Messianic: Utopia

Last week’s post looked at the first move of the messianic perspective, namely the cessation of the monopoly of self-contained perspectives of history, and the emergence of marginalised alternative perspectives. In particular, this messianic perspective was a way of giving voice to those who have been broken by the march of history.

Even though my article The Liturgical Transformation of Political Community used the language of standpoints rather than the messianic, I did suggest that, in order to get an idea of what a messianic perspective furnishes to history, it is necessary to discern the telos of this perspective. As my doctoral supervisory Terry Veling wrote in his Living in the Margins, it is necessary for that messianic perspective to “form the horizon of meaning through which understanding becomes possible” (31).

Matthew Sharpe has in a helpful article provided some raw material to give directionality to this messianism by identifying two types of messianism.

The first is what he calls a “restorative messianism” in which the messianic furnishes a hope (40.3). The horizon of this hope, in the words of Gershom Schlolem, is “directed to the return and recreation of a past condition”.

The second messianism Sharpe calls a “utopian messianism”. This is the Kabbalistic type of messianism embraced by thinkers of the political left, such as Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno. For Sharpe, utopian messianism “aims at a state of things which has never yet existed”.

This is something impossible to predict, and presses not only to the interruption but to the end of the status quo, and presses towards something new and hitherto not conceived.

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