Non-Jewish Messianicities and Literature: Between Theology and Politics, between Traditions

Just like in religion and politics, ideas, images and beliefs understood as “messianic” also live in literature. Being a multidimensional phenomenon, messianism has to do with the questions of philosophy of history and its end, law and anomia, violence and eternal peace, tradition and breaking with it. Jaques Derrida, who also reflected a lot on the relation between philosophy and literature throughout his entire career, proposed to replace the strong, theologically loaded notion of messianism with a weaker concept of messianicity which would be devoid of any explicit religious, dogmatic connotations and therefore to understand it as a primarily philosophical concept. In the recent decades the attention of scholars was first of all attracted to the messianic theme in the literary tradition associated with Judaism. However, despite that both in philosophy and literature messianism is indeed first of all present in authors belonging (in a stronger or weaker sense) to the Jewish tradition, a strong echo of this concept is present in other traditions, as well as controversies and tensions that messianism brings about. Therefore, the focus of the workshop is to trace and map different messianisms or messianicities in secular literary traditions and to explicate the resonances of a concept with Jewish origins in non-Jewish contexts and to look for the overlaps and possible dialogues between various literary traditions and texts.

Being associated with controversial and dangerous ideas, such as the most radical forms of nationalism and religious exclusivity, antinomianism, transgression, and justification of political violence, messianism and its paradoxes are mediated and worked through literary texts, which can be understood both as exercises of political and religious imagination and explorations of different dimensions of messianicity. Walter Benjamin once recapitulated one of the conceptions of the messianic world-to-come as “everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different.” This idea of minimal change can be also applied to the messianic dimension of literature itself: At the end of the day, literature’s impact on the world is precisely this, it does not change anything in the world, and yet a literary text introduces a tiny imperceptible adjustment to the world, so everything stays the same, only a little bit different. Core aporias of messianicity also find their expression in the domain of language, since genuine, proper use of language transgresses its rules, going beyond the letter of grammar and its “proper” conduct, saves language by sinning against its laws. Thus, the language in which a messianic message can be expressed is always a language in-making, a marginalized dialect or distorted jargon, where categories like “correct” and “incorrect”, “rule” and “exception” are no longer applicable. Therefore, we propose to focus not only on the content, but also on the form of texts in various literary traditions which bear an imprint of messianicity in them.