, §678: 412/497–8)

Here, Hegel specifies two key elements of this discussion of religion. First,
as seen above, religion culminates in the recognition of the identity of
spirit’s existence and self-consciousness. Second, representational form of
thought is at least initially an obstacle to this goal. Hegel further elaborates
this second point at the outset of the Encyclopaedia, explaining that
representations share the content of thought, but that this content is
presented as an ‘admixture’ with the form of the representation. Thus, while
‘the content is ob-ject of our consciousness . . . the determinacies of these
forms join themselves onto the content; with the result that each of these
forms seems to give to rise to a particular ob-ject’ (E1, §3: 26/44).
Manifestations of philosophical truths as external objects and historical
events means that these truths have a force that often eludes abstract
formulations, but the truths of those objects and events can all too easily be
confused with the objects and events themselves. This manifestation as a
specific object is both the source of religion’s force in society and an
obstacle to its elevation to thought.
Conceiving of religion as representation means that Hegel’s theological
reflections take on a distinct role. Religious thought is representational and
his discussion of the crucifixion or Pentecost should be understood within
that wider philosophical framework. The importance of representation for
interpreting Hegel’s philosophy of religion can be hard to keep in mind, as
Hegel offers extended theological commentary. Indeed, his writing can give
the sense that it is theology that should take priority over philosophy (or
that his philosophy is deeply theological). For instance, in the introductory
materials of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, he states that his
philosophy is a continuation of natural theology, before claiming that
God is the one and only object of philosophy. [Its concern is] to occupy itself with God, to
apprehend everything in him, to lead everything back to him, as well as to derive everything
particular from God and to justify everything only insofar as it stems from God, is sustained
through its relationship with him, lives by his radiance and has [within itself] the mind of God.
Thus philosophy is theology, and [one’s] occupation with philosophy – or rather in philosophy
– is of itself the service of God. (LPR1, 84/6)

Hegel provides proofs for the existence of God and explores the doctrines
of the Trinity and Incarnation. From examples such as these, it is clear why
more theological interpretations of Hegel have dominated Hegel
scholarship. The interpretative direction of any reading ultimately hinges on
the degree of emphasis placed on the idea of representation. For in the same
section of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel goes on to
specify that ‘the whole of our treatment – indeed, even immediate religion
itself – is nothing other than the development of the concept, and that [in
turn] is nothing other than the positing of what is contained in the concept.
This positing constitutes the reality of the concept; it elevates and perfects
the concept into the idea’ (LPR1, 110–11/30–1). Hegel makes the same
point in the Philosophy of Right. In a passage particularly relevant to the
political theology being developed here, he writes,
 The essence of the relation between religion and the state can be determined, however, only if
we recall the concept of religion. The content of religion is absolute truth, and consequently the
most elevated of all dispositions is to be found in religion. As intuition, feeling,
representational knowledge [vorstellende Erkenntnis], its concern is with God as the
unrestricted principle and cause on which everything hangs. It thus involves the demand that
everything else shall be seen in this light and depend on it for corroboration, justification, and
verification. (PR, §270r: 242/417)37

This relation between representation and concept, religion and

philosophy, is the starting point for thinking about Hegel’s implicit political
theological method. Representations are one relation to truth and
philosophy another. If religion, in the course of representing that truth,
comes to understand the dynamics of representation, that effects a transition
to philosophy. Philosophy then grasps representations as representations, in
the unity of content and form.
But why is this necessary? A hasty reading might conclude that Hegel is
offering an evolutionary account of thought. People were once religious but
now, having cast aside useless representations, they can emerge into
philosophical light. Yet it is clear that Hegel means something else.
Representations continue to be necessary, as the above discussion of their
political significance indicates. Understanding this significance, and further
grasping the relation between philosophy and religion, requires delving
deeper into the nature and function of representations.

Hegel’s implicit political theology

Thus far, I have shown Hegel’s understanding of religion in relationship to

philosophy, emphasizing the importance of his concept of representation.
When Hegel discusses religion as representation, he argues that it is both
necessary and problematic. It is necessary in that it facilitates the
development of self-consciousness, but problematic in that the
representations can be confused with the truth they represent. Up to this
point, Hegel’s insights are helpful for thinking about political theology in
the broad sense of political religion.38 Religious ideas (as well as
experiences and affects) are a form of relating to truth and that relationship
has political significance. That significance is distinct from, but still related
to, the more narrow sense of political theology that I am developing here. I
am claiming that beneath Hegel’s wider philosophy of religion, there is an
implicit political theology. Still rooted in the notion of religion as
representation, this more subterranean political theology takes theology as a
way of engaging the world.
While there has been a significant amount of work on Hegel’s notion of
representation, this has focused on religion in isolation from politics. In
particular, Malcolm Clark’s Logic and System and Kathleen Dow Magnus’s
Hegel and Symbolic Mediation both provide a helpful analysis of the
function of representation in Hegel’s philosophy. Yet, Clark’s systematic
overview leaves little space for an in-depth consideration of religion, and
Magnus concentrates on theological elements without connecting them to
politics.39 Thomas Lewis provides the connection between religion as
representation, on the one hand, and philosophy and the state, on the other,
but is less concerned with an analysis of the dynamics of representation
itself. Taken together, though, Clark, Magnus and Lewis will help clarify
the central role of representation in Hegel’s implicit political theology.
Clark, Magnus and Lewis are all agreed that representation plays an
ongoing and central role in Hegel’s philosophical system. To reiterate an
earlier point, thought does not dispense with representation after arriving at
philosophy. As Clark shows, this creates a tension between a system that is
expressed through representations, the ‘other’ of thought, while
simultaneously systematizing the functioning of representations.
Hence the paradox of Hegel’s system: logical thought is at once the whole of philosophy and
but a part of it. In Hegel’s own terms, logical thought contains its other. That is, true
philosophical thought contains all reality and is not simply opposed and applied to it.
Nevertheless, thought contains reality as its other, not merely as a ‘confused thought’, but as
that which reduces the system of pure thought to one part of a greater whole.40

Representations and philosophy as pure thought are parts of a whole, a

whole that philosophy thinks in its totality, but also a whole that contains
the other of pure thought. It is a difficult balance to hold – philosophy
thinks the dynamics of thought in its abstractness, comprehending that
which it cannot reduce to itself.
Magnus confronts the same problem. Her exploration of representations
is written in response to Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s supposed elision of
sensuousness. The specifics of that critique are not key for this present
discussion, so suffice it to say that Derrida is concerned that the material
ground and ambiguity of any metaphor are domesticated by Hegel’s
treatment of metaphor.41 This critique is frequently lodged against Hegel:
all of reality is reduced to abstract conceptuality. For Derrida, this allows
Hegel to hide ‘a fundamental contradiction: self-grounding spirit negates
the sensuous element of reality in the same moment that it uses it’.42 Here,
there is a parallel between Clark and Magnus; both explore the ways in
which Hegel depicts representations leading to a concept which
comprehends that act of representation in its essentiality. While this
comprehension places the concept ‘above’ representation, it does not
remove the need for representations. So spirit does not need to negate the
sensuous element of reality but can grasp that sensuous element in its
otherness to pure thought. That does not presuppose a rejection of that
sensuousness, though it does transform the relationship. What both Clark
and Magnus show is that Hegel’s philosophy has to be read dynamically. It
is thought in motion. Any argument that claims representation is somehow
overcome or left behind is guilty of freezing Hegel’s thought in the moment
of the concept rather than continuing to follow the trajectory of pure
thought from its abstractness back to its interaction with sensuousness. It is
for this reason that the Phenomenology can be read as loop. Its conclusion
is not an end, but now enables the reader to return to the beginning to
comprehend the journey of self-consciousness from the perspective of spirit
(PS, §20: 11/24).
Put another way, the persistence of representational thinking is
sometimes overlooked in thinking about Hegel’s understanding of
philosophy. As Clark argues,
Before it can rise above the limitations of mere consciousness and become the infinite, self-
relating unity its concept supposes it to be, it must appear to itself as outside of itself. It must,
 in other words, take on various symbolic forms. But even after it recognizes its object as itself
in absolute religion, spirit remains in need of the symbolic. Its discovery of its self-identity
does not delete its internal difference; its being as spirit eliminates neither its experience as
consciousness nor its need for symbolic representation.43

Clark describes this necessity of representation as the return to

representation: ‘If philosophical thought be seen as abandoning its stake in
the familiar world, it is only in order to return to a profounder experience of
it. The transition from Vorstellung to thought is itself but an abstraction of
the concrete movement which includes no less a return from thought to
Vorstellung.’44
One of the continuing roles of representation is to provoke thought. In
Magnus’s reading of Hegel, ‘symbols are in a certain sense the negative of
thought; they are the material thought must transform in order to be
thought’.45 Or as Clark claims, ‘Vorstellung must be seen both as thought
and as the “other” of thought.’46 This otherness is not an externality, though
it initially manifests as such. In terms of religion, representations begin as
the other in the form of the divine object, then as divine subject, before
absolute religion’s realization that the consciousness of divine subjectivity
is a moment of self-consciousness. This process thus represents spirit’s self-
alienation into the form of another subject, to which it relates. This
transition marks the move from a divine object to divine subject, which
prepares the grounds for recognizing the identity of human and divine
subjectivity – the becoming substance of subject. Yet all the while,
otherness is maintained. The transition is not one of otherness to sameness,
but otherness is misidentified as external, to the recognition of otherness as
interior.47
These statements should be read in light of Hegel’s claim that spirit is
the unity of identity and difference. Symbolic thought is not completely
eliminated in the course of this process. Rather it is maintained as a
negativity necessary for the continual activity that spirit is. As Magnus
explains, spirit
never gets to the point of being able to ‘be’ in a simple, immediate, or nondifferentiated way.
Spirit’s identity depends upon the real difference it bears within itself. Its identification is only
 as true as its difference . . . Spirit never gets to the point of being able to deny or cancel its
intrinsic negativity because this negativity is essential to what spirit is. It cannot forget or
disregard its internal difference because this difference is the source and substance of its life.
For Hegel, spirit, the ultimate truth of reality, is something that both is there and something
that makes itself be there; it is both immediate and mediated, self-identical and self-
differentiating. Spirit is the activity that unites these two dimensions of reality.48

This understanding of representation is the ground of Magnus’s rejection

of Derrida’s accusation that Hegel ultimately resolves every negative into a
positive. Derrida’s reading is in one sense true – Hegel does have a
complete system which one could regard as resolving every negative, but
only if ‘every negative’ is taken to refer to contradictions emerging within
the categories of thought. ‘Both alienation and totality, identity and
difference, remain a part of what spirit is. Spirit reconciles these two sides,
but, as Hegel points out over and over again, spirit is the continual activity
of this reconciliation, not merely the end result of it.’49 This understanding
still allows for negativity, it just comprehends the way negativity ‘works’ in
the broader philosophical system. As I will argue in my reading of
Malabou, this insight parallels Hegel’s argument for the necessity of
contingency and the refutation of critiques of Hegel as a totalizing thinker.
Representation marks one of the points at which Hegel asserts the identity
of identity and difference: ‘the difference intrinsic to the symbol remains
within spirit as part of its act of self-identification. Logically speaking, there
can be no self-identifying spirit that does not also contain and bear
difference within it.’50 This further clarifies the relationship between
representation and philosophy. Magnus and Clark show the ongoing
necessity of representation. As Magnus writes, ‘we can come to see how the
contradictoriness, negativity, and “otherness” inherent to spirit is less an
impediment to spirit’s self-realization than the condition for it.’51
If Magnus and Clark track the mechanics of representation, Lewis draws
out the key social and political consequences of this approach to
understanding religion. For Lewis, the continuing need for representations
is primarily related to the ultimate goal of Hegel’s philosophy: the
cultivation of an ethical society and the strengthening of the state. Such a
society and state requires social cohesion, and religion can be one source of
this communal bond.52 ‘Hegel argues that although religious representations
do not cognize the truth as adequately as philosophical thinking does, these
religious representations are still capable of instilling and expressing the
reconciliation necessary for social cohesion.’53 The external form that
complicates the apprehension of truth is necessary for the cultivation of a
bond that goes beyond abstract thought to a form of feeling (PR, §270;
244/418).54 Their externalized form makes representations more accessible
than philosophy’s abstract formulations, as they are ingrained in rituals and
impact communities on an emotional level.55 It is representations, not
abstract thought, that provide the ‘existential matrix’ of life.56
For Lewis, the social function of religion eclipses the traditional sense of
a belief in a more or less stable set of dogmatic beliefs.57 This
understanding of religion as representation means that ‘God’ no longer need
refer to a transcendent being and that the question of the existence of God
becomes mostly irrelevant. Indeed, what Hegel conceptualizes as religion
need not be what is typically conceived of as a religious community or
tradition.58 John Burbidge makes a similar case for an expanded sense of
religion. ‘It is potentially a universal phenomenon that singular, historical
incarnation passes away and becomes universal. So Jesus is now only one
among many – the Koran; the founding of Israel, Sri Aurobindo; the
Jacobite revolution (or the Paris commune); nature’s struggle for survival;
the traditional Ojibwa hunter, smoking a peace pipe over the bear he has
just killed; Freud’s therapies . . . Each has become the focus of stories,
because in each all the transcendent and ultimate has become actual.’59 In
this wider notion of religion, God is the representational name of the unity
of being and thought.60 Hegel moves from the divine to the divine concept,
claiming that ‘this movement of thinking itself, of the concept itself, is that
for which we should have the utmost awe. It is at the heart of, in some
sense, everything and consequently is appropriately referred to as
“divine.” ’61 The resulting philosophy of religion develops ‘a conception of
religion that supports social solidarity for the broader populace’.62
Together Magnus, Clark and Lewis provide a description of Hegel’s
understanding of religion as a politically charged form of thought that
enables a different mode of relating to the truth of philosophy. This
understanding sheds new light on Hegel’s own use of theological concepts,
but it still leaves open the question of constructive engagements with those
representations. If philosophy can explain how representations have
meaning within a community, can it also use representations to make new
meaning?

Philosophy and the return to representation

In the course of the discussion, I have argued that representational forms of

thought are both necessary and problematic. Representations tend to
become divorced from the act of representing undertaken by the subject.
This subject then relates to its own representations as external objects rather
than tools for reflective practices. ‘Religion thus effects a double alienation:
The self is alienated from what it conceives to be absolute and from the
actual world. The revealed religion partially overcomes this alienation in
the cultus, but precisely insofar as it completes this overcoming, it passes
from religion into philosophy.’63
This transition from religion to philosophy involves a kind of
cancellation but also preserves representational thought.64 Having arrived at
philosophy, representations are now viewed in their appropriate light, but
continue to function as a moment of that philosophy. As Hegel explains in
the Phenomenology, spirit maintains the universal determinations of
consciousness, self-consciousness and reason, but as moments of the unity
that is spirit.
Religion presupposes that these have run their full course and is their simple totality or
absolute self. The course traversed by these moments is, moreover, in relation to religion, not
to be represented as occurring in time. Only the totality of spirit is in time, and the ‘shapes’,
which are ‘shapes’ of the totality of spirit, display themselves in a temporal succession; for
only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure freedom in face of an ‘other’, a
form which expresses itself as time. (PS, §679: 413/498)

Understanding this relationship, philosophy preserves representational

thinking as part of the whole it comprehends.
 There are two aspects to the preservation of representational thinking:
the representations themselves are preserved as well as representational
thinking as such. As Magnus and Clark argue, representations as the other
of thought, trouble abstract conceptuality, continuing to drive its movement.
It is at this point that the inventive possibilities of Hegel’s implicit political
theology become clear. It is not only that representations are externalized
truths that philosophy can understand as part of self-consciousness.
Philosophy can continue to use those representations and engage in other
forms of representational thinking. Put more succinctly, philosophical
thought can return to representations and experiment with ever new ways of
thinking the world.
The return to representations is not something that Hegel discusses in his
major works or lectures. He does, however, explore this idea in his response
to Karl Friedrich Göschel, the author of Aphorisms on Ignorance and
Absolute Knowledge (Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes
Wissen).65 Published in 1829, Göschel argues against the ‘ignorance’ of
Jacobi, the theology of feeling found in those like Schleiermacher and the
varieties of theological rationalism that emerge after Kant. While these
specifics are not relevant to the present task, Hegel’s review of the book
provides some interesting reflections on the nature of Hegel’s understanding
of religion.
In the initial sections of the review, Hegel summarizes the main features
of the book, occasionally pausing to offer remarks on the relationship
between religion and philosophy. These comments are similar to the
arguments found in the Phenomenology, the Encyclopaedia and the
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. He then addresses a question raised
by Göschel on the point of the relation of Hegel’s philosophy to scripture.
The question, namely, is whether this philosophy would not gain in definiteness and clarity in
its progress if it were to attach itself more decisively to the Word of God out of which it has
developed; if it were to proceed more definitely and in name (i.e., with the naming of names)
from the sin which has become manifest to it as abstraction, without the presupposition of
which no understanding of the world is possible, without the recognition of which no self-
knowledge is possible, and without the transcendence of which no knowledge of God is
 possible. According to this philosophy itself, it is not thought but representation which is
highest. (RG, 1:389/377)

Affirming this higher role of representation would allow Hegel’s

philosophy more clearly to demonstrate its connection to scripture. Hegel
acknowledges there is some truth to Göschel’s claim, but quickly moves to
refute it. The passage warrants citing at length,
The author has touched on an interesting point – the general transition from representation to
the concept and from the concept to representation, a two-way transition which is already
present in scientific mediation, and which here meets with the demand that it be also expressed
in the scientific exposition . . . The present reviewer may, at least with a view to apologizing
for the imperfection of his works in this respect, recall that it is precisely from the beginning,
to which the author as well refers, which chiefly imposes the necessity of holding more fixedly
to the concept which is expressed in pure thoughts, and which has often been won in hard
battle with representation. This at once means the necessity of attaching to the course of the
concept’s development, of holding oneself more strictly in its tracks so as to win self-assurance
with respect to it, and of holding off by force the distractions which the manysidedness makes
the danger of yielding something in the methodological strictness of thought too close for
comfort. But greater firmness attained in the movement of the concept will license greater
unconcern before the temptation of representation, and at once allow representation to breathe
more freely within the overlordship [Herrschaft] of the concept; and to do so with as little fear
of its consequences as concern over its [internal] coherence, which – in relation to
presupposed faith – need not prove itself free. (RG, 1:390/378–9)66

Hegel thus argues that his presentations of the relationship between

representation and concept have been pedagogically necessary for the
historically situated task of elevating humanity to conceptual thought. As
Clark Butler explains in his commentary on Hegel’s relationship with
Göschel, ‘Once the transition from representation to the concept has been
made, an enlivening transition from the concept back to representation is
permissible. Freer reign can be given for representation to develop under
the ascendancy of the concept.’67
Shortly after Hegel clarifies the two-way transition between
representation and concept, he addresses a common flaw in the critiques of
speculative philosophy, namely their one-sided determination.
Such determinations, as previously indicated, are in part called forth by falsification of the
speculative fact and put forth as a complaint against that fact. But they are also in a part
advanced as assertions against this fact. Such one-sided determinations, [viewed] as bound up
 with the matter, are moments of its concept which thus arise, in the course of the exposition of
it, in their momentary positions. The negation of these moments must be exhibited in the
immanent dialectic of the concept. This negation, insofar as such moments have been posited
as objections, assumes the guise of their refutation. (RG, 1:392/380–1, emphasis mine)

Not only does this reaffirm the emphasis on the dynamic immanent
movement of the dialectic, but it also provides a basis for extending Hegel’s
argument further. The cessation of movement at the concept allows a one-
sided determination of the concept itself. Conceptual thought must return to
the level of representation in order to be actualized. The abstraction of the
concept is not final, but generative.
Here, it is possible to push past Hegel’s own stated conclusions. In
returning to representations the concept not only allows ‘greater
unconcern’, it enables the transformation of representations. As is clear in
his review, Hegel does not see a great need for revising those
representations. He is primarily concerned with affirming Göschel’s
position that scripture may be used to cultivate philosophical thought. I am
claiming that it is possible to go further: not only should conceptual thought
return to representations, but these representations can be transformed.
These kinds of transformations are implicit within Hegel’s formulations of
Christian doctrines such as sin or the Trinity. Another way of expressing
Hegel’s heterodoxy is to view these doctrines as transformed by the return
from the concept. These transformations are politically significant as
convictions about justice, social order and rights mutate in the
representational laboratory of political theology.68 Having understood the
necessity of representations, it becomes necessary, as Magnus argues, ‘to
think through the representations given to us, regardless of what they are.
Only in this way can they become our own. Only in this way can they be
transformed from something imposed upon us to something determined by
us. To use Hegel’s terminology: only this way does spirit’s abstract being in
itself become for itself and free.’69

Conclusion
Hegel has two interrelated political theologies and understanding religion as
representation is essential to both. First, there is a broad political theology
that argues for the importance of religion to the life of the state. Second,
there is an implicit, narrow political theology that develops an
understanding of the relationship between religion and philosophy, allowing
for philosophy to inventively and experimentally use theological ideas to
think the world.
In the genealogies of political theological themes offered by Cohn,
Löwith, Taubes and Bloch, Hegel plays a key role. Something significant
happens to theology in Hegel and that transformation remains significant
for reflecting on politics today. This transformation involves conceptions of
history and the development of dialectical thought, but there is also a shift
in the way that Hegel uses theology. Theology becomes a way of
philosophically thinking the world. Though it requires pushing past Hegel’s
own conclusions, I argue that there is a way of reading Hegel as
experimenting with theological concepts. That experimentation, along with
Schmitt’s sociology of concepts, is at the centre of a narrow form of
political theology that engages in an inventive use of theology to critique
the world. While neither Taubes nor Bloch appeal to Hegel’s concept of
representation, they engage in this form of experimentation. They both
express a lack of concern before representations. Theological concepts
become tools of thought, critique and revolution. Both Taubes and Bloch
trace the malleability of religious doctrines and then transform Jewish and
Christian teachings in order to express more clearly the insights they find in
the Hegelian system. Of course, this reformulation is not all they
accomplish and both Taubes and Bloch express wariness of Hegelian
philosophy.
At the conclusion of the first chapter, I noted three persistent questions
that confront apocalyptic political theology. First, there is the issue of
political theological method and the relationship between theology and
philosophy. This chapter has offered an answer to that question, finding in
religious representations the impetus towards philosophical thought as well
as the persistent ‘other of thought’. Political theology, as a discourse of
limits, beginnings and endings, is concerned with the boundaries of what
can be defended. In theological concepts such as apocalypse, philosophy
finds an other that pushes it to think anew. Thus, in keeping with the
opening call for a desecularizing political theology, there is no hierarchy
between theology and philosophy. Both are useful for critiquing the world.
That leaves the remaining questions of novelty, trauma and pessimism. If
philosophy can return to religious representations and creatively engage
them to think the world, how can apocalypticism offer the possibility of an
immanent novelty? Taubes will begin to answer these questions, but the
possibility of newness is closely followed by the shadow of destruction.
Reading Taubes together with Malabou then, will provide insights on the
particular form of hope that accompanies the trauma of the end of the
world.
 3

Spiritual disinvestment: Taubes, Hegel and

apocalypticism

Jacob Taubes offers a prime example of what it means to experiment with

theological concepts in the sense described by Hegel. His political theology
offers a detailed engagement with the histories of theology and philosophy,
excavating the sites where concepts have been used and finding within
those histories the materials for creative critique. Two key aspects of this
political theology consolidate themes developed in my earlier discussions of
the nature of the world and Hegel: the notion of working with theological
materials and his definition of apocalypse. The first develops the narrow
political theological method, as Taubes offers an apocalyptic critique that is
immanent and desecularizing. The second expounds the consequences of
thinking apocalyptically. Taubes is less convinced of the world’s fragility
than Schmitt, but more convinced that signs of that fragility should be
welcomed. Confronted with the creative potential of destruction, Taubes
calls for a disinvestment from the world.
In order to explore Taubes’s political theological method and its
implications for thinking the apocalypse, I will first outline Taubes’s
understanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy. In the
course of this discussion, the connections to my reading of Hegel in the
previous chapter will become clear. This connection opens up an
exploration of other Hegelian themes in Taubes’s work, including the
relationship between the concept and nature, and the ways that Taubes
draws out apocalyptic themes in Hegel. Having considered Taubes and this
apocalyptic Hegel, I then turn to the nature of Taubes’s apocalypticism and
the way that his political theology can be read against critiques of
apocalyptic thinking. Taubes distrusts the hopes of this world and offers a
thoroughgoing negation of everything as it is. This uncompromising
negativity recalls anxieties about anti-liberal tendencies of apocalypticism.
Exploring these tendencies in Taubes, alongside Hegel and Schmitt, begins
to clarify why Taubes rejects hope in gradual progress or even messianic
deliverance. It also illuminates the similarities and differences of his
political theology and the work of Schmitt. Taubes defined his political
theology against Schmitt’s conservative approach and Schmitt will
frequently appear as a foil.1 Finally, I consider parallels between Taubes and
transcendental materialist readings of Hegel. These similarities provide the
grounds for reading Taubes through Malabou in the subsequent chapter.

