Abstract
For many of us, I suspect, the last two years have called hope into question. Millions have died from COVID-19, millions have lost someone they cared about, and millions more have fallen ill themselves. In addition to these direct effects, the virus has disrupted normal patterns of life. Some of us have endured exhausting lockdowns, while others were exposed to infection by virtue of their employment. In typical fashion, the neoliberal systems that govern our lives have placed the heaviest burdens on those who were already vulnerable, but even those of us who are insulated from the worst effects of the pandemic have had moments in which our hope was challenged by suffering and uncertainty.
In a strange coincidence, my first book—Hope in a Secular Age—appeared at exactly the moment that COVID began to spread around the world. I had no idea what was coming, of course, but the book sought to address a situation like the one we are experiencing. Even before the challenges of pandemic life, I was convinced that the only hope worth keeping has to be honest rather than easy. As we have found, hope has a certain fragility, but I believe that this is the source of its power. In my view, hope is premised upon the possibility of disappointment, pressing forward without guarantees.
At some level, although we invent a thousand ways to forget it, we all know that we are vulnerable. We cannot be sure that our loves will endure, that our projects will succeed, or that we stand on the side of justice and truth. It does no good to pretend that things are more certain than they are; as we have repeatedly seen over the last two years, such bluster is prone to shatter upon the complexity of lived experience. This is the context in which I hear the question that frames this symposium: “Is hope reasonable or necessary?” My answer on both counts will be “no,” but that does not mean hope must be abandoned. Instead, I aim to suggest that hope is an extra-rational discipline that is contingent but indispensable.
In addition to the shared challenges posed by the pandemic, I have had personal reasons for finding hope hard. In March last year I was riding my bicycle near my home in Melbourne, a car made an illegal turn across my path, and we collided at high speed. At first, I thought my injuries were merely musculoskeletal, but within a week it became clear that (although I was wearing a helmet) I had suffered a minor traumatic brain injury—which is to say, a concussion.
Most people recover completely from an injury like mine within weeks, but I am among the significant proportion of cases that take more than a year to resolve. For the first six months my mind moved slowly, my memory was unreliable, and I had a constant headache that intensified with any attempt at concentration, even light conversation with a friend. As I write this (a year later), I have recently returned to work, though I am still moving more slowly than before. My doctors say that my cognitive capacities will recover completely, and the progress I have seen has been considerable. Since I have relied so heavily on the support of others, I have developed a deeper appreciation for our interdependence and the importance of social support structures (cf. Butler 2021). Still, this insistent headache won’t let me forget how vulnerable I am.
I am conscious that this vignette is unusually personal for a scholarly context. After all, whereas scholarship consists in the public exchange of reasoned arguments, personal experience is private in an important sense. At the same time, in revisiting my earlier work while writing this article, I was struck by the fact that my scholarship has always been intensely personal—it’s just that in my book, the experiences that propelled the argument remained implicit. This article describes the rupture I have recently experienced in order to emphasize that the motivation of my work was always more than merely theoretical.
I am keen to make the stakes explicit because the sources that inform my understanding of hope are famously abstruse. The itinerary of my book develops in conversation with the fifth century “mystic” Dionysius the Areopagite and the “postmodern” philosopher Jacques Derrida. Precisely the thing that many readers find rebarbative in their work—their practice of reflexive critique, language straining to undo itself—is what I find so instructive with respect to hope, for both authors juxtapose a rigorous negativity with persistent affirmations. Although hope is not an explicit focus of either author, I think it is implicitly at the center of their work insofar as they both exemplify an affirmation without assurance.
In the book I argue that a hope inflected by negativity is robust enough to address the critique of hope that has been levied by theorists from Aristotle and Albert Camus to Calvin Warren (Aristotle 1934; Camus 1942; Warren 2015). Where hope’s critics claim that it distracts attention from things as they are, I think a hope of this kind encourages an honest resilience that energizes political action (cf. Newheiser 2018; 2020a). For this reason, despite the rarefied register in which my interlocutors operate, the questions that concern me matter for actual lives. For that reason, in what follows I will explain how Derrida’s reflections on the messianic speak to the turbulent times that we are living in.
