The Messianic Now Philosophy, Religion, Culture

This collection explores the phenomenon of the messianic in contemporary philosophy, religion and culture. From the later Derrida’s work on Marx and Benjamin to Agamben and Badiou’s recent texts on St Paul, it is becoming possible to detect a marked ‘messianic turn’ in contemporary continental thought. However, despite the plethora of work in the field there has not been any sustained attempt to think through the larger philosophical, theological and cultural implications of this phenomenon. What, then, characterises our contemporary messianic moment? Where does it come from? And why speak of the messianic now? In The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture, a group of internationally-known figures and rising stars within the fields of continental philosophy, religious studies and cultural studies come together to consider what the messianic might mean at the beginning of the 21st century. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Research.

Acknowledgements Arthur Bradley 1. Introduction: On a Newly Arisen Messianic Tone in Philosophy Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher 2. The Apostate Messiah: Scholem, Taubes and the Occlusions of Sabbatai Zevi Howard Caygill 3. Locating the Messianic: In Search of Causation and Benjamin’s Last Message Eric Jacobson 4. Levinas’s Weak Messianism in Time and Flesh, or The Insistence of Messiah Ben David Bettina Bergo 5. Tarrying with the Apocalypse: The Wary Messianism of Rosenzweig and Levinas Agata Bielik-Robson 6. The Messianic Idea, the Time of Capital and the Everyday William Large 7. Impersonal Speech: Blanchot, Virno, Messianism Lars Iyer 8. Time, Language and the Destruction of Power Franson Manjali 9. Two Versions of Islam and the Apocalypse: The Persistence of Eschatology in Schlegel, Baudrillard andŽižek Ian Almond 10. Left Behind: The Messianic without Sovereignty Jeffrey W. Robbins 11. Redemptive Remnants: Agamben’s Human Messianism Patrick O’Connor 12. Why the People To Come Will Not, and Must Not, Be Sovereign: Notes on a Political and Mathematical Puzzle Soumyabrata Choudhury 13. The Long Take: Messianic Time in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia Gerard Loughlin

Arthur Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (2004); Derrida's Of Grammatology: A Philosophical Guide (2008) and has co-edited (with Paul Fletcher) a collection of essays entitled The Politics to Come (2010). In 2010, he published (with Andrew Tate) a monograph entitled The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11. Paul Fletcher (1965-2008) was Lecturer in Religious Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology (2009) and co-editor (with Arthur Bradley) of the edited collection The Politics to Come (2010).