An introduction to Taubes

Jacob Taubes was a German philosopher and scholar of religion.2 In

addition to his sole monograph, Occidental Eschatology, he wrote a number
of articles and essays, many of which were posthumously collected in the
volume From Cult to Culture. He is perhaps most well-known for his
posthumously published series of lectures, The Political Theology of Paul.
In the introductory remarks to the German edition of From Cult to Culture,
Assmann, Assmann and Hartwich place Taubes in a distinct line of
twentieth-century German cultural criticism, fostered by the Jewish
tradition, that draws on the works of Kant, Hegel and Marx. This tradition
includes Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno and Steiner (a tradition that could be
expanded to include Bloch).3 What unites these figures is the development
of a form of Jewish thought that is radical, secular and messianic.4
Taubes is part of this tradition, but not fully. Unlike the others, he is
relatively unconcerned with aesthetics. While he does engage with
surrealism, on the whole he remains focused on cult rather than culture.5
And while Taubes’s political theology is not sectarian, it is certainly not
secular in any straightforward sense. Anson Rabinbach’s description of
Bloch’s and Benjamin’s philosophies as ‘both secular and theological’ and
representing ‘an intellectualist rejection of the existing order of things’,
could equally apply to Taubes.6 Indeed, the troubling relationship between
the secular and theological is one of Taubes’s central contributions to
political theology.
As might be expected of a Jewish intellectual during this period, his
thought is shaped by his experiences during the Second World War. One
motivation for the reconfiguration of messianism was an attempt to resist
growing Jewish accommodation to German culture, the looming Nazi threat
and the aftermath of the War. These concerns are fundamental to Taubes’s
political theology. He aims to uncover something repressed within his
religious tradition, a radicalism lost as religion became a cultural form like
any other, and he does so in a context where he is coming to grips with
significant intellectual complicity with National Socialism. As he says in a
1952 letter to Armin Mohler, he cannot comprehend ‘that both C.S. [Carl
Schmitt] and M.H. [Martin Heidegger] welcomed the National Socialist
“revolution” and went along with it and it remains a problem for me that I
cannot just dismiss by using catchwords such as vile, swinish . . . What was
so “seductive” about National Socialism?’ (CS, 19–20).7 This dismay is an
important motivation in Taubes’s desire to reignite an alternative,
apocalyptic passion.
The preface to the English edition of From Cult to Culture notes that
Taubes’s exploration of these issues is complicated by his tendency to
address specific points in contemporaneous, ongoing debates. Despite the
occasional nature of much of this work, clear themes emerge: a
dissatisfaction with the world as it is, a complex evaluation of the legacy of
modernity and a tension between the desire for the end of the world and a
wish to avoid slipping into nihilism. These themes all appear in Occidental
Eschatology. As seen in
Chapter 2, Taubes connects Hegel to Joachim de Fiore, arguing that
Hegelian philosophy is the modern expression of Gnostic and apocalyptic
theological traditions: ‘[a]pocalypticism and Gnosis form the basis of
Hegel’s logic, which is often discussed but seldom understood. The
connection between apocalyptic ontology and Hegelian logic is neither
artificial nor an afterthought’ (OE, 36).8 Taubes’s approach is a return to
these theological concepts or, to use the Hegelian language developed in the
previous chapter, a return to representations. This return is not an attempt to
conserve a sacred tradition, but to redeploy these representations anew in an
effort to offer a critique of the world.
As already noted, this redeployment of theological concepts means
Taubes is neither theological nor secular, but offers a desecularizing
political theology. In a 1954 essay on Karl Barth and dialectics, Taubes
claims philosophy cannot ‘accept the self-interpretation of theology’, but
‘can try to understand the meaning of divine revelation’.9 Doing so allows
theology to ‘serve as a concrete negation of a status quo that the
dictatorship of common sense accepts as man’s permanent situation’.10 For
Taubes, this concrete negation is theology’s central task:
Theological language is born out of the dualism between the ideal standard and the status quo
of man’s situation. So long as this cleavage is not healed, there remains a legitimate task for
theology. But the language of theology itself reflects the cleavage between the ideal and the
ruling norms of man and society. In the moment that the ideal standards that theology has put
as a judgment upon man and society are realized in the course of human history, the task of
theology has been fulfilled . . . The development of theological language is, therefore, relevant
for a philosophy that studies the stages of man’s self-realization.11

Not only does Taubes recognize theology’s task as concrete negation, he

understands the need for the development of theological language and
avoids advocating a retrieval of lost theological meanings or pure origins
uncontaminated by the developments of modernity. While he describes
Jewish and Gnostic apocalyptic thought as tainted by Hellenization, there is
no simple process of recovery or return. In his comments on the ‘re-’ of the
Reformation and Renaissance, as well as his comments on Kierkegaard’s
recovery of the early church and Marx’s retrieval of the Greek polis, Taubes
‘transposes’ history into the future.
In the same essay on Barth’s theology, Taubes poses the question of the
relationship between theology and philosophy and again puts forward a
Hegelian position:
It is true that (as Barth once remarked) all philosophy has its origin in theology. It is, however,
possible to turn around the relation between theology and philosophy. Dialectical theology can
point to the development of history from theology to philosophy: theology is the origin. But an
equally legitimate interpretation of this sequence might be given from the other side:
philosophy is the end. If I emphasize the origin, then the later development takes the form of
gradual alienation and eclipse of origin. If I emphasize the end, the process of development
takes the form of gradual fulfilment. The scheme is the same in both interpretations. At no
point does the premise of Barth’s pantheology contradict the scheme of Hegel’s dialectic.12

Taubes thus anticipates more recent pronouncements by Žižek and Gianni

Vattimo that Christian theology births modernity.13 Whereas Barth presents
this story in an Oedipal light, with philosophy forgetting its origins and
returning to kill the father, the Taubesian interpretation sees the story as one
of the passing of generations. It is not that philosophy has to return and kill
the father, it is simply the case that as one generation is born another dies
away.
Taubes presents a similar perspective on the relationship between
theology and philosophy in a later essay on ‘The Dogmatic Myth of
Gnosticism’. Here, he argues for the importance of an allegorical reading of
myth. He cautions against a narrow understanding of allegorical readings of
myth as simply a form of archaic exegesis. In a wider understanding,
allegorical interpretation ‘becomes a vehicle for a new understanding of
reality that is differentiated from archaic myth. Allegory is a form of
translation. It translates mythic forms, names and the destinies of mythic
narrative into concepts. In allegorical interpretation . . . the mythic template
gains a new content.’14 Moving on to a later Greek, philosophical
allegorical interpretation, he argues that this reading ‘acts not only as the
rationalizing exegesis of archaic myth, but itself turns into the form of
representation of a “new” myth’.15 Continuing the reproductive metaphor,
the transformation of the mythic forms, names and destinies is the product
of new couplings, diversifying the gene pool. Or more strongly, it is a
mutation, the result of the mutual contamination of philosophy and
theology.16
This emphasis on philosophical interpretations of theological concepts
returns to what Agata Bielik-Robson describes as a ‘positive, theological
evaluation of modernity’17:
Modernity, the age of enlightenment, man’s rational empowerment and emancipation, is thus to
be defended against itself, against its inner dangers that threaten to overthrow the promise it
gave at its onset. The theological definition of modernity, therefore, wholly depends on the
right understanding of this precarious promise, which is always threatened to disappear in the
course of modern history: the messianic promise of a universal liberation, that is, leaving all
the Egypts of this world for good, with its hierarchies, glories of domination and self-renewing
cycles of power.18

Rather than offering a theological rejection of modernity, as is the case of

many of his contemporaries, Taubes offers a theological defence of
modernity against its own worst tendencies. This defence of modernity
requires the process of developing a new theological language, one which is
‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory, focused on the finite life,
immanentist and this-worldly’.19
It is not only Taubes’s Jewish contemporaries who develop theological
rejections of modernity; his defence of modernity is one of the points of
contrast between his and Schmitt’s political theologies. If Schmitt inquires
about ‘the theological potentials of legal concepts’, Taubes looks for ‘the
political potentials in the theological metaphors’ (PT, 69). While Schmitt
views the secularization of theological concepts as a negative development,
Taubes sees his version of political theology as necessary for the
development of theological thought. There is a parallel here to Taubes’s
discussion of Barth. Schmitt is like Barth in offering an understanding of
the progression from religion to secular thought as a loss or corruption,
whereas Taubes sees philosophy as a telos of theological thought. Put
another way, Schmitt sees the separation of legal concepts from their
theological origins as an abuse of theological ideas. Taubes’s political
theology provides a constructive method of philosophical engagement with
religious texts and history. He sees his work, not as philosophical theology,
but as a working with ‘theological materials’ (PT, 69). Taubes argues it is
advantageous to experiment more openly with theological materials and
rejects Schmitt’s claim that theology provides the rules for such
experimentation.
As already established, Taubes views religious language, and thus
apocalypse, as representations, capable of development and novel usage.
Like Hegel, Taubes does not view this development as secularization. While
Taubes does not use Hegelian terminology, this development is an
immanentization, a revisiting of religious representations from the
perspective of the concept. In his view, any attempt at nostalgically
employing archaic religious or mythic language is doomed to failure.
‘Insofar as the mythical discourse on the gods preserves itself as residues
and remainders in the accounts of monotheistic religions of revelation, it
retains the weight of a poetic metaphor only. Its power or legitimacy as a
religious expression, however, has wasted away.’20 With the exceptions of
Barth and Tillich, Taubes is of the opinion that theology is no longer
practiced by the theologians. In his letter to Mohler, he criticizes the
theologians of the day and advocates for a wider understanding of theology.
‘What is there today that is not “theology” (apart from theological
claptrap)? Is Ernst Jünger less a “theologian” than Bultmann or Brunner?
Kafka less so than Karl Barth?’ (CS, 22). In Taubes’s view, much of what
passes for theology is precisely this poetic metaphor, trading platitudes for
power and legitimacy.
Rather than remaining in this mode of theology, Taubes seeks to renew
the development of religious language in order to address the cleavage
between humanity as it is and as it could be. In this context, apocalypse is
transferred from a chronological feature of revelation, to the revealed
temporal and political logic that drives the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard and
Marx. As Mike Grimshaw writes, a key question for Taubes is ‘how is
political theology as a movement to be rethought, for within such a
redefinition apocalypse becomes a type of judgment central to any political
theology’.21 Taubes’s insight, in Grimshaw’s view, is that ‘in
post/modernity theology, if not sectarian, is the self-reflexivity of modern
thought that thinks the unthought of both secularity and “religion” ’.22 This
unthought is that which unites secularism and religion in their opposition.

Taubes and Hegel

In more Hegelian terms, Taubes offers a model of theological reflection in

which thought has returned from the concept. Understanding Taubes’s
transformation of the relationship between secularism and religion through
Hegel further clarifies Taubes’s political theological method. The Hegelian
dialectic works by uncovering the unthought commonality that manifests
itself as opposition. With regard to religion, this unthought consists in at
least three themes. First, as seen in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s treatment
of superstition and enlightenment, both reason and faith are concerned with
pure thought, but in their simplistic forms understand this pure thought in
opposition to their self-consciousness. In the initial stages of the analysis of
the relationship between Enlightenment and superstition, Hegel argues,
[The absolute being of the believing consciousness] is pure thought, and pure thought posited
within itself as an object or as essence; in the believing consciousness, this intrinsic being of
thought acquires at the same time for consciousness that is for itself, the form – but only the
empty form – of objectivity; it has the character of something presented to consciousness. To
pure insight, however, since it is pure consciousness from the side of the self that is for itself,
the “other” appears as something negative of self-consciousness. (PS, §552: 336/299)

This critique of faith, in the simplified form of superstition, is developed in

the process of Enlightenment’s break from the myth of pure insight.
One part of this process is the differentiation in which intellectual insight confronts its own self
as object; so long as it persists in this relationship it is alienated from itself. As pure insight it is
devoid of all content; for nothing else can become its content because it is the self-
consciousness of the category. But since in confronting the content, pure insight at first knows
it only as a content and not yet as its own self, it does not recognize itself in it. (PS, §548: 333–
4/404–5)

Both Enlightenment and superstition mistake their content for something

external to self-consciousness, rather than their own self.
 Second, there is the representational form of religion. Religion tends to
lose sight of its form while secularity forgets the necessity of
representations for the actualization of concepts. As Hegel explains the
representational form of thought falls short of speculative thought, ‘it has
the content, but without its necessity . . . Since this consciousness, even in
its thinking, remains at the level of picture-thinking, absolute being is
indeed revealed to it, but the moments of this being, on account of this
[empirically] synthetic presentation, partly themselves fall asunder so that
they are not related to one another through their own notion . . . relating
itself to it only in an external manner’ (PS, §771: 465–6/560). The
paragraphs following this one, demonstrate how this transition in form,
from representation to concept, is accomplished through representational
thinking.
Third, the truth of religion is often forgotten by religion itself. Put in a
more Taubesian way, the truth of religion is no longer thought by religion in
its predominant institutional or cultural forms. While Taubes does not make
use of Hegelian language when describing his political theological method,
his work enacts a transition from representation to concept by thinking the
unthought of both religion and secularism from the perspective of a
philosophy which experiments with religious materials.
Taubes refers to the resulting perspective as a ‘transcendental
eschatology’. This form of eschatology ‘requires that everything be
grounded in subjectivity, making this the condition of the possibility of
cognition, as self-knowledge, self-apocalypse’ (OE, 132). This eschatology
is an internalization that resists depoliticization. ‘All apocalypses associated
with history or natural occurrences, all sounding of trumpets and symbols
of wrath, all global conflagrations and new parodies are only coup de
theatre and parables; they are simply the orchestral arrangement for the one
real apocalypse: the Apocalypse of Man’ (OE, 132). This passage captures
the essential elements of Taubesian political theology – the
immanentization of apocalyptic ideas accomplished by the treatment of
religious ideas as representations.
 Yet, this immanentization of apocalyptic ideas renders these ideas
potentially unsuitable for their original ecclesial contexts. One of Taubes’s
central contributions to political theology is his proposal of expanding the
context of theology.
Perhaps the time has come when theology must learn to live without the support of canon and
classical authorities and stand in the world without authority. Without authority, however,
theology can only teach by an indirect method. Theology is indeed in a strange position
because it has to prove its purity by immersing itself in all the layers of human existence and
cannot claim for itself a special realm . . . Theology must remain incognito in the realm of the
secular and work for the sanctification of the world.23

Theology, stripped of its customary ecclesial authority, must seek out new,
‘incognito’, activities. As Tina Beattie puts it, theology moves from the
queen of the sciences to the court jester, disrupting the forms of hierarchical
authority it once exercised.24 Religious thought, as representation, goes
beyond religion.
Taubes finds this alternative activity in the exploration of the gap
between what is and what should be. In doing so, he affirms Marx’s
observation that the critique of religion is the basis of all criticism. The
critique of religion is, as Taubes explains, ‘the model for a critique of
profane existence’.25 This critique is the critique which religion provides.
Yet this critique is self-incriminating. Theology’s complicity with that
profane existence means that the critique provided by religion entails the
critique of religion itself. This initial form of critique persists through the
political, economical and technological. ‘Every level propagates its own
illusory appearances, develops its own apologies, but also forges its own
weapon of critique.’26 Taubes’s political theology is the process of
transformation described by Marx in his comments on Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right: ‘the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the
criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology
into the criticism of politics.’27 From theology and religion to law and
politics, the concepts of religion, understood in relation to philosophical
truth, are still capable of articulating the ‘cleavage between the ideal and the
ruling norms of man and society’.28 Political theology does not attempt to
explain the political through theological concepts, as in Schmitt. Taubes
uses religion not to ‘transform the worldly question of industrial society
into a theological one; rather, we transform the theological into the
worldly’.29
This political theology is not wholly Hegelian, however. He follows
Marx in questioning the relationship between idea and actuality.
Individual sections of the Phenomenology contain the critical elements for entire realms, like
religion, the state, and bourgeois life, but admittedly in an alienated form. For the real process
of history is only depicted as the phenomenon of the process, which comes about through self-
consciousness . . . Hegel’s dialectic is a dialectic of the idea, not of actuality. What Hegel burns
in the dialectical fire of the idea is not actual religion, the actual state, actual society and
nature, but religion itself as already an object of knowledge, as theology and dogma. It is not
the state and society which undergo sublation, but jurisprudence and political science; it is not
nature which is sublated in its objectivity, but the natural sciences. (OE, 179)

While he is correct to highlight that Hegel is primarily concerned with the

concept, he overstates the gap between concept and actuality. Taubes does
not offer a fully developed reading of Hegel’s wider philosophy, but reading
his criticism in the light of that larger context closes the distance between
Taubes and Hegel.
This point about the gap between the actual and ideal is also important
because it returns to issues fundamental to the ontology of the world
developed in the first chapter. There, I argued that Haslanger’s social
constructivism and Tuana’s interactionist ontology could be read in terms of
Hegel’s notion of spirit. That reading is enabled by transcendental
materialist interpretations of Hegel and those interpretations are concerned
with precisely this division. If the world is constituted by the interaction of
the natural, human-made, social and biological, then ideas can never be
merely ideal. Working through Taubes’s critique is thus not an attempt to
defend Hegel from Taubes but a way of developing a reading of Hegel that
brings the two closer together while beginning to draw in the transcendental
materialism I am using to account for the world and that will inform the
next chapter’s discussion of Malabou.
Taubes’s critique focuses on the division between idea and actuality,
ideal religion and religion as it actually is found in the world. First, Hegel
would object to the notion of actual religion, society and nature as objects
completely divorced from the process of conceptualization. Taubes’s claim
is a familiar one: Hegel deals only with ideas, not material, lived reality. It
is true, in a sense, that the Philosophy of Right is concerned with political
science rather than actual politics. What would sublation mean in politics if
not a sublation that involves ideas about politics? If Marx attempts to
sublate philosophy into a material politics, this move is itself
comprehensible from the perspective of a Hegelian philosophy which
insists on the actualization of the absolute. In a sense, this understanding
makes Hegel the more realistic of the two. Marx sublates philosophy into
material reality as part of a process in achieving final resolution. For Hegel,
the absolute contains a persistent negativity between thought and reality as
immediately given. Thought is always perturbed and reanimated by the
other of thought. The absolute does not denote the end of that negativity,
but its comprehension.30
Second, in the concluding sentence, Taubes claims that it is natural
science that is sublated, not nature itself. Again, for Hegel, this statement
assumes too great a division between nature and natural science. Abstract
reflection on nature includes the material sublation of nature in humanity’s
creation of its own freedom. The relationship between the abstract and
concrete is one of the key themes of transcendental materialism. As Adrian
Johnston argues,
Hegel’s emphasis on the need to think substance also as subject reciprocally entails the
complementary obligation to conceptualize subject as substance. This reciprocity reflects his
post-Spinozist (in both senses of the qualifier ‘post-’) immanentism in which transcendent(al)
subjectivity nonetheless remains immanent to substance in a dialectical-speculative
relationship of an ‘identity of identity and difference’. Thinking subject as substance, which is
a move central to transcendental materialism, involves treating subjectivity and various
phenomena tied up with it as ‘real abstractions’ . . . As real qua non-illusory, such abstractions
are causally efficacious and, hence, far from epiphenomenal. In Hegelian phrasing, the thought
of the concrete apart from the abstract is itself the height of abstraction.31

As Johnston explains elsewhere, nature gives birth to a process of

denaturalization.32 Human subjectivity is nature thinking itself.
 It is thus possible to accept Taubes’s point that political science is not
politics as such, but it is a mistake to posit them as completely distinct. The
relationship between material and abstract reflection is, as Johnston points
out, the identity of identity and difference. This claim is essential to Hegel’s
definition of philosophy in the Encyclopaedia Logic: ‘philosophy should be
quite clear about the fact that its content is nothing other than the basic
import that is originally produced and produces itself in the domain of the
living spirit, the content that is made into the world, the outer and inner
world of consciousness; in other words, the content of philosophy is
actuality’ (E1, §6: 29/47). He goes on to explain that the first interaction
between consciousness and actuality is experience. Those attentive to
experience quickly realize the difference between this transience and the
actuality underlying those appearances. The following paragraph is even
more explicit: ‘right from the start, our meditative thinking did not confine
itself to its merely abstract mode . . . but threw itself at the same time upon
the material of the world of appearance’ (E1, §7: 30/49).
Taubes’s clear distinction between idea and actuality is also rejected in
the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, Hegel critiques both the simple
immediacy of the preconceptual as failing to understand the becoming that
characterizes actuality. Reason, he insists, must be understood as a
purposive activity generated by the immediacy of experience and moving
towards the concept.
The exaltation of a supposed nature over a misconceived thinking, and especially the rejection
of external teleology, has brought the form of purpose in general into discredit. Still, in the
sense in which Aristotle, too, defines nature as purposive activity, purpose is what is immediate
and at rest, the unmoved which is also self-moving, and as such is subject. Its power to move,
taken abstractly, is being-for-self or pure negativity. The result is the same as the beginning,
only because the beginning is the purpose; in other words, the actual is the same as its notion
only because the immediate, as purpose, contains the self or pure actuality within itself. The
realized purpose, or the existent actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming. (PS, §22:
12/26)

Finally, this relationship is also found in Hegel’s definition of nature.

‘Nature has presented itself as the idea in the form of otherness. Since
therefore the idea is the negative of itself, or is external to itself, nature is
not merely external in relation to this idea’ (E2, §247: 13/237). Arguing that
Hegel is wrong to speak of nature when he really means natural science is
to misunderstand the relationship between the two. Taubes’s objection to
Hegel is understandable, arising as it does from a Marxist tradition of
critiquing Hegel’s idealism but nonetheless errs in neglecting the Hegelian
understanding of the relationship between substance and subject.33
Rather than following Taubes in offering these points as critiques of
Hegel, one should read Taubes as drawing out the latent principles within
Hegel’s philosophy. ‘The explosive material is already latent in the
principle of Hegel. Even though in the Hegelian system the power of the
state coincides with the divinations of religion and the principles of
philosophy, as he reconciles actuality with spirit, the state with religious
conscience, and religious conscience with philosophy’ (OE, 164). Taubes is
not a Hegelian in the sense that he seeks to replicate and clarify Hegel’s
texts. He is a Hegelian in his creative redeployment of Hegel’s philosophy.
The extent of this Hegelianism is clear at the conclusion of Occidental
Eschatology. He ends with a criticism of all philosophies of return.
Kierkegaard, in Taubes’s reading, aims to recover early Christianity, while
Marx seeks to recover something of the Greek polis. Hegel, though, sees his
philosophy as the fulfilment lying at the end of the development of Western
history. ‘Hegel’s fulfilment, however, is a reconciliation of destruction’
(OE, 192). Hegel stands at the apex of modern thought, destroying
modernity for modernity’s sake. For Taubes, Hegel writes in a moment of
revelation and annihilation at the tipping point between the modern and
what will follow.
This epoch, in which the threshold of Western history is crossed, regards itself primarily as the
no-longer [Nicht-Mehr] of the past and the not-yet [Noch-Nicht] of what is to come. To all
weak spirits longing for shelter and security, this age appears wanting. For the coming age is
not served by demonizing or giving new life to what-has-been [das Gewesene], but by
remaining steadfast in the no-longer and the not-yet, in the nothingness of the night, and thus
remaining open to the first signs of the coming day. (OE, 193)

Taubes thus offers an argument for uncovering a persistent, latent element

that lies within modernity – a willingness to destroy the world as it is in the
name of that which it could be. This alternation between affirmation of
modernity and call for the destruction of the world presents a persistent
tension in Taubes’s thought. His embracing of destruction is a clear
articulation of a Hegelian apocalyptic political theology, but his focus on
‘the nothingness of the night’ perpetually comes up against his commitment
to modernity as he seeks to navigate between history and apocalypse,
progress and providence.34 He calls for the destruction of the modern world
in the name of the values of modernity.