There are messianic echoes in Derrida’s early work, often in connection with the work of Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida 1967, 123; 1972, 22; 1983). However, the theme crystallizes in Derrida’s writings from the mid 1990s, at which point it becomes a motif he frequently revisits (Derrida 1996, 128; 1997, 121, 204). In Specters of Marx, Derrida observes that “the messianic remains an ineffaceable mark…of Marx’s heritage” (Derrida 1993, 33). 1 The irony, of course, is that Marx was famously critical of religion—and of religious hopes in particular (Marx 1970). Nevertheless, Derrida identifies a certain messianic spirit in Marx insofar as he pursues a justice that exceeds the calculation of juridical rules. To be sure, Marx does not interpret this theme in religious terms, but Derrida suggests that he exemplifies a messianic affirmation of emancipatory promise (Derrida 1993, 102).
Although Derrida draws Marx toward messianic traditions that he sought to resist, he distances himself from religious messianism. In Specters of Marx, Derrida identifies messianic affirmation as the aspect of Marx’s heritage that remains indispensable for Derrida’s own work. However, as if to avoid his own association with religion, Derrida (1993, 102) describes it as “a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism.” A few years later, in “Christianity and Secularization,” he explains: It is a matter of thinking a messianic structure of experience that is universal, a structure of experience that consists in awaiting the time to come [l’à-venir], awaiting that which comes [vient] or who comes, but awaiting without a horizon of expectation, which is already a rupture not only with classical religious messianism but also with a phenomenology, an ontology, or a hermeneutics that describes (and with great necessity) the horizon of waiting from which someone, or the future [l’avenir], comes to us. (Derrida 2020, 142)
Derrida associates this messianic structure with a posture of suspension that lacks a specific object whereas particular messianic traditions operate, he suggests, within a horizon of expectation that is established in advance.
In light of the rupture that Derrida describes between messianic affirmation and religious messianism, many commentators conclude that Derrida rejects the determinate hopes of religious messianism in favor of the indeterminate openness of an abstracted messianicity (cf. Caputo 1997, 118). On this view, religion is simply too specific insofar as it narrows the horizon of expectation by holding particular hopes for the messianic future. In my view, however, Derrida’s relationship to religious traditions is more complex and ambivalent than this reading suggests (cf. Newheiser 2019, 85–107; 2020b). Untangling this relationship helps to clarify the significance of Derrida’s broader project and the place of messianism within it.
In the passage quoted above, Derrida associates the messianic with the analysis of temporality he developed in his early work. At the outset of his career, in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida (1967, 409–28) argues that every structure is disrupted by elements it cannot control. Two years later, in “Différance,” he construes this tension in terms of time: insofar as presence is the domain of the conscious subject, Derrida (1972, 1–30) associates the play of différance with a futurity that is strictly inconceivable. The details of Derrida’s argument in these early essays can be dizzying, but for my purposes the key point is that he is addressing an ethical problem. Derrida (1967, 410) explains that the assertion of metaphysical certainty is motivated by an understandable desire for safety; the difficulty is that the security it provides is unreliable. In response, Derrida argues that uncertainty permits (rather than prevents) meaningful affirmation.
Twenty years later, in “Force of Law,” Derrida (1990) elaborates upon the political significance of his earlier treatment of time. Where he had previously associated the future with an otherness that cannot be grasped by conscious thought, here he stipulates a distinction between two French terms for the future: futur (which extends the present in continuous, linear time) and l’avenir (which corresponds to the interruptive futurity he describes in “Différance”). In arguing that justice and democracy are to come in this sense, Derrida describes an ethics of uncertainty that affirms particular attempts to pursue justice while acknowledging that a commitment to justice may require unexpected development (cf. Derrida 2003, 167–216). From “Force of Law” onwards his work returns repeatedly to this relationship to the future to-come [à-venir], one that encourages provisional affirmation in an experimental mode.
It is in this context that messianism emerges in Derrida’s (cf. 1993, 68) work as a privileged figure for the coming of the other, rupture, eskhaton. As with his earlier writings, Derrida’s concern is not to define temporality as such but rather to address the way in which people relate to the future. It is for this reason that “Christianity and Secularization” distinguishes the messianic experience he has in mind from any method that would describe a horizon from which the future comes (Derrida 2020, 142)—whether through religion, phenomenology, hermeneutics, etc. In describing messianicity as “awaiting without a horizon of expectation,” Derrida (2020, 142–43) underlines the limits of any frame of reference through which we might anticipate the future. For him, the messianic describes the possibility of absolute surprise.
