The Messianic Idea, the Time of Capital and the Everyday

摘要

Why should anyone bother with religious ideas? Are they not the most outmoded, reactionary and useless forms of expression? Not if they make us see reality in a different way. What we are faced with in these dangerous times is a complete and total global catastrophe. Capitalism turns away from this disaster (of which it is the cause) by promising an endless future of the same. Only a time which breaks with this time can truly prevent it from happening. We are faced with three futures: the future of the disaster, which is the reality of capitalism; the future of progress, which is the fantasy of capital; and that future which interrupts this fatal double of the real and the fantastical. Such a future is the messianic. Messianism should be clearly distinguished from any kind of millenarianism. It does not seek the “end of times”, a world beyond or behind the world, but the transformation of the present by the hidden possibilities of the everyday.