Apocalypticism and the question of history

In the light of this tension, Bielik-Robson argues that one should emphasize
Taubes’s more eschatological or messianic tendencies rather than accepting
his ‘self-professed apocalypticism’.35 Contrary to this position, I claim that
it is important to retain the apocalyptic elements of Taubes’s philosophy.
While agreeing with Bielik-Robson that this tension is problematically
unresolved in Taubes’s work, it is possible to read texts such as Occidental
Eschatology as willing the destruction of the world, if world is understood
as the material and social relations that I outlined in the first chapter.
Evaluating Taubes’s apocalypticism requires inquiring further into the
nature of that apocalypticism. As already noted, one of the key critiques of
apocalypticism has been the notion of an external, divine force breaking
into history. Throughout this chapter I have argued that Taubes offers an
immanent political theology, opening up the possibility of an
apocalypticism without transcendence. It is now time to see if Taubes can
fulfil that promise.
At the start of Occidental Eschatology, Taubes defines apocalypse as ‘in
the literal and figurative sense, revelation’ (OE, 4). Revelation, in turn, is
‘the subject of history; history is the predicate of revelation’ (OE, 7). Seeing
this revelation as both concealment and unveiling, Taubes defines the
‘apocalyptic principle’ as entailing ‘a form-destroying and forming power.
Depending on the situation and the task, only one of the two components
emerges, but neither can be absent’ (OE, 10). In his lectures on Paul, he
explores the consequences of the apocalyptic disposition, claiming that he
has ‘no spiritual investment in the world as it is’ (PT, 103). As Bielik-
Robson indicates, this final phrase is crucial. Either one emphasizes ‘the
world’ or one focuses on ‘as it is’:
If we follow the first apocalyptic possibility, history will only emerge as a passive waiting for
an event which will finally lead us out of the world into the original divine Nothingness. But if
we follow the latter, history will have a chance to emerge as a process that can finally lead us
from the world-as-it-is, that is: naturalised, hierarchised, spatialised, and ideologically
stabilised in the cyclical succession of powers.36

Bielik-Robson echoes Svenungsson’s concerns that apocalypticism

entails a break with history rather than an intrahistorical process.37 For
Bielik-Robson, one must choose between apocalypse as revelation and
apocalypse as annihilation.38 The former can take place within history. It
can function as an ‘operative antinomianism’, a ‘traumatising negation’ that
stops short of ‘apocalyptic annihilation’.39 Whether Taubes’s political
theology calls for end of the world or its salvation hinges on this question of
history.
What creates history in Taubes’s account is neither an annihilating shock awaited by the
apocalypticists, nor the inherent norm inscribed into some impersonal ‘laws of history’, but the
antinomian tension, which always presses against the grain, against ‘nature’, against any
progressive normativity. History, therefore, is never a progress, it is rather a disruptive staccato
of breaks, awakenings and traumas that never simply evaporate without trace but always leave
a disquieting mark that, despite all the ‘natural’ obstacles, initiates messianic transformation of
the world.40

If Bielik-Robson is correct, then Taubes is not describing an apocalyptic

annihilation, but a negativity that haunts the world. Yet, this reading of
Taubes can also be reconfigured within an apocalyptic framework rooted in
the conviction that the world cannot be redeemed.41 In this case,
apocalypticism is not so much the end of history, but the end of our history.
If apocalypse is simultaneous revelation and annihilation, what is revealed
are the gaps and fissures which are the sites of a destructive potential.
While there may be general problems with apocalyptic political theology, it
is important to reflect on Taubes’s distinctive immanent, material and finite
approach. Thinking apocalyptically from this perspective allows new forms
of apocalypticism rather than the rejection of apocalyptic political theology
altogether. Apocalypse is no longer something awaited, but an active,
negative presence. This negativity is not orientated at messianic
transformation – for such transformations are transformations of the violent
and inescapable world – but a transformation that passes through
annihilation. Apocalypticism is not about replacing what is now with
something better. It is about ‘opposing the totality of this world with a new
totality that comprehensively founds anew in the way that it negates . . .
namely, in terms of basic foundations’ (OE, 9).42
This basic foundation, the nature of the world as violent and inescapable,
is the revelation that accompanies annihilation. It is only in realizing the
horror of the world that one can truly desire its end and only in so desiring
that elusive and violent end, see the world in its vicious persistence. Read
this way, there is no longer a division between revelation and annihilation in
Taubes’s apocalypticism. Bielik-Robson places the ‘moment of revelation’
outside of history; revelation is its initiating otherness. It ‘cannot be
reconciled with the “natural” course of events . . . messianic belief can be
impressed upon human beings only through a violent event called
revelation’.43 This outsideness is a way of describing the otherness of
revelation. It is the truth of the world that is inexpressible in the terms of
that world. Rather than discussing this otherness in terms of externality,
risking the reintroduction of transcendence, this otherness can still be
described as immanent to the world. It is, as Bull argues in his Hegelian
reading of apocalypticism, that which the world rejects and the positions
constituted by the slow, invisible (to many) forms of violence that do not
happen in the world, but are the world. Revelation forces one to see the
unseen – the exclusions that are constitutive of the world as such.
In this regard, Taubes’s political theology is an example of the twentieth-
century Jewish messianism described by Rabinbach, characterized by a
utopian vision ‘of a future which is the fulfilment of all that which can be
hoped for in the condition of exile but cannot be realized within it.
Redemption appears either as the end of history or as an event within
history, never as an event produced by history.’44 Revelation is something
that happens to history rather than is produced by it. As he describes it, the
apocalyptic ‘element involves a quantum leap from present to future, from
exile to freedom. This leap necessarily brings with it the complete
destruction and negation of the old order. Messianism is thus bound up with
both violence and catastrophe.’45 The language again suggests a break or
fissure within history, addressed from within history, but which is a
simultaneously annihilating and founding rather than producing. ‘Freedom
may occur in history, but it is not brought about by historical forces or
individual acts.’46 There is thus an immanent notion of freedom, but the
actualization of this freedom is traumatic.
In both Rabinbach’s and Bielik-Robson’s reading of Taubes’s political
theology, two themes emerge. First, in keeping with the earlier discussion of
Hegel’s implicit political theology, apocalypticism and messianism are not
religious concepts that can be merely translated into secular forms of
progress and development. They are ways of thinking the end of the world
that trouble philosophy. As representations, they think philosophical truth,
but from a perspective other to that philosophical thought. Second, while
Taubes is able to offer an immanent apocalypticism that avoids relying on
transcendent intervention, the complex relationship between revelation and
annihilation continues to trouble those who wish to still preserve some
continuity with the world. They reject ‘the possibility of an optimistic and
evolutionary conception of history, of progress, without of course
foreclosing the possibility of freedom’.47 The limitations of this freedom
depend on the nature of the world.
This discussion of nature, freedom, history and progress makes clear an
essential divide that returns to the opening discussion of the nature of the
world and apocalypse. On the one hand, there are liberal, progressive or
messianic political theologies that posit a significant degree of autonomy or
freedom within the world, but reject critiques of the world as such. The
condition of possibility for freedom is the acceptance of the world. To turn
away from the world, to disinvest, is to abandon the possibility of changing
the world. On the other hand, Taubes’s political theology and the version of
apocalypticism I am developing here, reverse this relationship. The
materially embedded social relations that constitute the world operate as
enormous constraints. The possibilities of a better world always remain
possibilities of a world that is itself unjust. For this apocalypticism, the
condition of possibility for freedom is disinvestment from the world.

Taubes and Bloch

Taubes is not the only one to philosophically discuss theology in these

terms. As noted in the introduction to this section, there is a strong link to a
broader German political theological tradition. Of this tradition, Bloch is
closer to Taubes than most, even though Taubes describes Bloch as ‘wishy-
washy’ (PT, 74) and as producing a ‘utopia picture-book’ (PT, 71).
Notwithstanding these objections, there remain key points where Bloch
supports Taubes’s position as well as pushing his more apocalyptic
tendencies. In doing so, he tends to maintain greater focus on the concrete
aspects of human existence. So, while Taubes might be more concerned
with issues of political theological method and philosophical questions,
Bloch gives more attention to philosophical and theological understandings
of oppression and liberation.
There are three key points at which Bloch can supplement Taubes. First,
Bloch offers a similar spatial schematization of political theology. Taubes
describes the ‘work’ of apocalypse as moving in one of two directions.
Either it moves from above, revealing ‘the central point of God and the
world’ or ‘the centre is revealed from below’ (OE, 7). For Bloch, theology
is an activity that can be practised from On-high or From-below. Describing
the institutional forms of Christianity, he writes that ‘the religion of the On
high had to be kept for the people: the old myth of lordship from on-high
which, in Christianity, sanctioned, or at least explained, the unjust
distribution of this world’s goods with the just distribution of those of the
next’ (AC, 8). Bloch’s criticism of the On-high demonstrates his awareness
of the ambiguity of religion.48 Though theology from On-high often comes
from ‘the church’, Bloch is quick to remind his readers that this church is
not the Bible (AC, 9). The Biblical text provides the undoing of the
authority of the institutions which hitherto have appealed to the text in the
justification of their actions. The Bible is the source of ‘master-ideologies’
(p. 12) as well as ‘the counter-blow against the oppressor’ (p. 13). In order
for the Bible to serve its liberating function, it must be read carefully. The
reader must engage in the ‘detective work of biblical criticism’ which
demands that one ‘identify and save the Bible’s choked and buried
“plebeian element” ’ (AC, 62). This recalls the ambiguity of the Marxist
‘critique of religion’ – rather than Bloch urging a critique of the Bible he
encourages ‘criticism through the Bible’ (AC, 70).49 Such investigative
work reveals the dual nature of the Biblical text, ‘a Scripture for the people
and a Scripture against the people’ (AC, 70) or, a Bible From-below and a
Bible from On-high.
Second, Bloch offers a similar opposition to the world. Speaking of the
apocalyptic repetition of Exodus themes, Bloch notes that Israelite
Messianism contains a strong antithesis to the world (AC, 101). This
divestment from the world, to use Taubes’s phrase, is presented with a
greater Marxist inflection in Bloch than in Taubes. Indeed, Taubes
sometimes seems passive in his view of apocalyptic political theology.
Though Taubes can envision the end of the world, the result is to ‘let it go
down’ (PT, 103). He wonders, with Paul, if ‘we should still be rising up
against something that is going down anyway?’ (PT, 40). Bloch is more
active, advocating a ‘practical chiliasm’ in line with earlier movements such
as Müntzer’s. Yet, for both, there is a conviction that there is a gap between
the world and another which is possible. As Bloch writes, ‘there is always
an exodus from this world, an exodus from the particular status quo. And
there is always a hope, which is connected with rebellion – a hope founded
in the concrete given possibilities for new being. As a handhold in the
future, a process which, though by no means achieved, is yet by no means
in vain’ (AC, 107). Apocalyptic thought is thus opposed to the world as it is,
in the name of the world that might be.
A theory of religion based on wish ipso facto passes over into another, Utopian dimension,
which does not cease to exist in the subject even when the illusion of an hypostasized Beyond
is shattered. Indeed the subject, aware of itself now, and powerful, gains in stature from it, till it
 stands above nature itself. The idealism reflected in the now pulverized Other-world is
revealed as the fruit of purely human powers of transcending which, far from going beyond
nature, operate within it. (AC, 195)

Here, Bloch expresses the Hegelian understanding of nature articulated

above. Spirit is not the abolition of nature, but the transcending arch of
freedom which emerges from its material ground.
This apocalyptic focus is also central to Bloch’s understanding of a Jesus
who preaches that ‘there will be no time for tranquil observation: the
Kingdom will break through suddenly, in a single all-transforming bound’
(AC, 118). He opposes any attempt to suggest that this kingdom is an
internal one in the hearts of believers (AC, 117) or that the world as it is
now will continue in some form. ‘This world must pass away before the
next.’ (AC, 119). Bloch, attuned to the ambiguity of ‘this world’, specifies
that
Whenever the words ‘this world’ and ‘the other world’ appear . . . ‘This world’ means the same
as ‘the present aeon’; ‘the other world’ means the same as ‘the better aeon’ . . . What is meant
is eschatological tension, not some sort of geographical separation from a fixed This-world
here and a fixed Beyond there. The only real thing now about this world is its submergence in
the next. (AC, 119)

Further, the coming of Christ as Messiah is a ‘new eschatological Exodus,

overthrowing all things from their beginning to their end: the Exodus into
God as man’ (AC, 123). The repetition of exodus marks not only an
apocalyptic break within history – it is an apocalyptic event within the
concept of God.
Third, despite the title Atheism in Christianity, Bloch is not arguing for
atheism in any normal sense of the term. Rather, he proposes a form of
desecularizing political theology. The questions posed by religion, such as
the problem of evil, determinism or ultimate meaning, remain important
questions for atheism. It must respond to these issues if it ‘is not just the
unhistorical unrealistic folly of optimism, or of equally unhistorical
nihilism, with man as a laughable begetter of illusion . . . and with the alien
specter of death all around us, and that gorgon of cosmic inhumanity which
can never contain any shred of concern for man’ (AC, 107). He presents a
path between the continuation of religious belief as it has hitherto been
experienced and an absolute rejection of all things religious. In a similar
way to Taubes’s critique of modernity for modernity’s sake, or the critique
of rabbinic Judaism for Judaism’s sake, Bloch could be said to engage in
the critique of theism for religion’s sake. Joining Taubes in offering a
theology which is ‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory, focused
on the finite life, immanentist and this-worldly’,50 Bloch offers a vision of a
new heaven and new earth in which the ‘Christ-impulse’ can ‘live even
when God is dead’ (AC, 167). If ‘[a]theism-with-concrete-Utopia is at one
and the same time the annihilation of religion and the realization of its
heretical hope’ (AC, 225), then ‘with-concrete-Utopia’ sufficiently modifies
the term atheism so that it avoids slipping into the virulently anti-religious
rhetoric associated with New Atheism and other contemporary rejections of
religion.
Bloch and Taubes are far from being in total agreement, however. Most
notable is their divergent views of Paul. For Taubes, Paul represents a
transvaluation of values, the establishment of a new covenant-community
and the vehicle of an apocalyptic message. For Bloch, Paul twists the
Hebrew Scriptures in order to explain that Christ is the Messiah because of
the cross, rather than in spite of it (AC, 156–9). This understanding of
Jesus’s death gives rise to the
patience of the Cross – so praiseworthy an attitude in the oppressed, so comfortable for the
oppressors; a sanction, too, for the unconditional and absolute obedience to authority, as
coming from God. Every theology of hope which might have placed itself in the front rank of
change opted instead for conformity when it accepted these ideas – an acceptance whose
convenient passivity broke the fine edge of Jesus’ own hope. (AC, 161)

This harsh rhetoric does not prevent Bloch from acknowledging that Paul
played a crucial role in the development of Christianity; Bloch simply
places much more emphasis on Jesus, whose message he believes was
obfuscated by the preaching of Paul. Christ is the usurper, the one who
disrupts the On-high and rejects any association of divinity with mastery or
lordship. Bloch also develops his philosophy in a more explicitly Marxist
direction. While Taubes refers to Marx in his essays and at the conclusion
of Occidental Eschatology, it would be inaccurate to describe Taubes as a
Marxist. Bloch on the other hand, not only identified his philosophy as
Marxist, he was active in Communist circles.51 Perhaps due to these
involvements, Bloch’s apocalypticism is manifested in a more active and
overtly political fashion.
Even with these differences, Taubes’s Hegelian tendencies, used to
develop an apocalyptic political theology, are further enhanced by
occasional Blochian supplementation. Both their work arises out of a
conviction that the rational critique of false consciousness had not
succeeded in impeding fascism. They both argue for a recommencement of
utopian myth-making in order to create an imaginary capable of resisting
the world. They engage in this myth-making, or myth-retelling, by
developing philosophies that employ theological concepts in the
development of immanentist and materialist political theologies. Or, put in
more Hegelian language, they both return to representations to think the
world and its end.

Anti-liberal tendencies in Hegel, Taubes and Schmitt

Taubes and Bloch think the end of the world, but they think this end in
different ways. Taubes is more sceptical than Bloch about the sources of
hope that can be found in the world. For Taubes, the source of hope in the
world is its end. To understand how Taubes’s apocalypticism goes further
than Bloch’s utopianism, it is useful to return to the comparison of Taubes
and Schmitt. The latter two share a suspicion of the limits of politics
(recalling the distinction between politics and the political discussed in the
first chapter). This suspicion emerges in their critiques of liberalism. They
both recognize a need for the political beyond politics, but their opposing
views of the nature of the political is what distinguishes Taubes’s anarchic
apocalypticism from Schmitt’s authoritarian conservatism. Considering the
differences in their forms of anti-liberalism will thus clarify the nature of
Taubes’s apocalypticism as well as further elaborate the connections to
Hegel’s philosophy.
 The first difference is the competing directions of their political
theologies. As already noted, Taubes describes two forms of
apocalypticism, operating from different directions. One reveals ‘the central
point of God and the world’ from above, while for the other ‘the centre is
revealed from below’ (OE, 7). Corresponding to these two movements of
apocalypse are two political theologies. As Taubes says in a 1986 lecture,
‘Carl Schmitt thinks apocalyptically, but from above, from the powers that
be; I think from the bottom up’ (CS, 13). For Schmitt, political theology is
about containing a destructive force. This containment from above returns
to the earlier discussion of the katechon. Taubes defines the katechon as the
‘retainer [der Aufhalter] that holds down the chaos that pushes up from
below’ (PT, 103). Taubes, when he fully embraces the apocalyptic spirit,
welcomes this chaos. Grimshaw suggests that perhaps this insight is
precisely what liberal Christianity has sought to cover up – its apocalyptic
core. Schmitt’s exception becomes ‘the sign in the secular society of liberal
modernity of the apocalyptic power that exists, that is referenced by both
exception and miracle, that reminds us that what we believe to be the case,
the norm, is in fact only fragile and transitory’.52 For both, this anti-
liberalism focuses on the potential of an apocalypse, though Schmitt is
concerned with constraining this potential while Taubes aims to unleash
it.53 Taubes’s anti-liberalism comes about in his critique of modernity, but
in the name of a fuller version of the modern project. Schmitt’s anti-
liberalism attempts to contain forces of social disruption that Taubes sees as
necessary for the realization of this alternative modernity.
It is important to note that anti-liberalism does not necessarily imply a
rejection of the accomplishments of liberalism. The critique of liberalism is
similar to Marx’s critique of capitalism. The Communist Manifesto includes
a list of the great achievements of capitalism: ‘machinery, application of
chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground’.54 Similarly it is
possible to make a list of the achievement of liberalism: the articulation of
equal rights (even if the implementation lags behind) or the universal
declaration of human rights. Hegelian anti-liberalism is not a rejection of
these advancements but a rejection of the naturalization of liberalism. As
Taubes says in a 1986 address,
I really would like to be liberal; don’t you think that I would like it? But the world is not so
made that one can be liberal. For that is at the cost of others; the question is who pays the cost,
and the third and fourth worlds, the fifth and sixth worlds that are approaching, they will not be
liberal at all, but brutal demands will be made there. The question is, how does one deal with
them, when one starts to deal with them? If you work only at this liberal level of democracy,
you just don’t see what happens in history. (CS, 38)

In Grimshaw’s commentary on Taubes’s correspondence with Schmitt, he

argues that, for Taubes,
liberalism involves, in the end, a denial of the cost others suffer by our being liberal. That is,
liberalism is not a neutral state of affairs, nor a neutral society, but a claim that is inherently
oppositional and judgmental, with associated decision and implementations, and such
decisions are primarily focused on the benefits to the victors in what is seen as the inevitable
march of human progress. Taubes’s point is that liberal democracy fails to see what happens in
history, which is a history of brutality. In short, liberals have too high a view of humanity and
human nature, views that a realistic encounter with and examination of human history would
quickly overturn.55

Taubes rejects liberalism in the name of a greater form of liberation. Not

only does this anti-liberalism have Hegelian antecedents, but Taubes’s
relationship with Schmitt plays out a tension internal to Hegel’s own work.
There are at least two ways in which Hegel demonstrates an anti-liberal
tendency. First, the most direct critique of liberalism comes in Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right. As Karin de Boer argues, while Hegel sees the
achievement of individual freedom as an essential goal, his primary focus is
‘the structures that allow a modern state to establish itself as a rational
whole’.56 True freedom is something attained by the community of spirit,
not something that functions at the level of the individual. As Hegel writes,
‘society is not dispersed into atomic individuals, collected to perform only a
single and temporary act, and kept together for a moment and no longer. On
the contrary, it makes the appointment as a society, articulated into
associations, communities and corporations, which although constituted
already for other purposes, acquire in this way a connection with politics’
(PR, §308: 294/476).57 De Boer makes this point specifically in opposition
to those who read Hegel as emphasizing individual freedom and uses
Robert Pippin as one of her examples. As Pippin explains in Hegel’s
Practical Philosophy, he sees the rational exchange of reasons as a central
theme of Hegel’s philosophy. Freedom, for Hegel, ‘consists in being in a
certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself (which he describes as
being able to give my inclinations and incentives a “rational form”), which
itself is possible, so it is argued, only if one is also already in certain
(ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relations to others, if one is a
participant in certain practices’.58 Pippin works from this starting point to
the conclusion that Hegel’s ‘suspicions about moral individualism, an ethics
of conscience, etc., should not obscure the fact that he also wants to defend,
in his own way, the supreme importance of an individual’s free, reflective
life, however much he regards it as a necessarily collective achievement’.59
It is this passage that triggers de Boer’s concern, for in her reading the state
is not the means by which individuals achieve their own rational goals, but
an expression of the rational whole to which ‘the ultimate interests of
citizens ought to coincide’.60 The first anti-liberal tendency within Hegel’s
philosophy is thus found in this relationship between the individual and
society. The needs of society as a whole are primary.
Second, and somewhat at tension with the first, is the anti-liberalism that
is continued in Taubes and Bloch. While Bloch in particular shows the same
concern for the formation of a community of shared will, both Taubes and
Bloch are more suspicious of institutions than traditional Hegelianism
would allow. If de Boer’s focus on anti-liberal elements of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right leads to a stronger role for the state, this alternative
anti-liberalism seeks new forms of the social whole. Both objections to
liberalism are rooted in a rejection of individualism as the basis of society
but differ in that one is more accepting of the presently existing social
whole than the other. For Taubes, there is an anti-politics to apocalypticism
(remembering that anti-politics can be ultra-political). This anti-politics
differentiates apocalypticism from utopia as ‘utopia belongs to essentially
politicized man and merges from the political spirit. The state is the vessel
for the fulfilment of this concept of humanity . . . Even the ideal of utopia
needs to take its bearings from the real state’ (OE, 135). Taubes contrasts
that utopianism with an anarchic chiliasm that is dissimilar to the form of
politics continued even in the most concrete forms of utopianism. Though
the coming kingdom may be associated with a place (such as Jerusalem) at
a fundamental level it is ‘not being inaugurated, but it is coming. It is not
found in any location, but it is happening [es ereignet sich]. It is not being
discovered, but it is expected’ (OE, 136).
While Bloch does not develop as clear an anti-politics as Taubes,
Atheism in Christianity’s invectives against theology from On-high are not
only aimed at ecclesial authorities; they also target the collusion between
those authorities and the state. He describes Job as one of the heroes of the
Bible, for he realized that ‘piety was not to be confused with conformity to
law and order’ (AC, 19). This conformity with the law as manifested by the
state is problematic because it involves submission to that which is imposed
from On-high. Much of Bloch’s critique of institutional religion is rooted in
Christianity’s abandonment of its liberating message as religion from
below. ‘There was always opium there for the people – in the end it tainted
their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind
the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against
everything it stood for’ (AC, 47). Bloch is led to the Hegelian conclusion
that whatever form of social organization emerges in his concrete utopia, it
must not contain the alienation of a state that is defined in contradiction to
its people.
Thus, though Bloch is critically contrasting his concrete utopianism with
other forms of utopian thinking and is firmly opposed to the world as it is,
Taubes’s apocalypticism goes further. Bloch still finds hope in the world,
while Taubes performs the more difficult balancing act of a materialist
eschatology that wavers between hope and nihilism.61 Such an
apocalypticism is not rooted in the hope for the resolution of problems
within the world but in a desire for the end of the antagonisms that are the
world. As Frank B. Wilderson III argues, the only end to such antagonisms
is the destruction of one side, which read in a Hegelian vein, means the
destruction of both – one through the other.
While Taubes offers an apocalyptic condemnation of the world that goes
further than Bloch or Hegel, there is still this tension between hope and
nihilism. At times, Taubes makes his lack of investment in the world seem
easy. Recalling the discussion of Cohn and Hegel, though, it is important to
bear in mind the rarity of truly apocalyptic energy. Apocalyptic challenges
to social order do not begin, even under substantial oppression, until
elements within a community are convinced that they have no future from
the perspective of that order. Only then do the fractures within that order
begin to appear. As noted in that earlier discussion, it is for this reason that
Hegel remains worried about the Rabble. The Rabble refuses or is unable to
adapt to the political limitations of particular community. ‘Poverty in itself
does not turn people into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is
joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the
rich, against, society, against the government, etc’ (PR, §244z: 221/389). As
Brooks argues in his reading of the Rabble, an essential component of being
a member of a society is the conviction that problems are best resolved
within the limits of a political system.62 Within liberalism, for example,
there is no resolution between individual freedom and equality. Managing
that tension is liberalism. To refuse either side completely is to abandon
liberalism. Engaging in this refusal, when combined with economic, social
and political alienation, generates the position of the Rabble.
Hegel does not have a solution to the threat of the Rabble. He considers
charity, holds out the possibility of economic mobility and even suggests
colonialism might be a temporary solution (PR, §245–6: 221–2/390–1). For
Hegel, the problem is that the system of production and ownership which he
accepts as given – that is capitalism – necessarily produces the Rabble. This
position is based on the rushed conclusion that ‘despite an excess of wealth
civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient, to
check excessive poverty and the creation of penurious rabble’ (PR, §245:
222/390).
 Even if Taubes sometimes makes apocalypticism look a little too easy,
both his and Schmitt’s political theologies are attune to, if not grounded on,
the possibility of collapse represented by the Rabble. It could all go down.
The difference is the direction from which they think that possibility.
Taubes does not discuss the exception in the same way as Schmitt, but they
both are concerned with the moment of the suspension of the normal. For
Schmitt, the normal is suspended in the name of the normal. It is an act of
preservation. For Taubes, it initiates the end. It carries on the theological
legacy of Paul who ‘fundamentally negates law as a force of political order.
With this, legitimacy is denied to all sovereigns of this world, be they
imperatorial or theocratic.’63 It is an act of disinvestment. For Schmitt, it is
a political act carried out by the sovereign in the name of the law. For
Taubes, it is the existential ‘apocalypse of man’ expressed in the theological
language that marks the cleavage between the world as it is and the world
as it should. It happens rather than is directly enacted.

