Cartography of an endless messianic dissidence

among the ontological ruins of the State of Israel

Abstract

This article investigates, within the horizon of Jewish messianism, how Redemption, ethics, and justice are critically articulated with modern historical teleology and, on the basis of state messianism materialized in present-day Israel, which is grounded in an ontology of totality. Drawing on Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Benjamin, Redemption is understood as an interruption of continuous history and as a critique of the ideology of progress, instituting a time of rupture in which failures and catastrophes gain centrality and in which the possibility of an ethical justice within a messianic horizon is reconfigured. In dialogue with Derrida, this messianic justice, which is always to come and is irreducible to law, is distinguished from and at the same time articulated with Benjaminian Redemption, understood as an insurrectionary event that delegitimizes any final judgment of history. On this basis, and following Lévinas and Blanchot, we seek to show how ethics, conceived as first philosophy starting from the face of the other and from the imperative “thou shalt not kill,” displaces the primacy of ontology, breaking with totalizing ontologies and with the identification of the same with the universal. In this context, we criticize the use of messianism to legitimize Zionist nationalism and state violence, opposing it with the notion of “Jewishness” (Butler) as a diasporic, anti-identitarian vocation oriented toward cohabitation. Finally, we reflect on how Redemption can only be thought ethically as a practice of justice that remains inappropriable by law and that recognizes, in each other, the possible figure of the Messiah.