Suchergebnisse

What could be the common thread linking these three very different thinkers: Hegel, Rosenzweig, and Derrida? In my essay, I will argue that this link is provided by a certain form of political theology which is polemical towards Carl Schmitt's notion of the katechon or the "restrainer of the apocalypse." While the political theology which they propose is also based on the idea of the restraint, it takes a different form than the Schmittian postponement of the apocalyptic event. Their alternative notion is attenuation which results in the political and philosophical practice of maintaining a distance between God and the world. Neither simply restraining it, nor simply hastening, this new formula takes a third dialectical position between the katechon and the apocalyptic, which consists in "easing the lightning to the children": the world as God's child—weak, fragile, and exposed to the infinite power of creation and destruction—must nonetheless find a way to use the revelatory power of the eschaton for the immanent purposes.

The purpose of this essay is to put Ernst Bloch's philosophy to a test suggested by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. According to Blumenberg, modernity constitutes the second, successful, attempt at overcoming Gnosticism, after the first attempt, undertaken by Christianity, had failed. However – Blumenberg argues – it was not modern philosophy, but only science which had managed to escape Gnosticism's ontological trap of viewing the world as an illusion bordering on nothing.

The subject of this essay is the modern theology of work. Contrary to neoplatonism that condemned matter as unworthy of spiritual investment, theology of work states that matter is an ontological material that deserves further processing. Therefore, if modernity is to be understood as the beginning of the materialistic philosophy of immanence, early modern theological transformations have deeply contributed to this. Namely, the appreciation of matter as a realistically existing material to work through, the not yet ready and not fully shaped element of creation justifying the creatio continua in the human version, has certainly inaugurated a turn towards temporality, far less random than Max Weber thought. In Weber's classic approach, Puritan theology played the role of a catalyst for modernity, creating the concept of "intra-world asceticism". It stood for work conceived as Beruf which, in line with the Lutheran concept, means "profession and vocation". However, the author points to another – no more ascetic – theological genealogy of the modern idea of work, whose sources lie in the vision of the delayed apocalypse or, in other words, creative destruction. This extraordinary theology of work has its roots in the nominalism of Duns Scotus, the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, then transformed into the Christian Kabbalah, Goethe's Faust and particularly in Hegel's dialectical concept of work performed by the destructive and yet suppressed negativity.

My essay will take as its point of departure the paragraph from Gershom Scholem's "Reflections on Jewish Theology," in which he depicts the modern religious experience as the one of the "void of God" or as "pious atheism". I will first argue that the "void of God" cannot be reduced to atheistic non-belief in the presence of God. Then, I will demonstrate the further development of the Scholemian notion of the 'pious atheism' in Derrida, especially in his Lurianic treatment of Angelus Silesius, whose modern mysticism emerges in Derrida's reading as the 'almost-atheism' (presque-atheisme). The interesting feature of this development is that, while for Scholem, the 'void of God' is a predominantly negative experience, for Derrida, it becomes an affirmative model of modern – not just Jewish, but more generally, Abrahamic – religiosity which, on the one hand, touches upon atheistic non-belief in the divine presence here and now, yet, on the other, still insists on commemorating the 'withdrawn God' through his 'traces.' What, therefore, for Scholem, constitutes the ultimate cry of despair, best embodied in Kafka's work – for Derrida, reveals the more positive face of the modern predicament in which God has absented himself in order to make room for the creaturely reality. And while Scholem envisages redemption as the full restoration of the divine presence – Derrida redefines redemption as the 'pious' work of deconstruction to be undertaken in the 'almost-atheistic' condition of irreversible separation between God and the world.

ABSTRACT
This articles criticizes utopian thinking—but not from the conservative perspective, seeing human society as inherently flawed and unable to progress, morally and politically. It opposes utopia in the name of messianic philosophico-theological heritage, often confused with the utopian strain or overshadowed by it. Today, mostly thanks to Derrida and his own philosophical version of "messianicity" derived from Abrahamic religions, though by no means reducible to them—the messianic idea is undergoing a revival. The article examines this revival as an interesting alternative to utopian thinking: equally optimistic anthropologically and politically, yet free of certain "architectonic" aspirations that Derrida criticizes as too strongly rooted in the "social ontology" and thus defending the political status quo. What Bloch and Derrida propose is a serious investment in the "objective fantasy," not to be fully actualized but operative as a spectral source of "in-spiration" in the progressive transformation of social laws.