Transcendental materialist readings of Hegel: From Taubes to

Malabou

In the course of this chapter I have offered an overview of Taubes’s political

theology. In so doing, I have shown how Taubes continues key Hegelian
themes, contrasted Taubes’s political theology with Schmitt’s, but also
shown that they each offer their own version of an anti-liberal political
theology. In the next chapter I will continue developing Taubes’s political
theology through an engagement with Malabou. In order to provide context
for that engagement, it is important to understand Malabou’s relationship to
transcendental materialism and how the transcendental materialist reading
of Hegel relates to the reading of Taubes and Hegel I have been offering
thus far.
Transcendental materialism is most strongly associated with the work of
Adrian Johnston, who uses the term to name Žižek’s distinctive reading of
German Idealism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.64 He not only uses this
term to interpret Žižek but goes on to develop his own version of a
transcendental materialist philosophy. In so doing, Johnston has
collaborated with Malabou and the two share many of the basic
philosophical positions: non-reductive materialism, creative rereadings of
German Idealism and an appreciation for the growing body of literature
connecting biology, neuroscience and psychoanalysis.65 In the first chapter,
I claimed that transcendental materialism is one approach to thinking the
nature of the world, bringing a Hegelian perspective to the same conceptual
issues identified by Tuana and Haslanger. In the following chapter,
Malabou’s rejection of transcendence and her materialist understanding of
trauma will be key to further exploring apocalypticism.
There are three specific themes in Taubes that connect to transcendental
materialist readings of Hegel. First, Taubes repeatedly refers to the
importance of grounding political theology in material reality. He cautions
against ‘crass-materialism’, which is circumvented through a Hegelian
mediation of materialism and idealism. Hegel himself does not perform this
mediation, but Hegel’s philosophy is part of the transcendence of self-
alienation that allows this mediation to occur. Citing Marx’s view of
communism as ‘the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e.,
human) being’ Taubes adds that ‘Communist naturalism or humanism is
different from both idealism and materialism; at the same time it is the truth
that binds them together’ (OE, 182). Noting the Hegelian language, he
quotes the Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, in which Marx
further claims communism as ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict
between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of
the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-
confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and
the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself
to be this solution.’66
This binding together of idealism and materialism is mirrored in
Johnston’s definition of transcendental materialism. This philosophy claims
that
 [t]he break induced by the more-than-material subject splitting off from its material origins is
irreparable, opening up an impossible-to-close gap, a nondialecticizable parallax split. The
transcendental materialist theory of the subject is materialist insofar as it asserts that the Ideal
of subjective thought arises from the Real of objective being, although it is also simultaneously
transcendental insofar as it maintains that this thus-generated Ideal subjectivity thereafter
achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as
a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to
traditional versions of materialism.67

Johnston develops this materialism further than Taubes, but the emphasis on
achieving independence from the material origins of the subject is another
way of articulating spirit’s relation to nature.68 The possibility of a freedom
arising from material reality, maintaining a dialectical relationship to that
material reality, but without recourse to any form of transcendent being, is a
concern of both Taubes’s and Bloch’s apocalyptic political theology.
Whatever the representations of God and apocalypse mean for Taubes, they
are materially manifested. To repeat Bielik-Robson’s description, Taubes’s
political theology is ‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory,
focused on the finite life, immanentist and this-worldly’.69
Second, and on a related note, Taubes claims that Hegel’s ontology
moves from the metaphysical to the transcendental: ‘They do not take
nature as a norm but the production of man: history. Human creativity is
placed above nature.’70 Johnston does not state his position in opposition to
nature but celebrates a similar production of the transcendental from its
material basis. This point recalls the above discussion of Taubes’s
understanding of nature and freedom.
Finally, Taubes wants to preserve a kind of incompleteness to Hegel’s
philosophy. Taubes’s understanding that ‘Hegel, like Joachim, conceives of
the course of world history as a progression and, consequently, as a constant
negation of any system that currently exists’ (OE, 166) parallels Johnston’s
observation that ‘the reconciliation achieved by absolute knowing amounts
to the acceptance of an insurmountable incompleteness, an irresolvable
driving tension that cannot finally be put to rest through one last
Aufhebung’.71 Hegel’s philosophy is complete in its grasping of its inherent
incompleteness. Hegel’s system is comprehension of the logical and
therefore necessary nature of the material being which gives rise to the
reasoning subject. The closed nature of Hegel’s thought refers to the
systematic conceptualization of the shape of this restless spirit.
That this comprehension is still a form of closure is necessary to an
adequate understanding of Hegel’s project. If there is only a persistent
failure and reconstitution, then thought is trapped in the position of the
unhappy consciousness. It is not enough for philosophy to be dialectical;
dialectics must lead the subject to self-consciousness. Hegel, summarizing
the sections leading up to religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, makes
this point: ‘Then there was the self-consciousness that reached its final
“shape” in the Unhappy Consciousness, that was only the pain of the Spirit
that wrestled, but without success, to reach out into objectivity. The unity of
the individual self-consciousness and its changeless essence, to which the
former attains, remains therefore, a beyond for self-consciousness’ (PS,
§673: 410/495). Religion is the next step in realizing the unity of the subject
with that beyond, first as a unity with an other, then as a unity with an other
that is also the subject. The distinctive form of alienation experienced by
self-consciousness engaged in religious thought is a necessary stage for the
development of philosophical thought.72
While Johnston is generally resistant to theological appropriations of
philosophy,73 Taubes’s political theology, with a God that ‘comes into being
through history, through antithesis and negation, through corruptio, through
suffering and formlessness’ (OE, 101), provides a compatible theological
reading of Hegel’s philosophy. For Taubes, political theology must be done
in a new philosophical framework, with categories that ‘are transcendental
and not metaphysical’.74 In this regard, Johnston’s position is the reversal of
Göschel’s. If Göschel asks Hegel if it would not be better to root
philosophical concepts more directly in biblical imagery, Johnston suggests
that this imagery is too risky. Political theology, following the legacy of
Taubes and Bloch, echoes Hegel’s reply to Göschel – absolute knowing
instills the confidence necessary to return to representations. Taubes’s turn
to theology is thus the opposite of Schmitt’s. As Boer argues, faced with the
opposition of politics and theology, the answer is not to abandon theology.
Rather, ‘we take the move from theology to politics all the way, push it
through to its dialectical extreme. And, in doing so, we would end with
theology: not a going back to theology as Schmitt argued, but a theology
beyond the initial opposition, one that is the next step, thoroughly
politicised and materialised.’75 Taubes experiments rather than returns.
This chapter has worked through the basic elements of Taubes’s political
theology with particular focus on both the role of Hegelian ideas and the
contrast between Taubes and Schmitt. Taubes’s apocalyptic political
theology emerges as a critique of modernity for modernity’s sake – a
willingness to let loose apocalyptic fervour on a society which he felt did
not live out the ideal of modern freedom. Navigating the tension of both
affirming the modern world and calling for its destruction, I then
supplemented Taubes’s political theology through comparing and
contrasting his work with Bloch’s own treatment of eschatological themes.
Reading Bloch alongside Taubes, it becomes clear that the latter pushes past
the hope of concrete utopianism to a more difficult position. This political
theology requires a delicate balance between hope and nihilism, revelation
and annihilation. This discussion also shows the extent to which Taubes
exemplifies the Hegelian practice of returning to representation and using
theological concepts to think the world at the edge of the limits of
philosophy.
Taubes thus advances the attempt to address the remaining questions that
trouble apocalyptic views of the world. Both Taubes and Bloch offer a
reading of apocalypticism that rejects transcendence in favour of an
immanent and materialist account. There is a possibility of newness, even a
newness that is not a possibility of this world, but that possibility is not
external. Yet questions still remain. First, why does apocalypticism insist on
the connection between this immanent novelty and violence or trauma?
Second, what does it mean to live apocalyptically? To answer these
questions, I now turn to Malabou.
 4

Plastic apocalypticism

Reading Taubes, with help from Bloch and Schmitt, offers an initial
articulation of an apocalyptic political theology. Taubes’s thoroughgoing
negativity is an example of what it means to reject the world and all its
possibilities. While this political theology provides a good starting point, it
does not fully respond to two persistent questions that present themselves
when attempting to develop an apocalyptic account of the world. First, why
does apocalypticism insist on the connection between the possibility of a
possibility not of this world and traumatic violence? Second, what does it
mean to live apocalyptically? To answer these questions, Taubes’s
‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory, focused on the finite life,
immanentist and this-worldly’ political theology must be further
developed.1 More traditional forms of apocalypticism require an external,
transcendent agent as the source of novelty. Reading Taubes and Hegel, I
have argued that it is possible to experiment with theological materials and
offer an immanent account of apocalypticism. But how does such an
immanent account offer a genuine novelty rather than just a more extreme
reconfiguration of the world? And if it is possible to develop an immanent
apocalypticism, why not also argue for a more peaceful form of
apocalypticism? Only having resolved these questions can the question of
apocalyptic living be addressed.
The questions of immanence, novelty and trauma are also main concerns
of Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity. Malabou develops her concept
of plasticity through Hegel, she rejects messianic approaches to the new and
she does so within a materialist reframe work amenable to the concept of
world developed earlier.2 Reading Taubes through Malabou offers a way of
further connecting this concept of world and an immanent, materialist form
of apocalypticism. Taubes offers a political theological alternative to
messianism that can be read in terms of Malabou’s most strident forms of
destructive plasticity and Malabou offers a philosophical exploration of the
challenges of such a traumatic form of novelty.
I begin by linking Malabou’s concept of plasticity to the readings of
Hegel discussed in previous chapters, before turning to the parallels
between Malabou’s understanding of plasticity and Taubes’s understanding
of apocalypse as revelation and annihilation. To draw out how Hegel is
helpful in articulating this understanding of apocalypticism, I return to
Malcolm Bull’s work on Hegel and apocalypse, as well as explore the
connection between plasticity and Hegel’s understanding of contingency.
What might initially seem like mystical longing or utopian hopefulness in
Taubes or Bloch, when read in conjunction with Hegel, can be understood
in terms of possibility and contingency. Through these themes, Malabou
explains the role of a distinctively explosive and traumatic form of change,
providing further resources for considering the link between apocalypticism
and violence.

Malabou, Hegel and plasticity

In the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes speculative

thought as the negation of the form of standard propositions: ‘[T]he general
nature of the judgment or proposition, which involves the distinction of
subject and predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition, and the
proposition of identity which the former becomes contains the counter-
thrust against the subject-predicate relationship’ (PS, §61: 38/59). He uses
the example of the statement ‘God is being’ to illustrate his point. In this
proposition, the subject disappears into the predicate. Instead of grasping
the unity of the proposition, the two terms are seen as accidentally
connected. In contrast to this form of the proposition, Hegel claims that
philosophy must work towards ‘the goal of plasticity’ (PS, §64: 39/60).
Rather than the rigid understanding of the proposition, the movement,
which is the unity, of the statement must be rendered explicit. ‘This return
of the notion into itself must be set forth. This movement which continues
what formerly the proof was supposed to accomplish, is the dialectical
movement of the proposition itself. This alone is the speculative in act, and
only the expression of this movement is a speculation exposition’ (PS, §65:
39–40/61). The comprehension of the concept in its movement is the
definition of truth.
A similar understanding of plasticity appears in Hegel’s preface to the
second edition of the Science of Logic. ‘No subject matter is so absolutely
capable of being expounded with a strictly immanent plasticity as is thought
in its own necessary development’ (SL, 40/5:30). Here, he expands the use
of the term, using it not only to describe the form of the discourse, but the
process of discourse itself. ‘A plastic discourse demands . . . a plastic
receptivity and understanding on the part of the listener’ (SL, 40/5: 31).
These references, along with Hegel’s discussion of the ‘plastic arts’, are
the inspiration for Malabou’s concept of plasticity. Plasticity indicates three
traits that are shared between subjectivity, the dialectical process and being
itself. As she explains in The Future of Hegel, the term names the capacity
of ‘being at once capable of receiving and of giving from’ (FH, 8) and ‘an
explosive material . . . that can set off violent detonations’ (FH, 9).
Plasticity is itself a plastic term indicating ‘concrete shapes in which form is
crystallized (sculpture) and to the annihilation of all form (the bomb)’ (FH,
9). While philosophy has conceptualized malleability and transformation, it
is this destructive form of plasticity that Malabou argues has been under
theorized (OA, 4).
The concept of plasticity emphasizes the dynamic nature of Hegel’s
dialectical method. For Malabou,
The dialectical process is ‘plastic’ because, as it unfolds, it makes links between the opposing
moments of total immobility (the ‘fixed’) and vacuity (‘dissolution’), and then links both in the
vitality of the whole, a whole which, reconciling these two extremes, is itself the union of
resistance (Widerstand) and fluidity (Flüssigkeit). The process of plasticity is dialectical
because the operations which constitute it, the seizure of form and the annihilation of all form,
emergence and explosion, are contradictory. (FH, 12)
This passage succinctly encapsulates Malabou’s contribution to the task of
understanding apocalypse in an immanent and materialist way. The world is
a dynamic whole composed of both resistance and fluidity, the granting of
form and the destruction of form.
The applications to apocalyptic political theology become clearer when
this discussion of the dialectical process turns to the issue of temporality.
Recalling Hegel’s use of plasticity to describe the true nature of the
relationship between subject and predicate, Malabou argues that plasticity
characterizes the relationship of substance and accident. Accident
can designate continuation in both senses of the word, as consequence, that is, ‘what follows’
in the logical sense, and as event, that is, ‘what follows’ in a chronological sense. Self-
determination is thus the relation of substance to that which happens. Following this line of
thought we understand the ‘future’ in the philosophy of Hegel as the relation which
subjectivity maintains with the accidental. (FH, 12)

The future, for Hegel, is not merely the present that has not yet happened.
In this understanding ‘[t]ime is a dialectically differentiated instance; its
being divided into definite moments determines it only for a moment’ (FH,
13). Put another way, the future is constituted by a moment of abstraction, a
schematization of moments itself subject to the threefold determinations of
plasticity. For Malabou, understanding the future this way is a shift from the
vernacular meaning of time to an ‘anticipatory structure’ constitutive of
subjectivity (FH, 13). This anticipation is not the simple teleology often
attributed to Hegel’s philosophy of history but a structure which she defines
as ‘to see (what is) coming’ which is ‘the interplay, within Hegelian
philosophy, of teleological necessity and surprise’ (FH, 13).
This understanding of plasticity is a conceptual resource for thinking
apocalyptically without the teleology that accompanies eschatological,
messianic and apocalyptic ideas. Malabou’s understanding of the future
acknowledges the primacy of Hegel’s understanding of possibility.3 What is
possible is actual and the becoming of the actual is its necessity. At the
same time, there are those things that become necessary. Or, put another
way, their necessity is their becoming. And this necessity, like the future, is
a moment. Necessity may be undone. This affirms the basic necessity of
contingency – there is nothing unconvertible. Nothing is beyond change
except the system of knowing which grasps the fundamental concepts
inherent to that change. Everything is plastic.
To state that nothing is unconvertible amounts to claiming the philosophical necessity of the
thought of a new materialism, which does not believe in the ‘formless’ and implies the vision
of a malleable real that challenges the conception of time as a purely messianic process. It
means that we can sometimes decide about the future . . . which means that there is actually
something to do with it, in the sense in which Marx says that men make their own history. (PD,
77)

The concepts of plasticity and ‘to see (what is) coming’ allow Malabou to
articulate an understanding of the future in which the future is not
necessarily present now.
This understanding of plasticity recalls the earlier analysis of the contrast
Boer draws between eschatology and apocalypse. Rooted in a study of
biblical genres, Boer argues that apocalypse is defined in part by the seeing
of the future. This vision is one of the reasons that Boer prefers eschatology
over apocalypse. Yet, eschatology does not imply the same sense of
destruction or annihilation. Malabou’s understanding of plasticity provides
language for speaking about the seeing of a future that brings with it the
possibility of explosive plasticity. It is this relationship between the future
and destruction that ties together Taubes, Bloch and Malabou. This
destructive revelation does not reveal the future in any fixed sense, but that
what is now necessary, the world, may become impossible and the
impossible, indeed unthinkable, may become necessary.
For Hegel, philosophical tradition refers to two things simultaneously: ‘to the movement
through which a particular accident . . . becomes essential (i.e. it becomes fate), and to the way
a destiny, standing for the essential, then actualizes itself in its accidents, i.e. in its epochs and
stages. Whether one is prior to the other is not something that can be known. This is what
Absolute Knowledge knows. Hegelian philosophy assumes as an absolute fact the emergence
of the random in the very bosom of necessity and the fact that the random, the aleatory,
becomes necessary.’ (FH, 163)

Necessity characterizes a moment of thought, not the course of thinking

itself. In a sense, necessity flies at dusk. The possible only becomes
necessary as it becomes actual, but that actuality is always contingent (SL,
550–3/6:213–17). Awareness of necessity’s late arrival changes the
subject’s relationship to the future, foregrounding the underlying
contingency.

Plastic apocalypticism: Taubes and Malabou

Malabou’s plasticity can be used to read Taubes in two primary ways: in

terms of his political theological method and as a way of understanding the
nature of apocalyptic disruption. First, Taubes’s returning to experiment
with theological representations can be taken as an example of plastic
reading. If Taubes defines the enduring significance of theology as the
discourse which names the difference between humanity as it is and as it
could be, Malabou’s plasticity identifies the nature of Taubes’s relationship
to the traditions that furnish his key terms and concepts. Recalling
Rabinbach’s description of twentieth-century German Jewish messianism’s
‘language-work’, Taubes and Bloch have a plastic relationship to the
apocalyptic traditions whose texts proliferate their writings.
The plastic reading of a text is the reading that seeks to reveal the form left in the text through
the withdrawing of presence, that is, through its own deconstruction. It is a question of
showing how a text lives its deconstruction . . . It is a matter of revealing a form in the text that
is both other than the same and other than the other, other than metaphysics, other than
deconstruction. A form that is the fruit of the self-regulation of the relation between tradition
and its superseding and which at the same time exceeds that strict binary terms of this relation.
(PD, 52)

Like Taubes and Bloch, Malabou sees value in speaking with traditions,
subversively appropriating concepts. Plasticity recognizes the negativity
within being itself as the motor of thought, tracing the movement between
tradition and novelty and exposing the tensions within the present in order
to open up spaces for something new. This emergence from within the
tradition, an immanent critique or deconstruction, is the central theme that
Taubes and Bloch both trace back to Joachim. What makes Bloch and
Taubes particularly useful for the development of political theology is their
rejection of returning to an untarnished origin. They are not engaged in
political theologies of recovery, but of (re)invention.
Second, and more importantly, Taubes’s understanding of
apocalypticism can itself be interpreted as plastic. Recall that in Occidental
Eschatology Taubes writes, ‘[t]he apocalyptic principle combined within it
a form-destroying and forming power. Depending on the situation and the
task, only one of the two components emerges, but neither can be absent’
(OE, 10). As shown in the previous section, Malabou understands plasticity
as ‘the union of resistance and fluidity . . . The process of plasticity is
dialectical because the operations which constitute it, the seizure of form
and the annihilation of all form, emergence and explosion, are
contradictory’ (FH, 12). The resonance between the two formulations is
clear, and using plasticity to understand some of the implications of
Taubes’s apocalypticism further clarifies key issues in his political theology.
For example, in the previous chapter, I discussed Bielik-Robson’s
objection to Taubes’s apocalypticism: the willingness to see it all go down
inevitably contradicts his desire to defend modernity against its own worst
tendencies. I argued that his willing the annihilation of the world as it is
should be taken as the annihilation of the world as it is, rather the
destruction of the world tout court. Here, Malabou is helpful in calling for
readings of texts that give rise to their plastic processes of metamorphosis
(PD, 52). In this sense, metamorphosis names a process which, in its
plasticity, is annihilation, but always an annihilation which is forming (OA,
74–5). In the development of an immanent and materialist apocalypticism,
the destruction of the world is an end, but such an end is always also a
beginning. The question of what begins is beyond a plastic apocalypticism.
The world is all that is. In order for something else to be possible, the world
and all its possibilities must end. Equipped with Malabou’s terminology, it
is possible to understand Taubes as calling for the destruction of the world
as a plastic process of metamorphosis in which annihilation, explosion and
emergence are joined in contradictory relation.
With these two primary confluence between apocalypticism and
plasticity in mind, I now turn to the persistent questions that follow the
apocalyptic – questions of immanence, alterity, novelty and trauma. If
apocalypticism in the broadest sense of the term has been used to indicate a
shared ‘conceptual framework . . . endorsing a worldview in which
supernatural revelation, the heavenly world, and eschatological judgment
played essential parts’,4 plasticity can help further define the nature of
revelations that are not divine, revolutions that are earthly not heavenly and
the consequences that might follow judging the world itself to be unjust.

The problem of novelty and the rejection of the transcendent

When considering Taubes’s use of apocalyptic ideas, the most pressing

concern is apocalypticism’s reliance upon transcendence and its tendency to
encourage passivity. Both these tendencies take emphasis away from
human agency. The result is what Bloch refers to as the patience of the
cross in which the temporal suffering of the present is only a momentary
distraction from eternal paradise (AC, 161). Against this idea, the young
Hegel writes in condemnation of ‘the innumerable hypocrites in any
church’ who embrace ascetic ideals, privileging those who ‘have mastered
all the requisite knowledge’ and who ‘live and move in church activities’
(ETW, 138/181–2). This form of Christianity ‘has taught men to despise
civil and political freedom as dung in comparison with heavenly blessings
and the enjoyment of eternal life’ (ETW, 138/182). For Hegel, it fell to
those who would think philosophically about religion to overturn this form
of religion: ‘it has been reserved in the main for our epoch to vindicate at
least in theory the human ownership of the treasures formerly squandered
on heaven’ (ETW, 159/209). If Hegel, Bloch and Taubes reject this form of
passivity, a hope rooted in the arrival of salvation from a transcendent
agent, what then is the source of this new possibility?
In order to understand how Hegel, Taubes and Malabou together can
address this problem, I will first consider Taubes’s own work on
immanence, before returning to Malabou’s reading of Hegel, her rejection
of messianism and how this develops Taubes’s apocalyptic insights.
Reading Hegel and Taubes through Malabou while using Taubes to draw
out the apocalyptic themes of Hegel and Malabou will further clarify the
nature of plastic apocalypticism.

Taubes and immanence

In Taubes’s view, ‘theology describes the external horizon of alterity, which
in negation and alienation took a stand against culture as the sphere of
familiarity and whose antagonistic force he intends to strengthen in a time
in which Christian, particularly Protestant, theology in its conventional
understanding has long since been incorporated into culture as one of its
domains among others’.5 Theological discourse functions as an other to
philosophy, recalling the idea of representations as the other of thought.
This otherness is originally derived from theology’s concern with
transcendence and Taubes takes it as his task to argue for a form of
theological critique that rejects that transcendent guarantor and instead
engages in an immanent opposition of cult to culture.
In a review of the first volume of Paul Tillich’s systematic theology,
Taubes discusses Tillich’s symbolic topology. Rather than directing
theology outwards, to the external, Taubes sees Tillich as ‘mining the
depths’. ‘The “depth” of reason expresses something that is not reason but
that precedes reason and is manifest through it. That which transcends
reason is not located “beyond” reason, but the arrow of transcendence
points “downward” into its depths. The depth of reason is interpreted as
“substance” that appears in the rational structure of reality.’6 Taubes does
not offer an evaluation at this point, only noting the importance of depth as
an ontological symbol. In the following section, however, he connects his
summary of Tillich to Hegel. Taubes reads the Phenomenology of Spirit as
developing a logos-theology in which what becomes ‘explicit in theology is
the spirit that recognizes itself; it is reason united with its own depth.’7 This
logos relocates the word that was external to humanity, placing it within the
movement of the dialectic. Theology allows humanity to speak of its self-
alienation before it realizes its own role in that process. Achieving this
recognition results in a ‘Gnostic theology of knowledge’ which ‘has its
source in the Alexandrian theology and in the speculations of Joachim of
Fiore’.8 Hegel’s thought is simultaneously theological and philosophical,
‘but it is not a theology in the supernaturalistic sense, for it does not locate
the spirit outside of man. In Hegel’s logos-theology the symbols are finally
translated into immanent categories.’9
In a later work on surrealism Taubes offers a similar perspective,
highlighting the importance of the issue of these spatial terms. Questioning
the prefix sur of surrealism, he asks ‘how the vertical schema of Gnosticism
must fundamentally transform itself if it is to become visible in the
circumference of post-Copernican immanence’.10 While acknowledging
that it is also possible to argue for a horizontal schema, Taubes advocates
interpreting the sur in terms of the vertical. Initially adopting the vertical
schema might appear to be an affirmation of the transcendent, but Taubes
clarifies,
In Gnosticism, the pneumatic Self, which stands in opposition to the world in all its forms,
must guarantee its unworldliness though an unworldly God beyond the cosmos. This is in a
certain sense nothing other than the great projection of the revolutionary uncovered non-
worldly self. The surrealist revolt takes place against the infinite world established in modern
science of nature and technology that is experienced as a system of domination and coercion,
but in its breakout from this endless system of worldly coercion, it cannot invoke the guarantee
of a God beyond the world.11

A key claim to Taubes’s discussion of surrealism is his exploration of its

emphasis, shared by Gnosticism, against the coercion of the necessary,
understood variously as common sense, the natural and the status quo.
If Taubes’s theology involves recognizing alterity, but this alterity
cannot be transcendent in the usual sense of the external or non-human, an
alternative notion of alterity is required. The beyond or alterity indicated by
theological representations, now rendered as immanent categories, signifies
not an external alterity but ‘an “intensity” of the immanent’.12 Taubes’s
reading of Tillich and Hegel brings to mind the earlier discussions of
secularization. Hegel does not offer a story of secularization in which
religion is presented as outdated superstition. Rather religion is an essential
moment in the development of spirit that recognizes itself as the agent of its
own alienation. The result is not a cessation of alienation but an
understanding of that alienation as key to the form of knowledge that is
absolute knowing.

