Traversing the fantasy and the "morning after"

from political ontology to theopolitical meontology

pp. 175-220

in: Vassilios Paipais, Political ontology and international political thought, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter investigates the repoliticising potential in engaging with messianic nihilism as the phenomenological traversal of the traumatic core of tragic subjectivity (that this chapter reads as a phenomenology of the Lacanian drive). Messianic nihilism in this chapter is approached through the work of Walter Benjamin as well as through contemporary philosophical approaches to St Paul's meontological messianism. This chapter is critical to what it dubs as the antinomian temptation in the recovery of Paul's legacy and examines the significance of the concept of the incarnation and the eschatological structure of Christian hope as political categories (against ethicism and teleological forms of politics). In so doing, it offers critical readings of the messianic nihilism of Benjamin, Breton, Agamben, Taubes and Žižek by problematising the antinomian tendencies in their respective political theologies. The book argues for a version of Žižek's Badiouian politics of militancy crucially supplemented by a proper participatory understanding of Paul's messianic meontology and incarnational Christology as a means to reconceptualise the nexus relating subjectivity, universality and political action in world politics.