Saitya Brata Das

The decisive ecological crisis that assails us today provokes decisive questions for us, not only regarding nature’s condition as such but also the human being’s ontological position in the realm of beings as a whole in our contemporary epochal condition of modernity. While this (non) condition indeed calls forth urgent and immediate actions and politico-economic measures that must effectively be deployed, these measures in themselves are not sufficient to address the profound questions that the crisis poses for us. Recognizing this, a transformation of the human being’s relation to beings is called forth. Taking up St. Paul’s phenomenology of nature and Schelling’s Paul-inspired eschatological envisioning of nature, this paper tentatively works towards a theologico-political construction where such a transformation can be formulated by effectively putting into question the “kingdom of man”, which constitutes the ontological ground of modernity.

This book is a comprehensive and sustained engagement with the problematic of language. It addresses some of the most urgent questions of our contemporary times, such as Time and history, Violence and force, Law and justice, Ethics and politics, Metaphysics and technology, and Community and religion. It explores how language fosters the possibility of being with each other in non-totalizing ways. It presents a truly interdisciplinary approach, bringing together philosophers, social scientists, literary critics, and poets to offer fresh perspectives on the complexities of language. With contributions from scholars and thinkers worldwide, the scholarly volume is suitable for academics and researchers in the fields of linguistics, social sciences, philosophy, and contemporary culture studies.

This chapter elaborates the concept of kenosis through a rigorous reading of the letters of Saint Paul (especially the letter to the Philippians and to the Corinthians) and draws out the politico-theological consequences of this fecund concept. Setting itself against the decisionist political theology of Carl Schmitt—which is centered on the concept of sovereignty—this chapter conceives of a political theology as deconstruction of sovereignty. Reading a crucial passage from Saint Paul (Philippians 2:6–8)—which is a hymn singing of God’s self-emptying on the cross and assuming the form of the servant thereby—the chapter argues that this suffering of God is inseparable from the incomprehensible nature of divine love which kenotically pours itself upon us—for the sake of our redemption. A kenotic political theology is thus essentially a political theology of love. Applying this theologico-political problematic into the question concerning ecology, the chapter goes onto to show how the redemption of humanity is intrinsically connected with the redemption of nature too, and how this demands re-thinking of the theological conception of contiguity of beings which has been repressed in the metaphysical-scientific conception of modernity. A political theology love, which is essentially kenotic, cannot afford to lose this immense question of ecology. The reduction of nature into inert materiality at our disposal for exploitation: this metaphysical conception of nature on which all modern, post-Galilean ideas of nature are based, such reduction of nature finds its counter-conception in Paul who admonishes us not to abuse nature, not because nature is eternal, but because it is created by God.

Political eschatology attempts to examine the concept of “religious secularism” that Sean McGrath elaborates in his recent book Political Eschatology. Taking up the idea of “philosophical religion” that F.W.J. von Schelling prophetically anticipates, Sean McGrath transforms it into a thought of political eschatology. The idea of “political theology” not only serves here as a cipher for the form of the world as it exists, the world in the darkness of its lived presence, but also as an index of possibilities of forms of the world that we can’t predicate and predict on the basis of what already exists in the world. The Enigma of a Nil reviews A/Nil’s collection of poems entitled The Absent Color. Differentiating between different senses of the word “nil”—that is: nothing, negation etc.—the review makes manifest the revolutionary potentiality of a nothing that is not dialectical negation, the thought of a nothing that is at heart of political theology as infinite contestations of sovereignty and opening up of love from the heart of existence. The book takes seriously Paul’s conception of kenosis, and eschatologically conceives political theology as deconstruction of the form of the world as it exists, as the destruction of sovereign powers. Kenosis and the question of Political Theology aims to intervene in contemporary debates on “post-secularism” and “return to religion”. This work renews the task of political theology of an exception that weakens sovereignties and destitutes worldly hegemonies. This demands reintroducing the notion of transcendence and yet radicalizing it. At stake here is none other than delegitimation, not only of political sovereign power on a theological foundation but of the very place of “the human” as the sovereign being on the stage of world-historical politics. What is decisively new in this work is its attempt to understand the ecological problematic in light of political theology, and to think through the idea of kenosis in its own light.