Immanence and apocalypticism: Against messianism

Just as Taubes is concerned with defining an immanent apocalypticism,

Malabou too rejects transcendence. Her exploration of immanence and
temporality comes in response to Derrida’s ‘messianism without a messiah’.
Her objections are twofold. First, she rejects transcendence in the form of
an external alterity:
And with no irruptive transcendence, there is no open door to the pure event. Nor any
messianism. Nothing happens except self-transformation. From modification to
metamorphosis, from migration to modification, the torsions, volte-faces, and reversals of a
single impossibility of escaping unfold . . . there is no outside, nor is there any immobility. The
plasticity of unavoidable transformation. The lifeline of a radical transformation without
exoticism. (PD, 44)

Malabou writes of a plasticity that, like the destruction and deconstruction

that came before it, does not operate as an external force but emerges from
within – an ‘alterity that does not come from a yonder’ (PD, 67). Plasticity
denotes forms of novelty that emerge within an immanent plane.
Malabou’s stressing of the immanent in her reading of Hegel is not only
a rejection of the Derridian or Levinasian messianic preservation of the
transcendent, it is also an argument about the nature of the Hegelian
absolute. Malabou wants to keep a strong reading of this concept,
maintaining with Hegel that there is nothing outside the absolute (FH, 4).
She cites the opening sections of the Philosophy of Mind to support her
position: ‘Mind is, therefore, in its every act only apprehending itself, and
the aim of all genuine science is just this, that mind shall recognize itself in
everything in heaven and so on earth. An out-and-out other simply does not
exist for mind’ (E3, §377z: 1/9–10).13 This position is maintained
throughout Hegel’s work. In addition to the oft-cited ‘[t]he true is the
whole’ from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (PS, §20: 11/24),
there is Hegel’s explanation of the absolute in the Encyclopaedia of
Philosophical Sciences:
[T]he absolute idea is the universal, but this universal is not merely the abstract form that
confronts the particular contents as something-other; on the contrary it is the absolute form into
which all determinations, the whole fullness of the content posited by it, have returned. In this
perspective, the absolute idea is to be compared with the old man who utters the same religious
statements as the child, but for whom they carry the significance of his whole life. Even if the
child understands the religious content, it still counts for him only as something outside of
which lie the whole of life and the whole world. (E1, §237z: 304/389)

In the Science of Logic, he clarifies that the absolute is not an external

logical form, divorced from and applied to the ‘real’ world.
Accordingly, what is to be considered here as method is only the movement of the notion itself,
the nature of which movement has already been cognized; but first, there is now the added
significance that the notion is everything, and its movement is the universal absolute activity,
the self-determining and self-realizing movement. (SL, 826/6:551)

Malabou, through her reading of Hegel, requires neither transcendence nor

a transcendent understanding of the absolute ‘because plasticity works on
and within the body of the systematic exposition, without ever extending
above it or overdetermining it . . . it is revealed as the concept capable of
accounting for the incarnation, or the incorporation, of spirit’ (FH, 18). This
understanding of the absolute returns to themes addressed in the earlier
reading of Hegel. The absolute may be complete and closed, but only in the
sense that it is a complete understanding of incompleteness and a closed
system in the sense that it accounts for the negativity that can never be
overcome.
For Hegel, this extends to the most fundamental ontological level. In the
Science of Logic’s section on the doctrine of being, he examines the
relationship between being, nothing and becoming. Pure being and pure
nothing are identical, each passing over into the other.14 Yet their identity is
mobile, as they are both the same and ‘absolutely distinct’ at the same time
(SL, 82–3/5:83). The name of this relationship, in which being and nothing
are both same and different, is becoming. This transition is the introduction
of dialectic as ‘the higher movement of reason in which such seemingly
utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously’ (SL,
105/5:111). Having established that the ‘dialectical immanent nature of
being and nothing’ (SL, 105/5:111) manifests their unity in becoming,
Hegel turns to the precise nature of this becoming as coming-to-be and
ceasing-to-be. As one might expect, a similar pattern emerges. The two are
not externally related as sublations of the other. Rather, ‘each sublates itself
in itself and is in its own self the opposite of itself’ (SL, 106/5:112). The
finite is defined as limited, which establishes the infinite by way of
contradiction. Yet, the infinite too is defined by its other, the finite, making
it finite as well. Finite and infinite ‘are just as much essentially connected
by the very negation which separates them’ (SL, 140/5:153). Hegel claims
that thought
passes from the finite to the infinite. This transcending of the finite appears as an external act .
. . Owing to the inseparability of the infinite and finite . . . there arises a limit; the infinite has
vanished and its other, the finite, has entered. But this entrance of the finite appears as a
happening external to the infinite, and the new limit as something that does not arise from the
infinite itself but is likewise found as given. And so we are faced with a relapse into the
previous determination which has been sublated in vain. But this new limit is itself only
something which has to be sublated or transcended. And so again there arises the void, the
nothing, in which similarly the said determinateness, a new limit, is encountered – and so on to
infinity. (SL, 141/5:154)

He calls this understanding of the infinite the spurious infinite, against

which he poses an alternative notion – affirmative infinity. ‘The infinite,
therefore, as now before us is, in fact, the process in which it is deposed to
being only one of its determinations, the opposite of the finite, and so to
being itself only one of the finites, and then raising this its difference from
itself into the affirmation of itself and through this mediation becoming the
true infinite’ (SL, 148/5:163). This true infinite is in fact a becoming that
has become further determined from the moment of abstract becoming
which characterized the relationship between being and nothing. This
infinite does not move in a line but through self-negation.15 The infinite is
defined by contradiction.16
Thus, even though it is natural that eschatological ideas give rise to
fixation on the transcendent as the location of the infinite and the source of
hope, Hegel’s philosophy no longer requires this transcendence.
Representing the absolute as subject, a key step in the development of
consciousness encourages the identification of the absolute as ‘a fixed point
to which . . . the predicates are affixed by a movement belonging to the
fixed point itself’, but this fixity implies externality, whereas grasping the
dynamics of the absolute reveal its ‘actuality is self-movement’ (PS, §23:
13/27). Malabou’s rejection of a transcendent understanding of the absolute,
coupled with her insistence that there is nothing outside the absolute,
follows this reading of Hegel. Defining the infinite as self-negation means
there is nothing outside of the infinite. The spurious infinite ‘has the fixed
determination of a beyond, which cannot be reached, for the very reason
that it is not meant to be reached, because the determinateness of the
beyond, of the affirmative negation, is not let go’ (SL, 142/5:156). The
finite thus ‘perpetually generates itself in its beyond’, unaware of its role in
generating the infinite against which it defines itself (SL, 143/5:156).
In rejecting a transcendent understanding of the absolute, Malabou is
arguing for an immanent absolute within the boundaries of history. It is only
such an understanding of the absolute that can be constitutive of human
freedom. As Stephen Houlgate argues,
Human beings’ own needs, therefore, drive them to the recognition that they are essentially
self-conscious, social animals who are able to find freedom only in self-conscious community
with other human beings. This initially unintended course of action is, in Hegel’s view, rational
and necessary and is nothing other than the course of action to which human beings are driven
by their own free activity. We are thus not at the mercy of some transcendent Absolute, but we
are guided by the logic that is immanent in our own activity.17

Thus, while Hegel is clear that the absolute is not God, the concept of God
provides the means of thinking God as subject, which is a key stage in
recognizing the unity of God with the subject that knows God. That unity
moves consciousness from consciousness of the absolute to the absolute’s
self-consciousness in the subject. This self-consciousness, in turn, is
Hegel’s basis for a conception of freedom. Consequently, Malabou offers a
helpful means of conceiving of novelty within the immanent sphere, while
maintaining a strong understanding of the absolute, complementing the
political theologies of Taubes and Bloch who both see religion, as a mode
of thought, playing a vital role in the cultivation of human freedom.
Malabou’s second critique of messianism stems from her opposition to
the notion of time as a ‘purely messianic process’, a kind of fulfilment of
destiny, whether this destiny be the divine of traditional religion or the
messianism of humanism (PD, 76–7). For Malabou, both must be rejected
as rooted in a notion of the future as merely a ‘that which is to be present’ –
the rigidity of a future that can only be awaited. She, like Taubes, rejects
messianism or any form of apocalypticism that entails a ‘passive waiting for
an event which will finally lead us out of the world’ and instead sees the
potential for ‘a process which can finally lead us from the world-as-it-is’.18
This process depends on the plasticity of an immanent apocalypticism, ‘the
movement of the constitution of an exit, there, where no such exit is
possible . . . plasticity renders possible the appearance or formation of
alterity where the other is absent. Plasticity is the form of alterity without
transcendence’ (PD, 66).19
In rejecting this notion of the future, Malabou also dismisses attempts to
graft Hegel’s philosophy on to the narrative of the translation of
eschatology into progress. As with Taubes, this reading of Hegel is the
antithesis of Löwith’s understanding of Hegel’s role in the development of
the philosophy of history. In Malabou’s reading of Hegel, Löwith is both
right and wrong. He is right to describe Hegel as central to the
transformation of theological concepts of temporality into ‘secular’
philosophy. He is wrong to see this transformation as a crude translation of
salvation history into the myth of progress.20 Malabou’s reading is thus
helpful to political theology because it opens up an alternative to a
dominant trope in the genealogy of radical politics: namely that Christian
apocalyptic and millenarian theologies become secularized in the works of
Hegel and Marx, inevitably leading to totalitarianism. The guaranteed
Kingdom of God, the telos of history, is transformed into the inevitable
realization of a particular political or social order. Malabou, by
foregrounding plasticity, allows us to affirm Hegel’s role in transforming
theological concepts while rejecting this genealogy. In doing so, she
provides further conceptual resources for conceiving apocalypticism within
immanent and materialist political theologies.

A Blochian supplement

As in the previous chapter, Bloch’s development of apocalyptic thought in

relation to Hegel provides a useful supplement to this discussion of
Malabou and Taubes. In the Future of Hegel, Malabou refers to Derrida’s
description ‘of a certain simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, in which the
alterity and identity of the now are maintained together in the differentiated
element of a certain same-ness’ (FH, 15), later drawing a parallel to Hegel’s
description of the synthetic unity of time as a negative unity (FH, 47). This
negative unity of time already disrupts the consistency of a present which is
displaced into the past and future as the present that was and the present
that will be, respectively (FH, 3).
As explained earlier, Malabou is developing a concept of the future that
is not merely ‘that which is to come’ and arises not out of the transcendent
alterity of the messianic, but through the identity of identity and alterity.
When discussing temporality, Bloch uses the term ‘non-contemporaneity’ to
describe this dialectical identity.21 The now is contaminated with futures of
incomplete pasts, structural remnants of the not-yet-resolved, a capacity to
both transform and destroy the now, not as an external force intruding from
without, but as a negativity constitutive of any and every now.22
Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so externally, through the fact that they can be
seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with the others . . . Various
years in general beat in the one which is just being counted and prevails. Nor do they flourish
in obscurity as in the past, but contradict the Now; very strangely, crookedly, from behind.
(HT, 97)

These non-contemporaneous remnants become irrational features of any

new rationality. These contradictions, ‘non-desires for the Now’ (HT, 108),
are revelations of plasticity and plastic revelations. Attention to these non-
contemporaneous moments becomes the basis for a new apocalyptic
political theology, one in which apocalypticism denotes the capacity for
rupture that is constitutive of all nows. Apocalypticism is shorn of its
associations with teleology, in the sense of a linear progression towards a
determined end. ‘History is no entity advancing along a single line . . . it is
a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet
by no means revealed and resolved corners’ (HT, 62). The future is not-yet,
though not a not-yet present, but a not-yet as the indication of the capacity
to transform, rupture or remain the same. It is an alterity within history
rather than an ‘alterity . . . from a yonder’ (HT, 67).
For Bloch, this not-yet is a horizon rather than a determinative content –
it represents an unfulfilled past which is contemporaneous but not
simultaneous with the present. In Bloch’s framing, the excess that pushes
these movements out of the merely social or political is the non-
contemporaneity of the situation. Structural remnants of the not-yet-
resolved past combine with an accumulated rage at the present. The rage is
then funnelled through these elements, or in Bloch’s terms the ‘subjectively
non-contemporaneous contradiction activates this objectively non-
contemporaneous one’ (HT, 109). Bloch develops this theory of non-
contemporaneity while discussing the persistence of messianic and
millenarian motifs.23 Socialism, he claims, has broken away from its
theological origins, but ‘may pay respect to the dreams of its youth’ in the
process of fulfilling the substance of those dreams and casting off its
illusory elements (HT, 118).
This Blochian supplement to Taubes’s and Malabou’s reading of Hegel,
also returns to transcendental materialist themes discussed above. In
Johnston’s work, transcendental materialism is concerned with ‘the
immanent genesis of the transcendent’, a genesis which is, ‘in short, a self-
sundering material Grund internally producing what (subsequently)
transcends it’.24 The immanent genesis of the transcendent echoes Bloch’s
clearest statement on immanence and transcendence, his notion of
transcending without transcendence: ‘As the abolition of every On-high
which has no place for man; as a transcending with revolt, and equally a
revolt with transcending – but without transcendence’ (AC, 57).25 As Bloch
explains, this transcending without a transcendent is ‘the leap from the
Kingdom of Necessity to that of Freedom’, which is yet another iteration of
the Hegelian understanding of the immanent genesis of freedom from
nature. Bloch’s insistence on transcending rather than the transcendent only
further clarifies Johnston’s formulation of the transcendental materialist
understanding of freedom.
These two features of Bloch’s philosophy, non-contemporaneity and
transcending without transcendence, are related. As Ben Anderson notes,
Bloch offers
a unique type of materialism that . . . enables us to sense how the complex movement, and
emergence, of hope enacts topologies of space–time in which plural ‘goods’ or ‘betters’ are
synchronous and non-synchronous with matter rather than existing elsewhere (in another
space) or else when (in another time). The result is that there is no need for an other-worldly
form of transcendence that would intervene in the world from a position ‘out there’ or ‘up
there’.26

Though Bloch explains the possibilities opened by non-contemporaneity, it

is still unclear how one exploits this disjointed time. Just because
everything could be otherwise does not mean everything will be otherwise.
Understanding the possibility of other possibilities requires an investigation
of the relationship between necessity and contingency.

Contingency and plastic apocalypticism

If plasticity, in the domain of temporality, indicates a relationship to the

future as ‘to see (what is) coming’, the present becomes what Bloch
describes as non-contemporaneity. As seen in the previous section, the
present is a disjointed collection of nows. Translated into more Hegelian
language, Malabou, Taubes and Bloch advocate for a greater appreciation of
possibility within Hegel’s philosophy. Understanding this possibility and its
implication for Malabou’s notion of plasticity and apocalyptic political
theology requires a more detailed consideration of contingency and
necessity in Hegel. Working through these concepts also connects this
formulation of apocalypticism to recent developments in continental
philosophy, particularly in the work of Slavoj Žižek, Markus Gabriel and
Quentin Meillassoux.27 This more recent work repeats an earlier concern in
the study of Hegel, seen most clearly in the work of Stephen Houlgate and
John Burbidge. I will look at this earlier work first, before turning to points
of connection with the work of Žižek and Gabriel, and then concluding by
returning to Malabou, Taubes and the development of apocalyptic political
theology.

The necessity of contingency

Hegel defines the relationship between actuality, possibility and
contingency in the section on the doctrine of essence in the Science of
Logic:
[F]irst of all, since the actual and the possible are formal differences, their relation is likewise
merely formal and consists only in the fact that the one like the other is a positedness, or in
contingency.
Now since in contingency, the actual as well as the possible is positedness, they have received
determination in themselves; the actual thereby becomes, secondly, real actuality and with it
equally emerges real possibility and relative necessity.
Thirdly, the reflection of relative necessity into itself yields absolute necessity, which is
absolute possibility and actuality. (SL, 542/6:202)

In other words, the relationship between actuality and possibility is

contingency. Stated in a formula familiar to the Logic, ‘This absolute unrest
of the becoming of these two determinations [actuality and possibility] is
contingency. But just because each immediately turns itself into its
opposite, equally in this other it simply unites with itself, and this identity of
both, of one in the other, is necessity’ (SL, 545/6:206).
As Houlgate explains in his essay on this section, for Hegel, ‘although
being is immediacy and is there, it is not just that, but – in being what it is –
is in fact the process of emerging and of actualizing what it is’.28 Actuality,
in the vernacular sense of ‘the stuff that is’, is for Hegel simply immediacy.
Hegel has an expanded view in which actuality ‘is thus always the
actualizing of possibility; and possibility taken by itself is in its turn always
actuality that is not yet actualized, and so is the possibility of actuality’.29
The possibility of actuality is always also the possibility of non-
actualization – all possibility thus entails contingency. In Houlgate’s
reading, as ‘possibility must take the form of contingency, it is apparent that
not only contingency but also necessity arises from the ideas of actuality
and possibility’.30 What is this necessity? It is contingency.
This contingency does not denote a free-for-all. There is no abstract
contingency as such, only contingencies of possibilities defined by a state
of given conditions. A real possibility is defined by its ‘determination,
circumstances and conditions’ (SL, 547/6:208). Real possibility is posed
against a real actuality.
Now this is the posited whole of form, it is true, but of the form in its determinateness, namely,
of actuality as formal or immediate, and equally of possibility as an abstract in-itself. This
actuality which constitutes the possibility of something is therefore not its own possibility, but
the in-itself of another actual; it is only itself the actuality which ought to be sublated,
possibility as possibility only. Thus real possibility constitutes the totality of conditions, a
dispersed actuality which is not reflected into itself but is determined as being the in-itself, but
the in-itself of an other, and as meant to return back into itself. (SL, 547/6:209)

Or, as Houlgate explains ‘[b]ecause necessity has its source in what

possibility cannot but be, all that can be understood by necessity at this
point is the necessity of contingency’.31
If Hegel allows for contingent events in the realms of nature and history,
it does not necessarily follow that he allows for contingency within
concepts as well. It is conceivable that Hegel would allow for contingency
in world events but not in the nature of the concept. Further, Hegel
describes his logic as necessary. In the preface to the second edition of the
Science of Logic, he argues that philosophy displays thought ‘in its own
immanent activity or what is the same, in it its necessary development’ (SL,
31/5:19). Houlgate argues that a contingent thing only emerges from a
possibility necessarily: ‘since all contingent circumstances and condition
are themselves rooted in prior conditions and give rise to subsequent
conditions, it is clear that the whole course of contingency itself must be
necessary. But, if the whole course of contingency is necessary, then there
can be no real contingency in the world at all, since things, could not be
otherwise than they are.’32
As Houlgate acknowledges, this view of contingency would seem to
coincide with the most teleological readings of Hegel. For the purposes of
apocalyptic political theology, it would lend itself to the view that unseen or
impersonal forces are directing history towards a predetermined end. Yet
Houlgate makes clear that a further step is needed in order to comprehend
the relation between contingency and necessity. Insisting on the primacy of
necessity, in the manner suggested above, overlooks the contingency of
necessity: ‘specific “necessary occurrences” are contingent upon the
antecedent conditions, and the whole course of real necessity is itself
contingent upon what there actually is or happens to be as a whole. Indeed,
the whole course of real necessity is simply what there actually and
contingently is.’33
This brings Houlgate to a conclusion that resonates with my earlier
discussion of nature and freedom. Hegel’s understanding of freedom is
constituted by a negation of nature. The realization of that freedom is a
contingent event. Real necessity describes the realization of possibilities in
nature. So, rather than being a determinist, Hegel ‘is in fact simply a realist
who thinks that the world takes the contingent course it takes until human
beings intervene and tease out new possibilities from the conditions they
encounter – possibilities which are actually contained in those conditions,
but which would not be actualized without human intervention’.34 The
interactionist ontology discussed in
Chapter 1 calls for extending the capacity to reveal new possibilities beyond
the agency of humans, but the underlying point remains the same: freedom
consists of the transformation of the possibilities of the world. Apocalyptic
political theology focuses on the way that these transformations remained
trapped within the possibilities of the world unless they are rooted in the
world’s end.
There is still one more layer to Hegel’s understanding of contingency
and necessity – Hegel’s concept of absolute necessity. In the concluding
pages of the section on actuality, Hegel defines absolute necessity as ‘the
truth into which actuality and possibility as such, and formal and real
necessity withdraw . . . that being which in its negation, in essence, is self-
related and is being. It as much simple immediacy or pure being as simple
reflection-into-self or pure essence’ (SL, 552/6:215). In short, absolute
necessity is ‘immediate simplicity, it is being’ and this simple immediacy is
‘absolute negativity’ (SL, 552/6: 215). As Houlgate explains,
absolute necessity determines nothing other than the unavoidable fate of all contingent things,
namely that they will end. The paths laid down by absolute necessity and contingency thus do
not constitute two distinct sets of events in the world, but rather form one course of events
which, in one respect, is wholly contingent and dependent on what there actually is, and in
another respect, is structured by the absolute necessity of negation. Absolute necessity and
contingency do not stand in relation to one another, therefore, nor does one underlie the other;
rather, they are one and the same process.35

Absolute necessity is thus finitude – the passing away of all contingent

being. This necessity is not only a logical or formal necessity. The grasping
of the absolute necessity of the passing away of all finite things is a key
element of the development of human freedom. ‘The necessity that is
inherent in freedom is not just the formal necessity of contingency, nor just
the real necessity that follows from given conditions; nor is it sheer,
absolute necessity that just is because it is. It is a fourth form of necessity
that is internal to freedom itself – the necessity that there is because human
beings have the real capacity for free self-determination.’36
Houlgate ultimately concludes that humanity necessarily becomes self-
conscious and develops self-determining freedom because that is the nature
of humanity. Yet, the process of this development occurs through contingent
historical events. Nor is this form of necessity characterized by the
absoluteness that characterizes the necessity of the passing away of finite
things. Thus, ‘the necessity which is immanent in freedom and which is at
work in history cannot be all powerful, but must remain exposed to
contingencies that it does not control.’37 Necessity does not necessarily
endure. Hegel’s philosophy, in affirming the absolute necessity of finitude,
acknowledges that ‘self-conscious freedom in the state and civil society is
itself ultimately subject to the absolute necessity of destruction’.38 It is
undeniable that his more optimistic statements about the course of history
have had greater influence in the dominant interpretations of his philosophy,
but this solemn conclusion is nonetheless an unavoidable consequence of
his logic.
This brief summary of Houlgate’s treatment of contingency in Hegel
offers some resources for the immanentization of the apocalypse
constitutive of Taubes’s and Bloch’s political theology. There is an
emphasis on the contingency of the present form of human existence and a
break from any notion of impersonal forces of history bringing about a
promised utopia, millennium or heavenly community. Houlgate’s reading
makes clear that, for Hegel, everything must pass away.

Contingency all the way down?

John Burbidge offers an important alternative to Houlgate’s reading of the
same sections. In his reading he argues for a deeper contingency than
Houlgate. While I will show that he does not allow for the categorial
necessity required by Hegel, he develops the theme of contingency in a
series of formulations amenable to the apocalyptic reading of Hegel being
developed in this chapter. In Burbidge’s formulation, by the time the Logic
has advanced to the end of the section on actuality, the actuality has been
transformed, shifting from what is to one of many possible actualities.39
Burbidge not only announces this more fundamental contingency, he
claims that Hegel’s understanding of contingency is necessary for serious
philosophical engagement for history.
What distinguishes a theory that takes history seriously is that, within its purview, singular
actuals as novel and unique initiate general possibilities. These possibles as universals are not
considered to be necessary prior conditions, underlying what is ultimately significant in the
actual as individual. Rather, singular actuals provide the necessary condition for the universals
generated through reflection and debate. Prior to an action, these general possibilities have no
status at all. What uniquely happens is created – coming to be, as it were, out of nothing.40

For Burbidge, taking history seriously means beginning with the actual.
What is possible is determined by the actual, but not the actual as it
immediately appears. Philosophical thought, through its exposures of
contradictions, unveils possibilities previously hidden and exposes the
inherent finitude of any system, but these invisibilities are, in a sense,
necessary. ‘This is what is really necessary: this dynamic process where
contingencies emerge to disrupt totalities, introducing abrasion. The
resulting new universality cannot be anticipated, for it will emerge only
from the conflict. Yet it will, in Hegel’s final sense, be necessary as the end
result of the contingent processes. Such necessity can never be deduced a
priori from known prior conditions.’41 From the apocalyptic perspective,
the end of the world will have been necessary.
In pushing for a more fundamental level of contingency, Burbidge
connects self-consciousness’ awareness of this contingency to Hegel’s
discussion of the death of God in the later sections of the Phenomenology of
Spirit. He focuses his reading on §785, shortly before the transition from
revealed religion to absolute knowing. Just prior to this key section, Hegel
discusses ‘the coming into existence of God’s individual self-consciousness
as a universal self-consciousness’ through Christ’s sacrifice (PS, §784:
475/570). The death of God as ‘man’, ‘is abstract negativity, the immediate
result of the movement which ends in spiritual self-consciousness’ (PS,
§784: 475/570).
Burbidge picks up Hegel’s argument as Hegel explains the implications
of this transition:
The death of the Mediator is the death not only of his natural aspect or of his particular being-
for-self, not only of the already dead husk stripped of its essential notion, but also of the
 abstraction of the divine notion . . . The death of this representational thought contains,
therefore, at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine notion which is not posited
as self. The death is the painful feeling of the Unhappy Consciousness that God Himself is
dead . . . This feeling is, in fact, the loss of substance and of its appearance over against
consciousness; but it is at the same time the pure subjectivity of substance, or the pure certainty
of itself which it lacked when it was object, or the immediate, or pure essence. This knowing is
the inbreathing of the spirit, whereby Substance becomes subject, by which its abstraction and
lifelessness have died, and Substance therefore has become actual and simple and universal
self-consciousness. (PS, §785: 476)42

The experience of the death of God is essential to the emergence of absolute

knowing from representational thought. It is only by virtue of this
experience that ‘spirit is self-knowing spirit’ (PS, §786: 476/419). Though
Burbidge does not emphasize the point, the link between contingency and
the experience of the death of God starts from the representational
understanding of religion. The death of God, the significance of the story of
Christ, is the historical enactment of the relationship between the universal,
particular and singular. The death of God as mediator is ‘the death of the
abstraction of the divine essence: the death of the absolutely reliable,
transcendent standard that made life worth living, the death of everything
the self has stood for and everything that has defined the meaning of
existence’.43
The crucifixion is the death of any transcendent guarantor. It represents
the collapse into immanence. While Burbidge does not develop this line of
thought, the resurrection and Pentecost come to represent the birth of the
community of spirit that assumes the task of freedom – the rational self-
determination at the heart of Sittlichkeit.
[I]t is precisely this dissolution of all stability that heralds the possibility of absolute knowing.
This goal of all epistemology can no longer be a confident claim to certain conclusions, nor a
comprehension of everything in its essence. It can only be a flux, pure subjectivity, aware of
the past that has brought it to the present, accepting the present as the dynamic life it can only
enjoy, but leaving open the future. Though the next stages will emerge from the present, there
are no essentials that will have to be maintained. Any aspect may be put in question.
Contingencies will surprise us.44

As Burbidge considers the significance of this understanding of

contingency, the connection to apocalyptic thought becomes even clearer:
 [S]omeone comes along who is not content to fit into the status quo, who sees very clearly the
failures and the inadequacies of the current state of affairs, and who is moved to act. Passion
erupts in the committed action of the few who are grasped by the demands of the age; and
whose station places them at a critical juncture. They plunge forward, threatening the fragile
stability of the social order. Where that happens, and where their passionate acts articulate the
unexpressed restlessness of many others, history is ruptured. The comfortable social order is
recognized as one-sided, needing correction. But correction does not come piecemeal. Order
shatters in revolutionary turmoil. Rebellion evokes resistance and counter attack. Even if the
challenge is ultimately defeated, the future will never be like the past. For the new social order
will have built into its fabric new conventions that do justice to those passions worn out in the
struggle.45

This level of disruption, the explosiveness of unexpressed restlessness,

escapes the limits of social reasoning. Burbidge’s reading does not close off
the role of social reasoning. It includes those processes, but sets them atop
an absolutely contingent ground. It is the contingency of this ground that is
at the heart of apocalyptic fervour. It is possible that it could all be different.
Yet, Burbidge makes clear that contingency is not synonymous with
randomness. As he argues elsewhere, the novel is novel only with respect to
what precedes it. The comparison establishing novelty is thus a
determination establishing continuity between the new and the old. ‘History
develops; it does not haphazardly skip to unrelated stages.’46 Apocalypses
are always specific endings. The relationship between the actual, possible,
contingent and necessary is only manifested in the movement of thought. To
use Hegel’s language from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘the
whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its
development. Of the absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result,
that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its
nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself’ (PS,
§20: 11/24). For Burbidge, this arriving at the result never ceases.
While Houlgate and Burbidge initially appear to offer quite similar
accounts of the role of contingency in Hegel’s Logic, they differ in regard to
the depth of this contingency. For Houlgate, it is not contingent that there is
anything at all or that humanity knows the way it knows, only that things
are the way they are. For Burbidge, Hegel’s contingency is more pervasive.
This point of contention is also at the centre of the difference between
Markus Gabriel’s and Žižek’s reading of contingency in German Idealism.
Žižek, like Burbidge, sees contingency at the heart of Hegel’s openness to
the future. ‘What if the wager of [Hegel’s] dialectic is not to adopt the
“point of view of finality” toward the present viewing it as if it were already
past, but, precisely, to reintroduce the openness of the future into the past, to
grasp that-which-was in its process of becoming, to see the contingent
process which generated existing necessity?’47 He also presents a similar
understanding of the relationship between contingency and necessity,
arguing that ‘the very process through which necessity arises out of
necessity is a contingent process.’48 And like Burbidge, this contingency
goes all the way down.
Only if the encompassing unity is contingency can we claim the subject’s discovery of
necessary truth is simultaneously the (contingent) constitution of this truth itself, that to
paraphrase Hegel, the very return to (rediscovery of) eternal Truth generates this truth. So, far
from being an “essentialist” who develops the entire content out of the necessary self-
deployment of the notion, Hegel is – to use today’s terms – the ultimate thinker of autopoesis,
of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency, the thinker of
contingency’s gradual self-organization, of the gradual rise of order out of chaos.49

Žižek, then, shares Burbidge’s strong notion of contingency, in which

‘[n]ecessity is thus nothing but the “truth” of contingency, contingency
brought to its truth by way of (self-negation)’.50
Gabriel, on the other hand, agrees with Houlgate’s assessment that, for
Hegel, contingency has its limits. On the issue of contingency, this point
differentiates Hegel and Schelling. Hegel includes contingency, but there is
a necessity to the logical system, the categories, which comprehend that
contingency. For Schelling, however, it could all be different, or not be at
all.51 Put alternatively, Hegel has a concept of absolute necessity but not
absolute contingency. The form of being is necessary and this form includes
the necessary passing from being to nothing of the various contingent
contents that fill that form.

