Taking its cue from Derrida's late figure of a messianicité sans messianisme, a messianic without messianism, a structural messianism without religion, this article is concerned with a materialist – if not atheist – reading of the messianic. It is in Derrida where we can grasp the paradoxical structure of a messianic promise that can...
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Author Archive
Derrida & Sons: Marx, Benjamin, and the Specter of the Messianic
Nihilism, Destruction, Negativity. Walter Benjamin and the ‘Organization of Pessimism’
Equally repudiated by today’s neo-liberal, left-liberal, and neo-conservative ideologies, the legacy of nihilism takes the position of an “accursed share” (Georges Bataille). Although nihilism as a political, philosophical, and ethical concept can be traced back to the most influential strands of post-Nietzschean thought and modern continental philosophy, it retains a bad name. Contemporary philosophies...
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Towards a Politics of ‘Pure Means’: Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence
In his compelling essay on the On the Critique of Violence (1921), Benjamin dwells on the dialectic of “mythic violence” consisting of law-preserving and law-constituting violence (Gewalt), which mutually presuppose each other. While the former might be identified with today’s bio-political microphysics of power, the latter refers to the constitutive act of establishing power...
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The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time: Marx with Benjamin
Whereas for traditional Marxism history was driven by ‘objective’ historical forces towards its communist telos within history, critical Marxism attempted a blast of the very horizon of capitalisthistory itself. According to Slavoj Žižek (1989), in Marxian thought this ‘non-historical “ex-timate” kernel of history’ was only touched by Walter Benjamin’s last reflections On the Concept...
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Die Ideologie und ihre Kritik. Ein Problemaufriss mit einigen Leerstellen und vielen Fußnoten
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