The book based on the concept of kenosis explores the thought of a political theology as deconstruction of sovereignty. It takes up the most difficult question of God's revelation as the very revelation of love. It connects the theological inquiry to ecology, emphasizing humanity's redemption as intertwined with nature's salvation. It also critiques modern metaphysical views that treat nature as mere resource, urging a recognition of our essential interconnectedness with all beings. By taking Paul's conception of kenosis seriously, this book aims to dismantle existing sovereign powers and challenge the notion of human supremacy in global politics. It seeks to reintegrate transcendence into contemporary debates on post-secularism and religion, while addressing the urgent ecological crises we face. An interesting read for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and other intellectuals interested in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology.

The philosophical essays of this collection argue, each time from a singular perspective, that the task of thinking is to release the element of the unconditional from various closures, and thus to make it manifest as the true and the essential task of our individual and social existence. Naming this unconditional element as the "messianic", the book displays the profound ethico-political significance of messianic thought for our contemporary world. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In his posthumously published Broken Hegemonies, Reiner Schürmann shows how the ‘tragic denial’ of the differend – between the universal and the singular, natality and mortality, institution and destitution – gives rise to hegemonies. When ‘the sovereign fantasm’ that grounds and anchors the hegemony expires, the hegemony gets withered away. Taking Schürmann’s insights as point of departure, this paper attempts to think of singularisation to come in messianic sense, as truly anarchic thought worthy of our time, that is, to think without hegemonies. Such a messianic/eschatological tragic-anarchic thought can’t be understood as the dialectical operation of the universal’s antagonism to the particular. Beyond the dialectical opposition of the universal and the particular, differend of the singularisation to come can only be understood as the unheard of an-arché, that is, living without ‘why’.

This essay attempts to discuss the relation of mood to philosophy in the context of Benjamin's early thought. Reviewing Ilit Ferber's Melancholy and Philosophy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theatre and Language, I try to show that melancholy, far from merely a psychological-solipsistic-pathological condition as it is generally understood today, is rather to be understood as philosophical attunement and which as such is inseparably connected with profound ethico-political questions concerning responsibility and justice, with work and play and with a possible phenomenological disclosure of the world as a whole. Walter Benjamin's early works are seen, in this context, to be indispensable help to think such questions anew.

In the Open darkness and light, remembrance and oblivion, coming into existence and disappearing in death play their originary co-belonging, or co-figuration. Existence belongs to this opening and is exposed to its coming to presence: it is on the basis of this originary opening, this originary historical which is revealed to this mortal being called ‘man,’ on the basis of this revelation, man founds something like politics and history. There thus comes into existence out of this freedom, out of this “play space”2, this field called ‘polis’3 where there takes place war and festival, where historical revolutions tear apart history, brings ruptures and discontinuities in the very mode of his existence, where man seeks the foundation of his own foundation, where occurs the dialectics of negativity between man and man, where man puts at stake his own death, his own dissolution, and by the power of his own dissolution stands in relation to the total world that he seeks to dominate. This means that man’s attempts to metaphysically found his own political and historical existence must presuppose a far more originary non-foundation, the differentiating revealing of the open, the ungrounded spacing play, or playing space of natality and mortality.

Saitya Brata Das argues that in Kierkegaard's work we find a radical eschatological critique, not only of the liberal-humanist pathos of modernity but also the political theology of Carl Schmitt, that seeks to legitimise the sovereign power of the state by an appeal to a divine or theological foundation. Relating Kierkegaard's notion of 'Christianity without Christendom' to the Schellingian eschatological critique of sovereignty, he shows how Schelling's insistence on the eschatological difference between religion and politics is transformed and further intensified in Kierkegaard's critique of historical reason. Such an exception without sovereignty, Das argues, is the very task of our contemporary time.