This is the reason many readers suppose that Derrida rejects religious messianism: because religious traditions hold concrete hopes concerning what the messiah will be and achieve, they fall short of total openness. Crucially, however, Derrida (2020, 142) continues: “One cannot await without waiting within a horizon.” Derrida is aware that if one is waiting for someone or something, one’s understanding of that thing (however minimal it might be) shapes the way in which one waits—whether with fear or excitement, optimism or anxiety, confidence or curiosity. For that reason, pure indeterminacy is not a state that people should seek to achieve—on the contrary, he says, “an awaiting that does not know what it awaits” is a paradox (142). Derrida does not set messianic openness against the determinate expectations, dreams, and desires that provide daily life with its color and sheen (as if one had to choose between them). Instead, he models an affirmation that persists without assurance, remaining open to continual revision.
By the same token, Derrida does not reject religious messianism as if its specificity might somehow taint the purity of abstraction. As he explains, the word “messianicity” is inherited from particular religious traditions, and so Derrida’s use of the term is secularizing insofar as he abstracts a messianic structure that is free from the content of particular religious traditions (143). Crucially, however, Derrida (2020, 143) acknowledges that the very gesture of secularization does not leave the orbit of the traditions it seeks to surpass—“it remains,” he says, “a doublet of religion.” In typical fashion, Derrida works within the texts of religious messianism in order to open them to something unexpected. In this way, the form of this text corresponds to its content insofar as both affirm the continuing importance of determinate forms while, at the same time, pursuing the possibility of surprising development.
Those who take Derrida to be a critic of determinate religion sometimes imply that he celebrates interruption as such. If this were true, then Derrida’s work would be just as absurd as his critics claim. After all, as recent events remind us, surprise sometimes brings suffering rather than salvation. The loss of life and well-being from COVID-19 has been immense, and it has been concentrated (as usual) in communities that were already disadvantaged. On a much smaller scale, my accident also brought losses that I continue to feel; from painful experience, I know that interruption is sometimes traumatic. In my reading, though, Derrida’s enthusiasts and defenders are both misguided. Rather than valorizing rupture for its own sake, Derrida’s messianism models an affirmation that acknowledges the possibility of genuine loss.
Following my accident, for most of a year, every experience I had was colored by a concussive fog, and every thought was oddly viscous. Since I was unable to do the things that had previously shaped my identity—reading, writing, thinking with friends—I became unrecognizable to myself. Much as covid caused time to simultaneously expand and compress, with interminable days and instantaneous months, there have been points during my recovery when the future lost its hold on me. Even now, as I write these words, I can feel that I am not exactly as I used to be, and the thought sends ice down my spine. It is in moments like this, when I can sense despair sniffing around, that I return to the habits that Derrida has taught me over the last twenty years.
There is no quick solution to a rupture like this, but Derrida’s messianism reminds me to hold my expectations lightly, to have a flexible imagination, and to affirm the joy as it comes—since joy also can come as a sudden surprise. In my hardest moments, when the future I had hoped for seemed to be out of reach, I sought to adjust my understanding of my self, my life, and my purpose. That was painful, to be sure, but there was also a sort of grace in learning to let go of the certainties I didn’t know I had held. As Derrida describes it, we live in the tension between determinate actuality and messianic possibility—which is to say, the space in which hope may energize, unsettle, and sustain us (cf. Newheiser 2021).
So, to return to the question that frames this symposium, “Is hope reasonable or necessary?” In my reading, the messianic hope Derrida describes is not antithetical to reason, but it is not constrained by it either. For him, messianism carries the critical force associated with the unforeseeable future to come, but at the same time it stands in tension with particular hopes for the future (which we can’t do without). In my reading, this suggests that hope is an extra-rational capacity that concerns the will rather than the intellect or emotion. Hope’s contingency is the source of its power, for it points beyond the limits of what we ourselves can see.