Conclusion
The reading of Hegel developed here finds the greatest resonance with
Burbidge’s reading but with the qualification that contingency cannot
extend all the way down to Schelling’s depths. As Houlgate explains,
modern subjects
bring our own categories to bear on our experience and view nature and history through these
categories just as any civilization does. The categories we employ – or at least should employ –
are, as we have seen, categories such as freedom, development and self-determination. But
these categories are not just conventional categories; they are not just the product of
technological changes or of ‘paradigm shifts’ which are ultimately a matter of chance . . . The
categories of modern consciousness are historical products, but they are not therefore
intrinsically limited categories because they are the categories through which we have become
fully aware of our historicity and freedom.52

These categories are necessary, though the historical path to the derivation
of those categories is contingent. These categories are necessary for being
self-conscious of the historical character of human activity at this moment
in history. They are categories necessary for understanding the present.
They do not exhaust that present. It is important to remember that
annihilation, for all of its destructiveness, is still a possibility of the world.
It is simply the only possibility that opens up the possibility of the
emergence of new possibilities.
With this one qualification from Houlgate, however, Burbidge offers a
thorough reading of Hegel’s notion of contingency, stemming from readings
of both the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit, leading to an
open understanding of the future and drawing upon Hegel’s understanding
of religion. The reading of Taubes and Bloch developed in the previous
chapter, along with Malabou’s understanding of plasticity, is granted greater
conceptual clarity when supported by Burbidge. This clarity is especially
evident with regard to Bloch’s concepts of the not-yet and concrete utopia,
and the synthesis of Taubes and Malabou in plastic apocalypticism.
Contingency clarifies the relationship between the not-yet and concrete
utopia. As Bloch explains, concrete utopia differs from more traditional
forms of utopianism.
Concrete utopia is therefore concerned to understand the dream of its object exactly, a dream
which lies in the historical trend itself. As a utopia mediated with process, it is concerned to
 deliver the forms and contents which have already developed in the womb of present society.
Utopia in this no longer abstract sense is thus the same as realistic anticipation of what is good;
which must have become clear. There is a processive-concrete utopia in both basic elements of
the reality discerned by Marxism: in its tendency, the tension of what is due though hindered,
and in its latency, the correlate of the not yet realized objective-real possibilities in the world.
(PH, 2: 623)

As noted in the last chapter, Taubes dismisses Bloch’s utopianism. This

dismissal is understandable – the Principle of Hope’s encyclopaedic survey
of symbols of hope, at times, seems excessive. The underlying theory of
concrete utopia, however, is an apocalyptic rendering of the relationship
between the actual, possible and contingent. It is the contingency of what is
that justifies the belief that it could be different. Taubes’s acknowledgement
of the more tenuous relationship between the potential nihilistic and
messianic forms of embracing contingency provides a balance to Bloch’s
optimism, but Bloch’s concrete utopia allows for a kind of strategizing that
does not directly arise from Taubes. Put another way, Taubes offers an
important survey of the situation and considerations of the consequences of
actions while Bloch more directly demands action within the situation.
For Bloch, this orientation to the future is not divorced from one’s
relationship to the past. As Žižek explains, this requires the application of
the concept of contingency to the philosophy of history. The resulting
understanding of history is remarkably similar to Bloch’s notion of non-
contemporaneity:
the task of a true Marxist historiography is not to describe the events the way they really were
(and to explain how these events generated the ideological illusions that accompanied them);
the task is rather to unearth the hidden potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) which
was betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian
market capitalism).53

This parallel becomes even clearer when Žižek describes the cunning of
reason as functioning ‘to explain how these betrayed radical-emancipatory
potentials continue to “insist” as historical “specters” that haunt the
revolutionary memory . . . so that the later proletarian revolution should
also redeem (lay to rest) these past ghosts. These alternative versions of the
past which persist in a spectral form constitute the ontological “openness”
of this historical process.’54
Bloch’s concrete utopia is thus an aspiration arising from a consideration
of the non-contemporaneousness of the present situation. In more Hegelian
language, concrete utopia is the utopian impulse rooted in actuality. This
actuality is one characterized by the absolute necessity of contingency. The
possibility of novelty, the apocalyptic potential, emerges from actuality, not
from beyond. Apocalypticism, in this understanding, does not await the
transcendent but engages in the act of transcending.55 As Burbidge
explains,
whenever we consider the actual world as a totality on its own, we find it to be a world within
which determinate actualities emerge and become necessary and sufficient conditions for other
actualities, but whatever does in fact emerge is permeated by contingency. This is the nature of
necessity when we consider the total picture – what Hegel calls ‘absolute necessity’ – and it
requires, as a defining feature of its complex dynamic, that there be contingencies.56

Grasping this actuality returns the conversation to Malabou’s

understanding of plasticity. Plasticity denotes the manners of change
conceivable within the contingency of necessity. That is, given that
everything could be different (except the categories), plasticity announces
the modes of transformation that may occur. Things may be moulded
through processes of reform or exploded through apocalyptic movements.
Both will result in the emergence of new forms in a process of perpetual
transformation.57 This consistency of form as such, though the form of form
may change, is derived from the materialism common to Taubes and
Malabou. There is only this world, this actuality. Given the contingency of
that actuality, new organizations of that actuality may come, but it will
involve the re-organization of the material that is now.
This re-organization, as Malabou shows, requires going beyond gradual
transformations to grasp destructive plasticity. Contingent does not mean
arbitrary and the disruption of what has become necessary is cataclysmic.58
It is the end of the world. Or rather it is the ending of a world, but a world
which can only appear as the world. Malabou has been critical of the
messianic obsession with ending, but apocalyptic ending is ‘not the end of
time itself’.59 Rather, it seeks to think in the wake of the ‘collapse of
messianic structures’, no longer having anything ‘to do with the tenacious,
incurable desire to transform what has taken place’ (OA, 88–9). The
possibilities of novelty beyond such transformations are necessarily
traumatic.
This discussion of Malabou, Taubes and Hegel results in a notion of
plastic apocalypticism. Malabou’s understanding of plasticity as the ability
to give form, to receive form and to annihilate form provides additional
philosophical resources for thinking about the nature of apocalypticism. Her
reading of Hegel offers a way of conceiving of novelty within the immanent
plane. This understanding of plasticity is strikingly similar to Taubes’s
definition of apocalypticism. When read in light of Hegel’s understanding
of necessity and contingency, it becomes possible not only to see, with
Taubes, the possibility of it all going down but also to insist that it may,
eventually, have been necessary.
 5

Pessimism and hope in apocalyptic living

This book began with an account of the world and has subsequently worked
through Hegel, Taubes and Malabou to think about that world’s end. While
apocalypticism has historically been associated with the breaking in of a
transcendent power that simultaneously reveals the divine truth and
destroys the world, Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, together, provide a way of
thinking apocalyptically without that transcendence. Through concepts of
plasticity and contingency, it becomes possible to consider a resolutely
negative orientation to the world, focused on the possibility of possibilities
not of that world. This immanent account of novelty provides a peculiar
kind of hope. There is the possibility of something different, but that
possibility requires passing through annihilation.
In the first chapter I identified a series of questions that accompany
apocalypticism. While the ensuing chapters have addressed questions about
the nature of political theology, true novelty without transcendence and the
fact that this novelty necessarily is accompanied by destruction, it remains
to be seen what ‘disinvesting in the world as it is’ means for life in that
world. How does one live in a world that must end? How does a process of
active disinvestment in the world function? To begin to answer these
questions, I draw on the conceptual resources of plastic apocalypticism
while engaging with the queer theory of Lee Edelman and Frank B.
Wilderson III’s Afro-Pessimism. The result is not a set of answers but
perhaps the beginning of a strategy for living negatively.

Living with the absence of alternatives

The most frequent challenge to apocalyptic ideas, after the problem of
violence, is the question of alternatives. If the world is so bad, what does a
good world look like and how might it be brought about? The underlying
assumption is that there is an ethical or political duty to provide a concrete
plan for how things will be different in this new world.
In responding to this challenge, it is important to begin by reiterating
that the rejection of the world does not require insisting that nothing good
has ever happened in the world. Schmitt, in the course of his critique of
liberalism, makes this point.
There are certainly not many people today who want to renounce the old liberal freedoms,
particularly freedom of speech and the press. But on the European continent there are not many
more who believe that these freedoms still exist where they could actually endanger the real
holders of power. And the smallest number still believe that just laws and the right politics can
be achieved through newspaper articles, speeches at demonstrations, and parliamentary
debates.1

Liberalism, modernity and the Enlightenment have produced

understandings of rights, freedom and equality that are undeniably valuable.
Yet, at the same time, it is far from clear that these philosophical traditions
are the only ones capable of producing such understandings or that their
distinctive conceptualizations of rights, freedoms and equality are capable
of addressing the structuring antagonisms of the world. For Schmitt, the
defence of these traditions can also function as a distraction as they ‘wear
down great enthusiasm into chatter and intrigue and kill the genuine
instincts and intuitions that produce a moral decision’.2 To succumb to the
demand for alternatives is to become trapped by affirmation and to get lost
in the chatter and intrigue. Put another way, it is to reinvest in this world
through faith in its possibilities.
The narrative of these improvements is not as straightforward as it may
initially seem. One way of reading ‘progress’ in history is to argue that the
legal and political orders that operate in the world have resulted in
important developments: greater rights from women, increased tolerance of
a wide range of sexual orientations and decreased racially motivated
violence and discrimination. Surely, these victories are evidence that these
legal and political orders work? They are the preconditions of emancipation
rather than obstacles to its realization.3 Again, rejecting the world does not
mean overlooking those important developments, the concrete differences
they have made in the lives of people or the sacrifices through which those
developments were wrought. Yet it is nonetheless possible to read this
‘progress’ in a different way. These developments were not the result of
straightforward legal appeals and political processes, but a complex mixture
of these approaches alongside violence, violation of the law and political
revolution. The eventual accommodation is an example of the katechon at
work. Abstract gender and racial equality can be achieved provided that
concrete equality remains taboo. The state as the agent of abolition is better
than slaves being the authors of their own liberation. Greater acceptance of
homosexuality is possible provided that this homosexuality is not too queer.
Preserving marriage and the nuclear family is worth the risk of expanding
who has access to those institutions. Changes will be allowed so long as
order is preserved and chaos is contained. These accommodations, to those
who oppose them, may initially seem to be defeats. In truth, the opposite is
the case. Ultimately, they are reaffirmations of the power of that legal and
political order.4 The end of slavery can now be celebrated at the expense of
the shame that slavery ever existed in the first place. Previous injustices can
be recast as a misapplication of principles now corrected through the same
political order that re-establishes itself as the arbiter of justice.
Arguing against these legal and political orders is not an opposition to
greater rights for women, increased tolerance of a wide range of sexual
orientations and decreased racially motivated violence and discrimination.
Rather, this opposition is motivated by the desire for concrete rather than
abstract equality and for the possibility of relationships no longer dictated
by what Butler famously names the heterosexual matrix.5 If the world is
structured by the antagonisms of nature, capital, gender and race, however,
this concrete equality and these reconfigured relationships are not possible.
A world in which appropriation, distribution and production are no longer
fundamentally determined by this set of antagonisms is not a better world –
it is a different world.
 This insistence on the limitations of the world only returns the
conversation to the demand for alternatives. Apocalypticism refuses this
blackmail of affirmation from the outset. How can one offer an alternative
to the world from within the world? There are the only possibilities of the
world, and any attempt to formulate alternatives remains trapped by the
logic of that world.6 Apocalypticism does not assume that it is possible to
adopt a position ‘above our material complexity’ or to take ‘an angelic view
of the world’.7 Rather than offer a solution on the basis of this assumed
knowledge, it only offers a refusal. It ‘negates this world in its fullness’
(OE, 9).
Apocalypticism thus attempts to defend this negative position against
‘the trump card of affirmation’ – the question ‘[i]f not this, what?’8 This
question makes profound assumptions about the nature of this ‘this’. It is a
katechonic question, implying that the choices are between the gradually
improving or progressing world and an existence of violence and chaos.
The question elides that the world is already maintained by perpetual
violence that is often slow and invisible (to many). The choice is not
between violent destruction and peace, but between different distributions
of violence. As China Miéville writes, ‘We don’t have to have an
alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do . . . but if we don’t
that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a
serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end.’9 The
demand for alternatives assumes the ability to know what should be hoped
for and, indeed, how to best hope. Plastic apocalypticism is not a discourse
of articulated hopes, though. Rather, it is the hope in the possibility of being
able to one day hope. It is the conviction that the end is enough to hope in
without having to also articulate the beginning that will follow.
This refusal severs one of the links posited between apocalypticism and
totalitarianism. As discussed earlier, one objection to apocalyptic political
theology is that politics with apocalyptic origins results in the violent
imposition of a new world. Setting to one side the assumption that
theological origins somehow infect later political movements, the link
between some utopian visions of a new world and violence must be
acknowledged. Even in Thomas More’s version, utopia is the consequence
of conquest.10 The violence of plastic apocalypticism is not the violence of
imposing a new vision, though. Rather, the plastic apocalypticism
developed here distills apocalypticism to its negative essence. It is an
anarchic unleashing more than a planned imposition. Nothing is imposed
because there is not yet the position from which to think new beginnings.
For now, the end is enough.

Pessimism and surrender

If the demand for an alternative is one standard response to apocalyptic

ideas, the other is the accusation of self-indulgent pessimism and surrender.
Apocalypticism breeds quietism. Indeed, Taubes himself endorses a version
of this resignation. In his analysis of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he
summarizes the Apostle’s position as one that rejects the need for any kind
of revolution. What is the point if it is all going down anyway? Taubes
agrees with Paul, replying, ‘Demonstrate obedience to state authority, pay
taxes, don’t do anything bad, don’t get involved in conflicts’ (PT, 54). A
defence of apocalypticism and the accompanying pessimism thus requires a
notion of pessimism that is not merely surrender.
This defence of apocalyptic pessimism is particularly important as the
injunction to hope is reaching a new crescendo. These demands are often
accompanied by the condemnation of pessimism. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in
the Dark is emblematic in this regard: ‘the world often seems divided
between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s
more predictable, and in a sad way safer.’11 For Solnit, the position that
everything is horrible, while potentially a self-satisfying anti-authoritarian
position, is ultimately just the inversion of the notion that everything is or
will be fine.12 In opposition to this easy despair, she advocates a hope found
in contingency. The future remains unknown and actions, of individuals and
groups, can shape that future. Hope, in her view, lies between optimism and
pessimism. Both these options are passive – whether things will ultimately
be fine or it will all go down. Only hope entails action.13
 There is an active form of pessimism that can be contrasted with the
version that Solnit rejects.14 Both Edelman’s queer theory and Wilderson’s
Afro-Pessimism argue for forms of pessimism that are not merely
resignation. Neither Edelman nor Wilderson frame their work in terms of
political theology, but apocalyptic political theology can learn from the
resolute negativity that animates their positions.15 They both, in different
ways, reveal the difficulty of opposing the world. The fact that their
arguments are radical within and marginal to contemporary queer and Black
politics and theory is indicative of the extent to which the promise of the
world continues to be the source of hope. Both show the complexity of the
‘epistemological violence necessary to undo a social order’.16
Edelman argues for an anti-politics that rejects the absorption of the
queer into heteronormative forms of life. While mainstream activism
celebrates the increased visibility of LGBTQ people, gay marriage, the right
to adopt and, to varying extents, greater legal protection against
discrimination, Edelman highlights the cost of these victories. Queerness
has been captured. It has moved from the shadowy regions of parks and bus
stations into the bright light of pride parades with floats sponsored by banks
and fast-food restaurants.17 ‘Queer’ used to signify something dangerous –
a threat to family and society. The progress of the last few decades has been
achieved on the condition of disarmament.
Edelman is an example of someone who insists on continuing to fight,
not only against heteronormativity, but against the reproductive futurism
that he finds at the heart of its vision of subjectivity, family, social relations
and politics – a vision that he memorably describes as the ‘fascism of the
baby’s face’.18
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we
might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of
forging thereby some more perfect social order – such a hope, after all, would only reproduce
the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the
negativity of the queer – but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which
is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible,
inhumane.19
Edelman reiterates that this vision of queerness is not an oppositional
identity taken up to undo the dominant order. Such an oppositional identity
could too easily take on an inverted heroism, opposing that order so as to
save some aspect of it. Rather, Edelman argues that his rejection of the
future is offered ‘in opposition to politics as the governing fantasy of
realizing, in an always indefinite future’, some vision of reality.20 For
Edelman, the oppositional nature of this identity is essential. Queerness is
positional rather than substantive.21 The queer political gesture (rather than
gesture of queer politics) is to reject substantive political identity as such. In
embracing this position and rejecting the fantasy of identity, queerness
begins to disrupt the configuration of past, present and future represented
by the demand for endless reproduction. As Edelman points out, this
disruption begins with the rejection of actual biological reproduction. In
foregrounding non-productive sex, Edelman is refusing to invest in the
future.22 He is disinvesting from the world in the name of ‘having a life’.23
Edelman’s vision of a queer anti-politics is not without its issues. It can
look like indulgent individualism in the guise of radical resistance to the
Symbolic precisely at a moment when it seems more difficult than ever to
articulate collective visions of disruption.24 Abandoning the future can also
seem like a capitulation to a capitalist mode of time: history has ended and
all that remains is an endless cycle of alienated labour and consumption.25
These themes are taken up in José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopian response
to Edelman. Drawing on Bloch’s work, Muñoz agrees with Edelman’s
rejection of the world but argues that this queer refusal is accompanied by
‘an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’.26
Muñoz describes a queer negativity, but one which is more utopian than
what I am describing as Edelman’s queer apocalypticism. Put another way,
if Edelman offers an anti-utopian critique, Muñoz provides an anti-
antiutopianism. ‘Radical negativity, like the negation of negation, offers us
a mode of understanding negativity that is starkly different from the version
of the negative proposed by the queer antirelationist. Here the negative
becomes the resource for a certain mode of queer utopianism.’27 His queer
futurity is a response to the dangers of the political nihilism he finds in
Edelman.28 In keeping with his use of Bloch, Muñoz’s utopianism is not a
teleological advancing towards an already known end, however. Much as
with the earlier description of Hegel’s absolute, he argues utopia should be
understood as part of a method rather than a defined goal.29 Utopia is not
about the successful journey to a prescribed future but the process of failing
one’s way to the new. In that failure there is potentiality.30
There is also the question of whether or not Edelman’s attempt at
offering an account of queer negativity is capable of avoiding slipping back
into affirmation. Malabou argues that as ‘freedom becomes tied to the
possibility of saying yes to no. Absolute negation is thus affirmative in
principle’ (OA, 74). While it may be possible to maintain a ‘singular
insistence on jouissance’ and ‘forsakes all causes, all social action, all
responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms’,
what motivates this abandonment?31 The difficult work of forsaking is an
act of political self-destruction that refuses ‘enslavement to the future.’32
While Edelman is more adamant about what life is not rather than what it is,
there is in this declaration something like Muñoz’s notion of an open and
indeterminate potentiality.33
Malabou describes this as ‘the negative possibility’ (OA, 75). There is a
power to the negative that can be read as a peculiar form of hope. Not a
hope in the future but a hope in impossible possibilities of the present. Not
specific impossible possibilities but impossible possibilities as such. As the
concept of plasticity shows, annihilation is still a forming. There will be a
future. This future cannot be reproduced as it does not exist, nor can it be
produced as its conditions of possibility are not discernible in the present.34
Its condition of possibility is the end – it is a possibility indistinguishable
from annihilation. This is queer hope as disinvestment in the world. It is a
hope for the possibility of a future that requires first rejecting hope for the
future of the world. The unintelligibility of queer being does not abandon
hope of being understood, but refuses to be understood here and now.35
There is an impossible possibility of a queer futurity that ‘is animated by a
future desire only perceptible (“perhaps”) – not recognizable – now’.36
Rather than no future, there is no future for this. There is no future without
the passage through the apocalyptic trauma that provides the conditions for
the impossible possibility becoming possible.
This question of impossibility and possibility is also central to
Wilderson’s work. As Edelman is concerned with the structural position of
queerness, Wilderson is concerned with the positionality of Blackness. For
Edelman, the rejection of queerness is central to both the libidinal and
political economy of a capitalism that is heteronormative. For Wilderson,
the gratuitous violence and subjugation of Black bodies is even more
fundamental to these economies. The liberation of the worker, the
housewife and the queer, cannot be extended to the positionality of the
slave.37 ‘The Black’, for Wilderson, indicates an impossibility of the world.
This position is a form of anti-subjectivity.38 As already discussed in the
first chapter, he sees this impossibility, the exclusion of Blackness from the
human, as foundational to the world. Given the nature of this world, then
the only option is its rejection. ‘Where there are Slaves it is unethical to be
free.’39 One must refuse, to the extent that it is possible, to be reduced to
this world.
This pessimism about the possibility of inclusion in the world is not
mere resignation. It requires work, but it is not work for a solution. No
solution is possible. The demand for solutions is the same as the demand for
alternatives. The assumption is that one must have an answer to critique the
problem. Again, apocalypticism simply refuses this demand. Sometimes
refusing is all you can do. Even this refusal is not complete. Living
apocalyptically is the constant investigation of what it means to engage in
this refusing, of cultivating habits of refusal and of developing the capacity
to sustain this refusal as a mode of negatively being in the world.40 It is a
pure negativity, not interested in refusing in favour of a determinate
alternative. It is a willingness to see ‘an undoing . . . for its own sake’.41
This undoing is violent. It is the kind of change that requires plasticity of
the explosive kind. For Wilderson, life in the world is intimately attached to
violence. It is the only way that Blackness can refuse to be made an object.
A Black person can only appear ‘under the “cleansing” conditions of
violence. Only when real violence is coupled with representational
“monstrosity”, can Blacks move from the status of things to the status of . . .
of what, we’ll just have to wait and see.’42 The negation of the world is
always met with violence. It is therefore not a question of violence and non-
violence, but whose violence directed at whom and for what purpose. In
Saidiya V. Hartman’s conversation with Wilderson, she describes his
analysis of negation as ‘the captive’s central possibility for action, whether
we think of that as a radical refusal of the terms of the social order or . . . an
embrace of death’.43 For Wilderson, this life of negation is still life. ‘We
have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of
cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our life
(within our terrain of civil death) is bound up in claiming – sometimes
individually, sometimes collectively – the violence of which Fanon writes
about.’44 As Fanon shows, that violence cannot make a wrong world right,
nor can taking up violence be the direct and intentional creation of
genuinely new possibilities. Violent revolution, like all revolution, is still a
possibility of this world, but refusing the wrong world is not a peaceful
activity.45
Pessimism thus entails some resignation and some surrender of agency,
but what matters is what is resigned and what is surrendered. It is the
possibility of solutions to the problems of the world that is abandoned,
because it is the world itself that is the problem. Attempting to solve this
problem always entails taking up the mantel of agency or power as it is
defined by the world. Those who take up this mantel in order to solve the
problem are often unaware of the extent to which they are the problem
too.46
Edelman and Wilderson each offer a form of pessimism, an analysis of
anti-relational or non-relational positions and a consideration of the
implications for thinking about the world and its future. Solnit’s insistence
on hope still persists, however. After all, she is clear that hope is not a belief
that everything is going well or taking up tasks that seem destined for
success. One hopes for the good because it is good, not because it is
likely.47 In her vision, ‘[h]ope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a
door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment
even before that way is found or followed. Sometimes radicals settle for
excoriating the wall for being so large . . . rather than seeking a door.’48
Here, Solnit reaches a position that is nearing the apocalyptic version of
hope I have been developing. Indeed, she even draws upon Bloch in
outlining her definition of hope. Yet her hope is still a hope for a solution,
even if that solution is not necessarily conclusive and definitive. These
more tentative solutions, important though they may be, are still solutions
within the world. They are ultimately rendering the world structured by the
antagonisms of nature, capital, gender and race more tolerable.
The hope that Solnit is describing, from this perspective of a world
structured by antagonisms, are examples of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel
optimism. This is a hope that is dependent on an ‘attachment to
compromised conditions of possibility’.49 This hope provides the subject a
sense of being and purpose. To lose the object of hope is to risk dissolution,
groundlessness. Yet it is precisely this dissolution and groundlessness that
marks the possibility of new possibilities. Only after the hopes of this world
have been abandoned and the world itself has fallen away, will it be
possible to witness the emergence of new hope. To repeat what is now
becoming a refrain, the only hope is for an end and that hope is enough, for
now.
This active pessimism, a persistent refusal, is the non-quietist version of
disinvesting from the world. Not becoming fixated on the false hopes of the
world requires effort. One must have strategies for forging the kind of
autonomy that Bifo argues comes from refusal. ‘Do not take part in the
game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things,
do not hope.’50 Yet, even in his argument, as is often the case, the urge to
abandon hope is followed by a warning not to abandon the revolution, even
if that revolution is vague, unformed and far from sure of success.
An understanding of disinvestment drawing on Edelman and Wilderson
abandons even this hope. That does not amount to an abandonment of
agency or a form of resignation, however. Pessimism is not so much
resignation as the recognition that there is no possibility of victory. The
questions of agency and hope are incomplete questions. The real question is
the agency to do what? Hope for what? The task is neither to redeem the
present world nor to offer something new, but to recognize that this world is
not worth perpetuating and to find agency and hope in that act of
abandonment. There is still the possibility, though no guarantee, of finding
‘something beautiful or generative or sustaining in the pessimistic and the
negative’.51