The Future of Writing The article, taking up the question of 'philosophy - literature' once more, asks: what writing is possible at the limit of philosophy? If philosophy is seen to have realized its utmost possibility in Hegel where it also announces its own finitude, literature would then be the very limit-concept in relation to philosophy. The question is not the abandonment of one in favor of another but to respond to the double requirements that are incommensurable to each other. The article investigates the place of language and writing - in philosophical discourse and literature -- in relation to temporality to interrogate Hegelian determination of language understood as becoming of Sense, in its intimate relation to the dialectical determination of temporality as negativity and thereby, with the help of Blanchot's writings, to point towards thinking of language as essentially prayer at the limit of language, beyond the dialectical determination of sense, and as such is opened to the two fold attunements of melancholy and hope for the future, opened to the hope for redemption and intimated with mournfulness for what is lost without memory. There lies, in this messianic hope for redemption in the coming, the future of writing.

Saitya Brata Das rigorously examines Schelling's theologico-political works and sets his thought against his more dominant contemporary, Hegel. Das argues that Schelling inaugurates a new thinking outside of Occidental metaphysics, by a paradoxical manner of exit, which prepares for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida. This new reflection, outside of the Universal world-historical politics of modernity, is achieved by re-thinking religion as eschatology. Intervening in contemporary debates on post-secularism and the return to religion, Das shows that religion, in an essential sense, always opens up infinitude from the heart of finitude, to an irreducible outside of the profane order of worldly hegemonies. Religion here assumes a negative political theology of exception without sovereign power.

Man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in the lightening flash of language. Free towards, and endowed with the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of language that remains beyond his death: here alone lies redemption for the mortals. It is this affirmative question of the coming time that is pursued in this work: it occurs as and in a configuration of questions, not constituting a system: question of mortality and temporality, the flash of language that reveals man - beyond any predication - his finitude, the opening where man finds himself to welcome the coming, and finally redemption in the coming itself in the existential attunement of hope. This article attempts, reading the works of Schelling, Heidegger and Benjamin, to think the gift of language as redemptive, beyond any appropriation, in the face of evil whose possibility is given to the mortal alone.

If the dominant ethico-philosophical thinking of responsibility in the West is founded upon, or tied to a certain figure of death, it is because this ethical notion of responsibility is also a certain econo-onto-thanatology. Here the notion of the gift to the other is always already inscribed within a certain economic equivalence of value, or an economic determination of temporality as the geometric figure of the circle, or a certain economy of the experiences of abandonment and mourning, through which the event-character of the gift, its excess and its infinite surplus is economised, reduced, repressed, or even annulled. Reading Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this econo-onto-thanatology, and relating him to Schelling, Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard, this article attempts to reveal this very complex relationship of the ethical notion of responsibility and the gift with death, in order to think anew – in the spirit of Derrida – a responsibility in relation to mourning and abandonment, and in relation to a death that does not figure in any figuration of self-figuration and self-presence, but – to speak with Maurice Blanchot – as interminable, incessant worklessness, as endless ruination and abandonment of itself. This impossible aporia of the notion of responsibility is itself a dis-figuring of death, which is also an aporia of an instant which escapes, in its event character, the geometric figure of time as circle.

This essay attempts to think anew the relationship of pain with finitude and language. If man is that finite, mortal being whose being is essentially linguistic and being-in-communication, where language is not seen as mere attribute, property, or instrumental means of appropriation, then language cannot be understood in its cognitive disposal as categorical grasp of the “entities presently given,” but must be understood in a more originary manner as opening of the coming into presence, as the event of this coming itself. If a certain dominant ontology, in its innermost ground, understands pain as the very grounding work of logos, then it is necessary to open up the closure of this logos of metaphysics to another, more originary experience of pain in relation to mortality that dispropriates us beforehand, and thereby grants us language itself as gift and promise which welcomes the incalculable event of the “not yet.” This essay reads Heidegger, Schelling and Benjamin to think of the promise of this redemptive, messianic language in relation to an originary finitude, outside the metaphysics of subjectivity, insofar as this metaphysics subsumes language to its cognitive disposal, to its categorical grasp of entities’ “given present.”

What would remain of the relationship between literature and philosophy if the line between them, separating and calling each towards the other, is already always undecidable? This brings into question the traditional notion of Judgment, especially Hegelian notion of the limit as determinate negation. If Hegelian notion of the limit, or the line is based upon the predicative proposition, then the line as indeterminate transgression, without being able of found anything on the basis of predication, would remain unpredicative. In this excess of the line there lies the 'infinite contestation', an idea borrowed from Maurice Blanchot, of literature.