Living towards the end of the world

This discussion of abandoning hope in the world inevitably returns to the

question of violence. Throughout this book I have argued that
apocalypticism does not have to entail the violent imposition of a vision of
a new world. While that desire has animated other political visions, a plastic
apocalypticism drawing on Hegel, Taubes and Malabou has a different
relationship to violence. On the one hand, it recognizes trauma as the
condition for the immanent emergence of novelty. On the other hand, it
does not seek to bring about this new. It operates with an awareness that any
attempt to bring about the fundamentally new can only be the realization of
possibilities of this world, a world whose possibilities continue the
antagonistic divisions that apocalypticism seeks to escape. As Malabou
argues, ‘Transformation is a form of redemption, a strange salvation, but
salvation all the same. By contrast, the flight identity forged by destructive
plasticity flees itself first and foremost; it knows no salvation or deception’
(OA, 12).
What is more, even if it were possible to envision the kind of act that
could result in a new world, such an act would lie beyond any ethical or
political justification. Such an event would be sufficiently cataclysmic that
to even desire such an event is itself problematic. The suffering of the world
is overwhelming, but its annihilation will be no better. Indeed, terms like
‘better’ no longer function in considerations of the apocalyptic. There is
only must. Yet, it is also problematic to not desire such an event, for to do
so is to will the continuation of the violence of the present. To oppose the
apocalyptic end is to desire the comfort of familiar forms of violence rather
than the uncertainty of the traumatically new. In this tragic dilemma, how is
one to live?
First, this life entails abandoning the hope of living rightly.52 The
possibility of solutions has been forsaken and now the hope for absolution
should be too. Clearly not all positions in the world bear the same
culpability for the world, but apocalypticism is not oriented towards the
desire to evade the blame that adheres to one’s position.
Second, apocalypticism is not the apocalypse. There may be no fiery
end. If the Anthropocene, as discussed in the first chapter, took some 150
years to arrive, the end of that era may come at a similar speed. The
violence of the world is often slow and the violence of its undoing may be
so as well.
Finally, the constant investigation of what it means to engage in this
refusing, of cultivating habits of refusal and of developing the capacity to
sustain this refusal as a mode of negatively being in the world may also not
be dramatic. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard (or Johannes de Silentio)
contrasts two opposing positions: the knight of infinite resignation and the
knight of faith. Both these positions are offered in the course of exploring
Abraham’s ethical dilemma and the theological suspension of the ethical.53
To explore the options of resignation and faith, Kierkegaard offers the
example of fated lovers, forbidden from realizing their love. The knight of
infinite resignation dwells in the pain and torment of the inability to be with
the one he loves.54 The knight can only sublimate his desire. It becomes
‘the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character,
would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough
denied the fulfilment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the
eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form’.55 The knight of
faith also experiences this pain and also goes through a process of
sublimation. Yet this knight goes one step further, declaring ‘I have faith
that I will get her – that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that
for God all things are possible.’56
Both these positions can be considered in relationship to apocalyptic
subjectivity. First, like the knight of infinite resignation, one can be
overwhelmed by the horror of his world and live into this horror. It can
become one’s experience of the entire world and even sublimated in
political or artistic ways. Second, like the knight of infinite faith, one can
preserve hope in the possibility of the impossible: the world could be
redeemed.
I am arguing for a third possibility: the knight of apocalyptic pessimism.
Both of Kierkegaard’s knights are assured of their desire. It is only the
means of realizing that desire that remain elusive. The knight of apocalyptic
pessimism has no such assurance. She does not seek to overcome the
obstacle to the object of her desire but rejects the world that is itself the
obstacle to desiring rightly. She does not trust that with God, all things are
possible – there is no God that acts in such ways and she is not interested in
the impossible becoming possible within the world. The knight of infinite
faith desires something that makes sense. The knight of apocalyptic
pessimism hopes the peculiar hope for the possibility of the impossible that
cannot be expressed in the grammar of the world.57
Yet, like the knight of faith, the knight of apocalyptic pessimism still
must exist in the world. There is nothing else to do. When Taubes describes
himself as not being ‘spiritually’ invested in the world, it is because there is
no other means of disinvesting. Part of the horror of the world is its
inescapability. Between the two knights, however, there is still a difference.
Kierkegaard’s knight of faith
finds pleasure in everything, takes part in everything, and every time one sees him participating
in something particular, he does it with an assiduousness that marks the worldly man who is
attached to such things. He attends to his job. To see him makes one think of him as a pen-
pusher who has lost his soul to Italian bookkeeping, so punctilious is he. Sunday is for him a
holiday. He goes to church. No heavenly gaze or any sign of the incommensurable betrays him;
if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the crowd,
for at most his hearty and powerful singing of the hymns proves that he has good lungs.58

Unlike this knight of faith, the knight of apocalyptic pessimism begins to

detach from ‘such things’. She is not like the knight of infinite resignation,
knowable by his ‘walk’, but she is no longer spiritually invested in the
world as it is.59 Kierkegaard’s description can be rewritten in the light of the
world that the knight of apocalyptic pessimism refuses. She votes, but
realizes that the institutions maintained by voting are also instruments of
oppression (better a little less oppression while awaiting the end). She seeks
ecological justice, but with the full knowledge that such justice is
inconceivable so long as there is a humanity conceived as relating to an
othered nature. She refuses patriarchy, all the while knowing that this
gesture occurs within a patriarchal world.
The knight of apocalyptic pessimism rejects the hope of politics. She
disinvests, but without any alternative investment possibilities. This
disinvestment is a form of anti-politics, but, as I argued in the first chapter,
some anti-politics is ultra-political. Alberto Toscano makes this point in his
discussion of Eric Hobsbawm’s analysis of millenarian movements.
Hobsbawm, having discussed a variety of modern political movements that
echo themes from medieval millenarianism, claims that these movements
are ‘pre-political’.60 Toscano reads this ‘pre-political’ as ‘ultra-political’.
Or, put differently, it is the ultra-political as pre-politics or the political
demand that exceeds any existing politics. ‘The world-denial and hope for
radical transformation that is the “archaic” response to capitalism as
cultural catastrophe and dispossession can also translate into an
“impractical and utopian” approach to politics.’61 It is this intensely
negative disposition and fervent utopian desire which mark out
millenarianism’s significance. ‘Paradoxically, the very fanaticism that
makes it difficult to identity their “rational political core” is, in the last
instance, their rational political core. Millenarian utopianism is a sui generis
political realism.’62 Likewise, apocalypticism, in its anti-politics, is an
expression of the impossibility of political action.
Living and thinking apocalyptically thus changes nothing and it changes
everything. This conclusion is unsatisfactory, but so is the world. It offers
no solutions, only practiced refusal. The knight of apocalyptic pessimism
can only await the end that must come, but does so knowing that the world
has an incredible ability to persist.
 The end

In a now infamous speech, former US President Jimmy Carter declared ‘a

crisis of confidence’. He claimed that this crisis ‘strikes at the very heart
and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing
doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of
purpose for our Nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is
threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.’63 He
went on to argue that this confidence was at the foundation of the American
project. ‘Confidence in the future has supported everything else – public
institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very
Constitution of the United States . . . We’ve always believed in something
called progress.’64 He argued that the loss of confidence in the future
disconnects Americans from their past. The consequences were profound –
declining productivity, evaporating faith, the loss of values and the
dissolution of the nuclear family. Carter was right. He saw brewing chaos
and urged America to function as katechon. The world depends on hope in
the future. The future is everything. The rejection of the future is a hope for
nothing – a hope for the end. But that is still a kind of hope.
In the course of this book, I have argued that there is an inescapable
world constituted by slow and invisible (to many) violence. This violence is
the violence of antagonisms, material and social, along the dividing lines of
nature, capital, gender and race. History has seen improvements along those
divisions – changes that have improved the lives of many. Yet, that does not
change the persistence of those antagonisms. The world has seen changes,
but the world itself has not changed. Such a change is impossible to think,
but it is possible to imagine the end. Drawing on a narrow conception of
political theology, I have sought to creatively reread the potential of
apocalyptic thinking. Drawing on Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, I have
argued for an apocalypse that is immanent, material and desired for its own
sake. I have concluded by exploring what it might mean to live
pessimistically and offering the figure of the knight of apocalyptic
pessimism, arguing that her directionless refusal can provide a model for
this peculiar form of hope. For, though hoping in the end is a strange and
difficult task, the end is enough. It is all there is. For now.
 Notes

Introduction

1 Carl 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.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 218.

1 Philosophy, Political Theology and the End of the World

1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George
Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 36.
2 Schmitt’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.
3 Schmitt, Political Theology, 45.
4 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.
5 This 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).
6 Schmitt’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).
7 Massimo 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).
8 Ted A. Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2015), 12.
9 Vincent Lloyd ‘Introduction’, in Race and Political Theology, ed. Vincent Lloyd (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2012), 5–9.
10 Michael 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).
11 Kirwan, Political Theology, xiii.
12 Andrew Shanks, Hegel’s Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
153.
13 It 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.
14 Take, 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.
15 Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage
Books, 2008).
16 Lilla, The Stillborn God, 8–9.
17 Lilla, The Stillborn God, 17–18.
18 Lilla 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.
19 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin,
2008).
20 Gray, Black Mass, 13.
21 Though Gray critiques revolutionary ideas and connects them to religious origins, he also
questions simplistic secular solutions (Black Mass, 366–8).
22 Anthony 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.
23 On 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.
24 Jayne Svenungsson, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the
Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), xiii.
25 Svenungsson, Divining History, 12.
26 Svenungsson, 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.
27 Svenungsson, 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).
28 While 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.
29 Svenungsson, Divining History, 195.
30 This 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.
31 For 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).
32 Markus 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’.
33 The 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’.
34 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 67.
35 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 327.
36 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 78.
37 Schmitt, 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).
38 See G. L. Ulmen’s introduction to Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 23.
39 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 44–5.
40 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 44–8.
41 As 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.
42 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 78.
43 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 59–60.
44 Julia Hell, ‘Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future’, The
Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 84, no. 4 (2009): 290.
45 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 178.
46 Hell, ‘Katechon’, 310.
47 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 51–2.
48 Hell, ‘Katechon’, 289–93.
49 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 28.
50 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 33. See Hell, ‘Katechon’, 292–3.
51 Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical
Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 180.
52 Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 355.
53 Charles 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.
54 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 6.
55 For 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.
56 Steffen et al., ‘Anthropocene’, 849–50.
57 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene
Narrative’, Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 63.
58 Jason 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.
59 Moore, ‘End of Cheap Nature’, 288.
60 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’, Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1
(2014): 11.
61 Dipesh 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.
62 In 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.
63 Throughout 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.
64 Malm and Hornborg, ‘Geology of Mankind?’, 66–7.
65 Schmitt 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).
66 Silvia 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).
67 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74.
68 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74–5.
69 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75.

70 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 74.

71 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97.

72 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97.

73 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97.

74 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75.

75 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 86–9.

76 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 194.

77 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 184. Emphasis in original.

78 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 164–5.

79 Karen 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).

80 Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in

the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2014), 76.

81 Federici, 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).

82 In 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).

83 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 200.

84 Federici, 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).
85 Federici, 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.

86 Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11.
87 See, for example, Jared Sexton’s ‘The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and
Black Optimism’, Intensions 5 (2011): 1–47.
88 Wilderson, 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]).
89 As 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).
90 Wilderson, 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.
91 Nancy 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.
92 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 58.
93 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986),
87.
94 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87.
95 Wilderson 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.
96 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 20.
97 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 337; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 71.
98 Sexton, ‘The Vel of Slavery’, 7.
99 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 103.
100 Tuana, ‘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.
101 This 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.
102 Tuana, ‘Viscous Porosity’, 188 (italics in original). Tuana’s approach thus echoes Latour’s call
to ‘rematerialize our belonging to the world’ (Facing Gaia, 219).
103 Malm and Hornborg, ‘Geology of Mankind?’, 66.
104 While 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.
105 Malm and Hornborg, ‘Geology of Mankind?’, 63.
106 Anna 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.
107 Tuana’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.
108 Tuana, ‘Viscous Porosity’, 189.
109 This 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.
110 Angelica 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.
111 Nuzzo, ‘Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation’, 1.
112 Johnston’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).
113 Heidegger 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.
114 Martin 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.
115 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans.
William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185.
116 Philip 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.
117 Haslanger, Resisting Reality, 213.
118 This 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.
119 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideway Reflections (London: Profile, 2008), 8.
120 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011), 2.
121 On 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.
122 Federici 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.
123 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 5.
124 As 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.
125 Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, 181.
126 Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Cohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 144.
127 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 2.
128 Fredric 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).
130 Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo
Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 122.
131 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
132 Malm, Fossil Capital, 39–40.
133 Latour 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).
134 Roland 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.
135 Roland Boer, Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009), 18.
136 Boer, Political Myth, 19.
137 Boer, Political Myth, 19.
138 Boer, Political Myth, 19.
139 Boer, Political Myth, 20.
140 John 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).
141 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 13.
142 Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality (London: Verso, 1999),
48.
143 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 13.
144 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 71.
145 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 61–2.
146 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 83.
147 See Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early
Christianity (London: SPCK, 1985).

2 Implicit Political Theology: Reading Hegel’s Philosophy of

Religion

1 Hegel’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.
2 There 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.
3 Norman 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.
4 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 22–32.
5 Yonina 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.
6 Thom 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).
7 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 307.
8 McGinn, Visions of the End, 126–30.
9 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 109.
10 Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in
the 19th Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 12.
11 Indeed, 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.
12 Reeves and Gould, Joachim of Fiore, 2–3.
13 Cf. 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).
14 Indeed, 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.
15 Daniel Bell, End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: Free
Press, 1960), 285.
16 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical
Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993), 288.
17 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), 109.
18 Löwith, Meaning in History, 1.
19 Löwith, Meaning in History, 1.
20 Löwith, Meaning in History, 54.
21 Löwith, Meaning in History, 57.
22 Löwith, Meaning in History, 57–9.
23 Löwith, Meaning in History, 151.
24 Löwith, Meaning in History, 154.
25 Löwith, Meaning in History, 158.
26 Löwith 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.
27 Ferdinand 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.
28 Taubes 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.
29 Svenungsson, Divining History, 37.
30 It 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.
31 Taubes 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.
32 Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 244.
33 In 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.
34 Pinkard, 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).
35 Quentin Lauer, Hegel’s Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982),
34.
36 Hodgson 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.
37 My emphasis.
38 It 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.
39 Malcolm 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.
40 Clark, Logic and System, xi.
41 Magnus 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.
42 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 9.
43 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 181. My emphasis.
44 Clark, Logic and System, 38.
45 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 34.
46 Clark, Logic and System, 128.
47 Clark, Logic and System, 40.
48 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 33.
49 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 33.
50 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 213.
51 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 31.
52 Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 2.
53 Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 116.
54 This 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).
55 Thomas A. Lewis, ‘Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion in Recent
Hegel Scholarship’, Religion Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 571.
56 George 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.
57 In 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).
58 Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 156.
59 John 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.
60 Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 78.
61 Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 96.
62 Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel, 97.
63 Thomas 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.
64 Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the Phenomenology of
Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 91–2.
65 Karl 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).
66 My emphasis.
67 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 538.
68 Lewis 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).
69 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 209.

3 Spiritual Disinvestment: Taubes, Hegel and Apocalypticism

1 The 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.
2 There 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.
3 Aleida 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.
4 Anson 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.
5 Bloch 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.
6 Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 101.
7 Mohler 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).
8 In 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).
9 Jacob 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.
10 Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 177.
11 Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 178, my emphasis.
12 Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 188.
13 Vattimo 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.
14 Jacob 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).
15 Taubes, ‘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).
16 Anthony 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).
17 Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity: The Jewish Perspective’, New Blackfriars 94, no. 1050
(2013): 189.
18 Bielik-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).
19 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191.
20 Taubes, ‘Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism (1971)’, 67.
21 Mike 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.
22 Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xxiv.
23 Jacob 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.
24 Tina 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.
25 Jacob 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.
26 Taubes, ‘Culture and Ideology (1969)’, 265.
27 Karl 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.
28 Taubes, ‘Theodicy and Theology’, 178.
29 Taubes, ‘Culture and Ideology (1969)’, 264.
30 Jean 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.
31 Adrian Johnston, ‘Points of Forced Freedom: Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism’,
Speculations IV (2013): 94.
32 Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), xxiii.
33 This 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.
34 Jacob 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.
35 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 192.
36 Bielik-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.
37 Svenungsson, Divining History, 22–3.
38 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 193.
39 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 196.
40 Bielik-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).
41 The 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.
42 Rabinbach 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).
43 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 198.
44 ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 85.
45 Rabinbach, ‘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.
46 Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse’, 87.
47 Rabinbach, ‘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).
48 This ambiguity is also addressed in his discussion of connections between National Socialism
and German mystic and pagan traditions (HT, 48–62).
49 On 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.
50 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191.
51 See 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’.
52 Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xvii.
53 Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’, xi.
54 Marx, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, 489.
55 Grimshaw, ‘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.
56 Karin 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.
57 In 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).
58 Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4.
59 Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 23.
60 de Boer, ‘Democracy Out of Joint?’, 39.
61 As 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).
62 This 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.
63 Wolf-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.
64 Johnston’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.
65 Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis,
and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
66 Karl 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.
67 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 275.
68 Indeed, 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.
69 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 191.
70 Taubes, ‘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.
71 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 235.
72 This 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).
73 See, in particular, his ‘Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising
Materialism’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 19 (2008): 166–88.
74 Taubes, ‘Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism (1963)’, 30.
75 Boer, Criticism of Heaven, 451.

4 Plastic Apocalypticism

1 Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity: The Jewish Perspective’, New Blackfriars 94, no. 1050
(2013): 191.
2 In 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).
3 While 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.
4 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 13.
5 Aleida 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.
6 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), 208.
7 Taubes, ‘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.
8 Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 210.
9 Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 210–11.
10 Jacob 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.
11 Taubes, ‘Notes on Surrealism (1966)’, 107.
12 Taubes, ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method (1954)’, 208.
13 My emphasis.
14 It 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).
15 Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality (London: Verso, 1999),
104.
16 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 109.
17 Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 25.
18 Bielik-Robson, ‘Modernity’, 193.
19 Malabou 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).
20 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History
(Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1949), 54–9.
21 Non-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.
22 John 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.
23 Bloch 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).
24 Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 61.
25 See also Bloch’s discussion of transcending without the ‘transcendent-hypostasizing’ in his
earlier sections on the development of biblical hermeneutics (AC, 39).
26 Ben Anderson, ‘ “Transcending without Transcendence” Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope’,
Antipode 38, no. 4 (2006): 700.
27 See 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.
28 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 38.
29 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 39.
30 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 41.
31 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 42.
32 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 43.
33 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 44.
34 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 45.
35 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 47.
36 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 48.
37 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 49.
38 Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 49.
39 John 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/.
40 Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 12.
41 Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 9.
42 Translation modified from Miller’s.
43 Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 64.
44 Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 62.
45 Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 6.
46 John 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.
47 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 464.
48 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 467.
49 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 467.
50 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 468.
51 Gabriel, 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).
52 Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, 24.
53 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 464.
54 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 464.
55 As 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).
56 Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, 48.
57 Others 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).
58 Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 106.
59 Clayton Crockett and Catherine Malabou, ‘Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and
Theology’, Political Theology 11, no. 1 (2010): 30.

5 Pessimism and Hope in Apocalyptic Living

1 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988), 50.
2 Schmitt, Crisis of European Democracy, 71.
3 Jayne Svenungsson, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the
Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 176.
4 Saidiya 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).
 5 Judith 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).
6 Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical
Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 181–2.
7 Svenungsson, Divining History, 178.
8 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004), 4.
9 China 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.
10 Thomas More, Utopia (London: Verso, 2016), 72–3.
11 Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Edinburgh: Canongate
Books, 2016), 20.
12 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 20.
13 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, xii.
14 It 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).
15 To 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.
16 James 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.
17 On 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).
18 Edelman, 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.
19 Edelman, No Future, 4.
20 Edelman, No Future, 17.
21 Edelman, No Future, 25.
22 Non-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.
23 Edelman, No Future, 30.
24 Nina Power, ‘Non-Reproductive Futurism: Rancière’s Rational Equality against Edelman’s
Body Apolitic’, Borderlands 8, no. 2 (2009): 15.
25 Power, ‘Non-Reproductive Futurism’, 2.
26 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
27 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 13.
28 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 83.
29 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 91.
30 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 175.
31 Edelman, No Future, 48, 101.
32 Edelman, No Future, 30.
33 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 7.
34 On the queer hope enabled by non-reproductive futurity, see Bliss, ‘Hope Against Hope’.
35 Kara 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.
36 Keeling, ‘Looking for M – ’, 578.
37 Wilderson, 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.
38 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 9.
39 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 49.
40 Howard 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).
41 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 338.
42 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 66.
43 Hartman and Wilderson, ‘The Position of the Unthought’, 187.
44 Hartman and Wilderson, ‘The Position of the Unthought’, 187.
45 Fanon’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.
46 George 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).
47 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 11.
48 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 22.
49 Lauren Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’, New Formations: A Journal
of Culture/Theory/Politics 63 (2007): 33.
50 Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015), 225.
51 Bliss, ‘Hope Against Hope’, 94.
52 It 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).
53 I 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.
54 In Kierkegaard’s telling of his story, the knight is male, so I am preserving his gendered
language.
55 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Repetition, trans. Howard V. Kong and Edna H. Kong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 43.
56 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 46.
57 For this notion of the expressible within the world, see Barber, ‘World-Making and
Grammatical Impasse’.
58 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 39.
59 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 38.
60 E. 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’.
61 Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), 48.
62 Toscano, Fanaticism, 49.
63 Jimmy 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).
64 Carter, ‘Address to the Nation’.
 Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott.
London: Verso, 2005.
Agrama, Hussein Ali. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern
Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman (eds). Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. ‘Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types’. In Race and Epistemologies of
Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 39–57. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2007.
Anderson, Ben. ‘ “Transcending without Transcendence”: Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope’.
Antipode 38, no. 4 (2006): 691–710.
Assmann, Aleida, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich. ‘Introduction to the German Edition’. In
From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason, by Jacob Taubes, edited
by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, xviii–l. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010.
Balakrishnan, Gopal. The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso, 2000.
Barber, Daniel Colucciello. ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’. Qui Parle: Critical
Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 179–206.
Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer
geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967.
Beattie, Tina. ‘Nothing Really Matters: A Bohemian Rhapsody for a Dead Queen’. In Theology after
Lacan: The Passion for the Real, edited by Marcus Pound, Clayton Crockett and Creston Davis,
34–57. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014.
Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1960.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by
Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Cohn, 141–5. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Critique of Violence’. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.
Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso, 2015.
Berger, Peter L. ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’. In The Desecularization of
the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter L. Berger, 1–18. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999.
Berlant, Lauren. ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’. New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 63 (2007): 33–51.
Bernasconi, Robert. ‘Hegel at the Court of Ashanti’. In Hegel after Derrida, edited by Stuart Barnett,
41–63. London: Routledge, 1998.
Bielik-Robson, Agata. ‘Modernity: The Jewish Perspective’. New Blackfriars 94, no. 1050 (2013):
188–207.
Bliss, James. ‘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):
83–98.
Bloch, Ernst. Heritage of Our Times, translated by Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice. Cambridge:
Polity, 1991.
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul
Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia, translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000.
Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, translated by J.
T. Swann, 2nd edn. London: Verso, 2009.
Blond, Phillip. ‘Introduction: Theology before Philosophy’. In Post-Secular Philosophy: Between
Philosophy and Theology, edited by Phillip Blond, 1–66. London: Routledge, 1998.
Boer, Roland. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books,
2009.
Boer, Roland. Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009.
Boer, Roland. ‘Review, Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology’. The Bible & Critical Theory 8, no. 2
(2012): 99–100.
Bredekamp, Horst. ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’. Critical Inquiry
25, no. 2 (1999): 247–66.
Brooks, Thom. Punishment. London: Routledge, 2012.
Brooks, Thom. ‘Ethical Citizenship and the Stakeholder Society’. In Ethical Citizenship: British
Idealism and the Politics of Recognition, edited by Thom Brooks, 125–38. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2009.
Bull, Malcolm. Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality. London: Verso, 1999.
Burbidge, John W. Hegel on Logic and Religion: The Reasonableness of Christianity. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1992.
Burbidge, John W. ‘Hegel’s Open Future’. In Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S.
Harris, edited by Michael Baur and John Edward Russon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1997.
Burbidge, John W. Hegel’s Systematic Contingency. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Burns, Michael O’Neill. ‘The Hope of Speculative Materialism’. In After the Postsecular and the
Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, edited by Anthony Paul Smith
and Daniel Whistler, 316–34. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Burns, Michael O’Neill. Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic. London:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Butler, Clark. ‘Hegel, Altizer and Christian Atheism’. Encounter 41 (1980): 103–28.
Butler, Clark. ‘Hegelian Panentheism as Joachimite Christianity’. In New Perspectives on Hegel’s
Philosophy of Religion, edited by David Kolb, 131–42. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
1999.
Cacciari, Massimo. The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology. London: Bloomsbury,
2018.
Caldwell, Peter C. ‘Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent Literature’. The Journal of
Modern History 77, no. 2 (2005): 357–87.
Carter, Jimmy. ‘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].
Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T & T Clark, 2002.
Caygill, Howard. On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–
222.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’. Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1
(2014): 1–23.
Clark, Malcolm. Logic and System: A Study of the Translation from ‘Vorstellung’ to Thought in the
Philosophy of Hegel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.
Coates, Sam, and Rachel Sylvester. ‘Being a Mother Gives Me an Edge on May – Leadsom’. The
Times, 9 July 2016. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/being-a-mother-gives-me-
edge-on-may-leadsom-0t7bbm29x [accessed 14 July 2017].
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Secker & Warburg, 1957.
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists
of the Middle Ages. London: Pimlico, 1993.
Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd
edn. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998.
Connolly, William E. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and
Democratic Activism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost (eds). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Cover, Robert. ‘Nomos and Narrative’. In Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert
Cover, edited by Martha Minow, Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat, 95–172. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1993.
Cowburn, Ashley. ‘Andrea Leadsom Attacked by Tory MPs over “Vile” and “Insulting” Comments
on Theresa May’s Childlessness’. The Independent, 10 July 2016. Available at:
http:/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/andrea-leadsom-theresa-may-vile-insulting-
children-conservative-leadership-tory-a7128311.html [accessed 14 July 2017].
Crockett, Clayton. Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after Liberalism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011.
Crockett, Clayton, and Catherine Malabou. ‘Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology’.
Political Theology 11, no. 1 (2010): 15–34.
Danowski, Deborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of the World, translated by Rodrigo
Nunes. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
de Boer, Karin. ‘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.
de Boer, Karin. ‘Democracy Out of Joint? The Financial Crisis in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right’. Hegel Bulletin 33, no. 2 (2012): 36–53.
de Boer, Karin. ‘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.
de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. Cannibal Metaphysics, translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated
by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
de Lubac, Henri. La Postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore: de Joachim à nos jours. Paris: Cerf,
2014.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’. In
Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’. In Margins of
Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 2006.
de Vries, Hent, and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds). Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-
Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.
Dickey, Laurence W. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Di Giovanni, George. ‘Faith without Religion, Religion without Faith: Kant and Hegel on Religion’.
Journal of the History of Philosophy 41, no. 3 (2003): 365–83.
Dooley, Mark. The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2001.
Dudley, William. ‘The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic’ (Review). Notre Dame
Philosophical Review (2006). Available at: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25128-the-future-of-hegel-
plasticity-temporality-and-dialectic/ [accessed 13 February 2013].
Dupré, Louis. ‘Religion as Representation’. In The Legacy of Hegel: Proceedings of the Marquette
Hegel Symposium 1970, edited by J. J. O’Malley, K. W. Algozin, H. P. Kainz and L. C. Rice, 137–
43. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004.
Eltis, David. ‘Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An
Interpretation’. The American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1399–423.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 1986.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2004.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn:
Autonomedia, 2004.
Federici, Silvia. ‘Wages Against Housework’. In Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction
and Feminist Struggle, 15–22. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.
Fraser, Nancy. ‘Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael
Dawson’. Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 163–78.
Gabriel, Markus. Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism. London: Continuum, 2011.
Gabriel, Markus. Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2015.
Gabriel, Markus. Why the World Does Not Exist, translated by Gregory Moss. Cambridge: Polity,
2015.
Gabriel, Markus, and Slavoj Žižek. Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German
Idealism. London: Continuum, 2009.
Gaston, Sean. The Concept of the World from Kant to Derrida. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
Goodchild, Philip. ‘Debt, Epistemology and Ecotheology’. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature
and Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 151–77.
Göschel, Karl Friedrich. Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen im Verhältnisse zur
christlichen Glaubenserkenntniss: ein Beytrag zum Verständnisse der Philosophie unserer Zeit.
Berlin: E. Franklin, 1829.
Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Penguin, 2008.
Grimshaw, Mike. ‘Introduction: “A Very Rare Thing”’. In To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections,
by Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe, ix–xliii. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Haraway, Donna. ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’.
Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65.
Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011.
Harris, H. S. Hegel’s Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.
Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson III. ‘The Position of the Unthought’. Qui Parle:
Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201.
Hartwich, Wolf-Daniel, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann. ‘Afterword’. In The Political Theology
of Paul, by Jacob Taubes, translated by Dana Hollander, 115–42. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2004.
Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Hegel, G. W. F. Gesammelte Werke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968.
Hegel , G. W. F. Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller. London; New York: George Allen &
Unwin; Humanities Press, 1969.
Hegel, G. W. F. Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1969.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1830) with Zusätze, translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel: The Letters, translated by Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984.
Hegel, G. W. F. ‘Review of C.F. Göschel’s Aphorisms: Parts One and Two’, translated by Clark
Butler. Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 17, no. 4 (1988):
369–93.
Hegel, G. W. F. ‘Review of C.F. Göschel’s Aphorisms: Part Three’, translated by Clark Butler. Clio:
A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 18, no. 4 (1989): 379–85.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1830) with Zusätze, translated by W. Wallace and A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences
with the Zusätze, translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1991.
Hegel, G. W. F. Early Theological Writings, translated by T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson and
J. M. Stewart, edited by P. C. Hodgson. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hegel, G. W. F. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox and Stephen Houlgate.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London:
Blackwell, 1962.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated
by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Hell, Julia. ‘Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future’. The Germanic
Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 84, no. 4 (2009): 283–326.
Henrich, Dieter. Hegel im Kontext. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971.
Hobsbawm, E. J. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and
20th Centuries. New York : W. W. Norton, 1965.
Houlgate, Stephen. ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’. The Owl of Minerva
27, no. 1 (1995): 37–49.
Houlgate, Stephen. An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Hudson, Wayne. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Hutchings, Kimberly, and Tuija Pulkkinen (eds). Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond
Antigone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hyppolite, Jean. Studies on Marx and Hegel, translated by John O’Neill. New York: Basic Books,
1969.
Jaeschke, Walter. ‘Christianity and Secularity in Hegel’s Concept of the State’. Journal of Religion
61, no. 2 (1981): 127–45.
Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Jameson, Fredric. ‘The Future City’. New Left Review 21 (2003): 65–79.
Johnston, Adrian. ‘Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising Materialism’.
Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 19 (2008): 166–88.
Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
Johnston, Adrian. ‘Points of Forced Freedom: Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism’. Speculations
IV (2013): 91–8.
Johnston, Adrian. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary
Thinkers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Johnston, Adrian, and Catherine Malabou. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and
Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Jonas, Hans. Memoirs, edited by Christian Wiese, translated by Krishna Winston. Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University Press, 2008.
Keeling, Kara. ‘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): 565–82.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling: Repetition, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Kirwan, Michael. Political Theology: A New Introduction. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008.
Kolb, David. The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1988.
Kotsko, Adam. ‘The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Legitimacy: On the Root and Future of
Political Theology’. Crisis & Critique 2, no. 1 (2015): 285–99.
Kotsko, Adam. The Prince of This World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine
Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Lauer, Quentin. Hegel’s Concept of God. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.
Lazier, Benjamin. ‘On the Origins of “Political Theology”: Judaism and Heresy between the World
Wars’. New German Critique 35, no. 3 (2008): 143–64.
Lewis, Thomas A. ‘Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion in Recent Hegel
Scholarship’. Religion Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 556–74.
Lewis, Thomas A. ‘Religion and Demythologization in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’. In Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by Dean Moyar and Michael Quante, 192–209.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Lewis, Thomas A. Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011.
Lewis, Thomas A. Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion & Vice Versa. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015.
Lilla Mark. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review of Books,
2016.
Lilla, Mark. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. New York: Vintage Books,
2008.
Lloyd, Vincent. ‘Introduction’. In Race and Political Theology, edited by Vincent Lloyd, 1–21.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Lonzi, Carla. ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’. In Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, edited by Patricia
Jagentowicz Mills, 275–97. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Losurdo, Dominico. Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004.
Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History.
Chicago, IL: Phoenix Books, 1949.
Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, translated by
David E. Green. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967.
Lumsden, Simon. ‘The Rise of the Non-Metaphysical Hegel’. Philosophy Compass 3, no. 1 (2008):
51–65.
Lynch, Thomas. ‘Hegel and Fear and Trembling’. In Facing Abraham: Seven Readings of
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, edited by Frederiek Depoortere, 31–50. Leuven: Peeters,
2017.
Lynch, Thomas. ‘Transcendental Materialism as a Theoretical Orientation to the Study of Religion’.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 29, no. 2 (2017): 133–54.
Lynch, Thomas. ‘Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit’.
Jewish Culture and History 19, no. 1 (2018): 111–13.
Magee, Glenn Alexander. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2001.
Magnus, Kathleen Dow. Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2001.
Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, translated by
Lisabeth During. London: Routledge, 2005.
Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain?, translated by Sebastian Rand. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008.
Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction,
translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Malabou, Catherine. The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy, translated by Peter
Skafish. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, translated by Steven
Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
Malabou, Catherine. The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, translated by
Carolyn Shread. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Malabou, Catherine. Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London:
Verso, 2016.
Malm, Andreas. ‘Who Lit This Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy’. Critical
Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 215–48.
Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene
Narrative’. The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–9.
Martin, Jamie. ‘Liberalism and History after the Second World War: The Case of Jacob Taubes’.
Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 1 (2017): 131–52.
Marx, Karl. ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’. In Marx & Engels: Collected Works,
Vol. 3, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: 1843–1844, translated by Jack Cohen et al., 229–346.
New York: International Publishers, 2005.
Marx, Karl. ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party.’ In Marx & Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 6, Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels: 1845–1848, translated by Jack Cohen et al., 175–87. New York:
International Publishers, 2005.
McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1979.
Mehring, Reinhard. Carl Schmitt: A Biography, translated by Daniel Steer. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
Meiehenrich, Jens, and Oliver Simons (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
Meillassoux, Quentin. ‘The Spectral Dilemma’. Collapse IV (2008): 261–76.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray
Brassier. London: Continuum, 2010.
Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of
Labour. London: Zed Books, 2014.
Miéville, China. ‘The Dusty Hat’. In Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories, 223–47. London:
Macmillan, 2015.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Moore, Jason W. ‘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, edited by Christian Suter and Christopher Chase-
Dunn, 285–314. Berlin: LIT, 2014.
More, Thomas. Utopia. London: Verso, 2016.
Mouffe, Chantal (ed.). The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso, 1999.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York
University Press, 2009.
Neocleous, Mark. ‘Friend or Enemy? Reading Schmitt Politically’. Radical Philosophy 79 (1996):
13–23.
Nesbitt, Nick. ‘Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution’. Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2
(2004): 18–33.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011.
Nuzzo, Angelica. ‘The Truth of Absolutes Wissen in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’. In Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit: New Critical Essays, edited by Alfred Denker and Michael G. Vater,
265–93. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003.
Nuzzo, Angelica. ‘The End of Hegel’s Logic: Absolute Idea as Absolute Method’. In Hegel’s Theory
of the Subject, edited by David Carlson, 187–205. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Nuzzo, Angelica. ‘Dialectic as Logic of Transformative Processes’. In Hegel: New Directions, edited
by Katerina Deligiorgi, 85–104. Chesham: Acumen, 2006.
Nuzzo, Angelica. ‘ “… As If Truth Were a Coin!” Lessing and Hegel’s Developmental Theory of
Truth’. Hegel-Studien 44 (2009): 131–55.
Nuzzo, Angelica. ‘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, edited by
David S. Stern, 1–17. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Nuzzo, Angelica (ed.). Hegel on Religion and Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2013.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edn. New York:
Routledge, 2015.
O’Regan, Cyril. The Heterodox Hegel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Pippin, Robert B. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Pippin, Robert B. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.
Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2nd edn. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1952.
Power, Nina. ‘Non-Reproductive Futurism: Rancière’s Rational Equality against Edelman’s Body
Apolitic’. Borderlands 8, no. 2 (2009): 1–16. Available at:
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2_2009/power_futurism.pdf.
Rabinbach, Anson. ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German
Jewish Messianism’. New German Critique 34 (1985): 78–124.
Reeves, Marjorie, and Warwick Gould. Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the
Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Rowland, Christopher. The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity.
London: SPCK, 1985.
Russon, John. ‘Temporality and the Future of Philosophy in Hegel’s Phenomenology’. International
Philosophical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2008): 59–68.
Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, translated by Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum,
translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos, 2003.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by
George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007.
Schmitt, Carl. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political,
translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos, 2007.
Scott, Peter, and William T. Cavanaugh (eds). The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Serequeberhan, Tsenay. ‘The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’. International
Philosophical Quarter 29, no. 3 (1989): 301–18.
Sexton, Jared. ‘The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism’.
Intensions 5 (2011): 1–47.
Sexton, Jared. ‘The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign’. Critical Sociology 42,
nos 4–5 (2014): 1–15.
Shanks, Andrew. Hegel’s Political Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Sheth, Falguni A. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2009.
Smith, Anthony Paul. A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Smith, Anthony Paul, and Daniel Whistler. ‘What Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?’ In
After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion,
edited by Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, 1–25. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2010.
Smith, Ted A. Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2015.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Edinburgh: Canongate
Books, 2016.
Steffen, Will, 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.
Stewart, Jon (ed.). Kierkegaard’s Influence on Social-Political Thought. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011.
Svenungsson, Jayne. Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit,
translated by Stephen Donovan. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016.
Talmon, Yonina. ‘Pursuit of the Millennium: The Relation between Religious and Social Change’.
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes De Sociologie 3, no. 1 (1962): 125–48.
Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul, translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2004.
Taubes, Jacob. Occidental Eschatology, translated by David Ratmoko. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘Culture and Ideology (1969)’. In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique
of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, 248–67. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism (1971)’. In From Cult to Culture: Fragments
toward a Critique of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel,
61–75. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason, edited by
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism (1963)’. In From Cult to Culture:
Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and
Amir Engel, 28–44. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘Notes on Surrealism (1966)’. In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique
of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, 98–123. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘On the Nature of the Theological Method: Some Reflections on the Methodological
Principles of Tillich’s Theology (1954)’. In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of
Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, 195–213. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘Theodicy and Theology: A Philosophical Analysis of Karl Barth’s Dialectical
Theology (1954)’. In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason,
edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, 177–94. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. ‘Theology and Political Theory (1955)’. In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a
Critique of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, 222–32.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taubes, Jacob. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, translated by Keith Tribe. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013.
Terpstra, Marin, and Theo de Wit. ‘ “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, edited by Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, 319–53. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2000.
Tonner, Philip. ‘Are Animals Poor in the World? A Critique of Heidegger’s Anthropocentrism’. In
Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, edited by Rob Boddice, 203–21. Leiden:
 Brill, 2011.
Toscano, Alberto. ‘Beyond Abstraction: Marx and the Critique of the Critique of Religion’,
Historical Materialism 18 (2010): 3–29.
Toscano, Alberto. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso, 2010.
Treml, Martin. ‘Reinventing the Canonical: The Radical Thinking of Jacob Taubes’. In ‘Escape to
Life’: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933, edited by Eckhart
Goebel and Sigrid Weigel, 457–78. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Tuana, Nancy. ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’. In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy
Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Verene, Donald Phillip. Hegel’s Absolute: An Introduction to Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Ward, Graham. ‘Hegel’s Messianic Reasoning and Its Politics.’ In Politics to Come: Power,
Modernity and the Messianic, edited by Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, 78–97. London:
Continuum, 2010.
Warren, Karen J. ‘Ecological Feminist Philosophies: An Overview of the Issues’. In Ecological
Feminist Philosophies, edited by Karen J. Warren, ix–xvi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork
Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Westphal, Merold. ‘Hegel, Tillich, and the Secular’. The Journal of Religion 52, no. 3 (1972): 223–
39.
Wilderson III, Frank B. ‘Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?’ Social
Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225–40.
Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Wilderson III, Frank B. ‘Afro-pessimism & the End of Redemption’. The Occupied Times, 30 March
2016. Available at: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14236 [accessed 7 July 2017].
Worsley, Peter. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia, 2nd edn. London:
MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.
Yancy, George. ‘Looking at Whiteness: Tarrying with the Embedded and Opaque White Racist Self’.
In Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, 152–75. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 2012.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile, 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso,
2012.
Žižek, Slavoj, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (eds). Hegel & the Infinite: Religion, Politics,
and Dialectic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
 Index

Adorno, Theodor here

Afro-pessimism here, here
Agrama, Hussein Ali here
alienation here, here, here, here
alterity here, here, here
Anderson, Ben here
antagonism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Anthropocene here, here
anti-liberalism here, here
apocalypticism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
annihilation here, here, here, here, here, here, here
destruction here, here, here, here, here
externality here, here, here, here, here, here
genealogy of here, here
immanent here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
plastic apocalypticism here, here
as revelation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
transcendence, see externality
appropriation here, here, here, here
Augustine here, here

Barber, Daniel Coluccielo here, here, here

Beattie, Tina here
Bell, Daniel here
Benjamin, Walter here, here, here, here, here, here
 and Schmitt here
Berlant, Laura here
Bielik–Robson, Agata here, here, here, here
Bifo (Franco Berardi) here
Blackness here, here, here, here, here
Bloch, Ernst here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Boer, Roland here, here, here
Brooks, Thom here
Bull, Malcolm here, here, here
Burbidge, John here, here
Burns, Michael O’Neill here, here
Butler, Clark here
Butler, Judith here

capital here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
capitalism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Carter, Jimmy here
Caygill, Howard here
Césaire, Aimé here
Chakrabarty, Dipesh here
Clark, Malcolm here, here
climate change here, here, here, here
Cohn, Norman here, here, here
Collins, John J. here
colonialism here, here, here, here
contingency here
in Hegel here, here, here
of the world here, here, here

de Boer, Karin here

de Castro, Eduardo Vivieros here
Derrida, Jacques here, here, here, here
disinvestment here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

ecofeminism here, here

Edelman, Lee here
eschatology here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Fanon, Franz here, here, here

Federici, Silvia here
freedom here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here
Fraser, Nancy here
future here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel, Markus here, here, here

gender here, here, here, here, here, here
Gimshaw, Mike here, here, here
Göschel, C. F. here, here
Gould, Warwick here
Gray, John here, here, here, here

Haraway, Donna here

Hartman, Saidiya V. here, here
Haslanger, Sally here, here, here, here, here
Hegel, G. W. F. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here
actuality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Encyclopaedia here, here, here, here, here, here
fanaticism here
implicit political theology here, here, here, here, here, here, here
the infinite here
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion here
nature here, here, here, here
necessity here, here, here, here, here, here
 Phenomenology of Spirit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here
philosophy of history here, here, here
Philosophy of Right here, here, here, here, here
plasticity here
Rabble here, here
religion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
representation, see under representation
review of Göschel here
Science of Logic here, here, here, here
spirit here, here, here
Heidegger, Martin here, here
history here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Hobsbawm, E. J. here, here
Hodgson, Peter here
the Holocaust here
hope here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here
in the end here, here, here, here, here
Hornborg, Alf here, here
Houlgate, Stephen here, here, here, here, here
Hyppolite, Jean here

immanence here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jameson, Frederic here

Joachim of Fiore here, here, here, here, here, here
Johnston, Adrian here, here, here, here

katechon here, here, here, here, here

Kierkegaard, Søren here, here, here, here
and politics here
Kirwan, Michael here
Kotsko, Adam here, here

Latour, Bruno here, here, here

law here, here, here, here
Lewis, Thomas A. here, here, here
liberalism here, here, here, here, here, here
Lilla, Mark here, here, here, here
Lloyd, Vincent here
Losurdo, Dominic here
Löwith, Karl here, here, here

Magnus, Kathleen here

Malabou, Catherine here, here
on Derrida here
The Future of Hegel here, here, here, here
on Heidegger here
materialism here, here
The Ontology of the Accident here, here, here, here, here
plasticity, see under plasticity
Plasticity at the Dusk of
Writing here, here, here, here, here
Malm, Andreas here, here, here
Marx, Karl here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here
Marxism here, here, here, here
materialism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here
transcendental here, here, here, here
Meillassoux, Quentin here
messianism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here
Miéville, China here
millennialism here, here, here
Mills, Charles W. here
Mohler, Armin here, here
Moore, Jason here, here
Capitalocene here, here, here
cheap nature here
Muñoz, José Esteban here
Müntzer, Thomas here, here, here, here

National Socialism here, here, here, here, here, here, here

nature here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here
negativity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
newness, see novelty
nihilism here, here, here, here, here
Nixon, Rob here
nomos (see Schmitt)
novelty here, here, here, here, here, here
Nuzzo, Angelica here, here

optimism here, here, here, here, here, here

passivity here, here, here, here, here, here

patriarchy here, here, here
Patterson, Orlando here
Paul, Saint here, here, here, here, here, here
pessimism here, here, here, here, here
Pinkard, Terry here, here
Pippin, Rotbert here, here
plasticity
destructive here
explosive here, here, here, here, here, here
Malabou here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
political theology here, here, here, here, here
 apocalyptic here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here
definition of here, here
as methodology here
the political here, here
possibility here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Hegel here, here, here
primitive accumulation here, here

quietism, see passivity

Rabinbach, Anson here, here, here, here

race here, here, here, here, here, here, here
and the devil here
Reeves, Marjoree here
representation (Vorstellung) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
return to here, here, here
reproduction here, here, here
Rowland, Christopher here

Schmitt, Carl here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
critique of liberalism here, here, here
enemy here
nomos here, here
secular here, here, here, here
asecularity here, here
desecularization here, here, here, here, here
post–secularism here, here
secularization here, here, here, here, here
Shanks, Andrew here, here
slavery here, here, here, here
Smith, Anthony Paul here, here, here
Solnit, Rebecca here, here, here
sovereignty here
Svenungsson, Jayne here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Taubes, Jacobs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
apocalypticism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
and Bloch here, here, here, here, here
disinvestment, see under disinvestment
Hegel here, here, here, here, here
modernity here, here, here, here
Occidental Eschatology here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here
political theology here, here, here, here, here, here
The Political Theology of Paul here, here, here, here, here
and Schmitt here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Tillich, Paul here
Toscano, Alberto here
transcendence here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
trauma here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Tsing, Anna here, here
Tuana, Nancy here, here, here, here, here

utopia here, here, here, here, here, here, here

concrete utopia here, here, here, here
Moore, Thomas here, here

Vattimo, Gianni here, here

violence here, here, here, here, here, here
gratuitous here, here
invisibility of here, here, here, here, here, here
and liberalism here, here
objective here, here
of the world here, here, here, here, here
slow here, here, here
Whistler, Daniel here
Wilderson III, Frank B. here, here, here, here, here, here, here
witches here, here
world here, here, here
constitution of here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here
and earth here, here
end of here, here, here, here, here, here, here
inescapability of here, here, here, here, here
redemption of here, here, here, here, here, here, here
rejection of here

Yancy, George here

Žižek, Slavoj here, here, here, here, here, here

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are

trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Thomas Lynch, 2019

Thomas Lynch has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this

copyright page.

Cover image: The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490–1500 (oil on panel),

Hieronymus Bosch, (c. 1450–1516) © Prado, Madrid, Spain / Bridgeman
Images

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or

responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All
internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to
press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if
addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no
responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6474-4

ePDF: 978-1-3500-6473-7
eBook: 978-1-3500-6475-1

Series: Political Theologies

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.