TARIK KOCHI

ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF

INTERVENTION: UNDERSTANDING THE MESSIANIC:
DERRIDA THROUGH ERNST BLOCH

ABSTRACT. This paper looks at the concept of the messianic as a means of understanding
the Marxist tradition, particularly the relationship between the ethical and the political.
It examines the positions of Jacques Derrida and Ernst Bloch, whereby both utilise the
messianic as a means of upholding an ethical space which is not reducible to being, while
at the same time emphasising the need and demand of the messianic to be brought into
being. This contradiction operates as the basic characteristic of the messianic and it is
asserted that Bloch, rather than Derrida, offers a stronger version of the messianic and the
relationship it constructs between ethics and politics, by attaching a notion of the good,
that of human dignity which operates to guide the ethical command. While Bloch’s dignity
may lead to the position of sacrifice when engaging within the political, the co-ordination
of the ethical by dignity does not itself sacrifice ethics as a totality.

KEY WORDS: Bloch, Derrida, ethical, hauntology, hope, human dignity, Marx, messianic,
natural law, ‘not yet’, political, spirit, ‘to-come’, utopia

I NTRODUCTION

The Marxist vision has to understand the past far better than the past understood itself,
for only then does it understand why so many excellent intentions miscarried or were
perverted.
Ernst Bloch.1

Attaching the metaphor of a lighthouse to a piece on Derrida is not

novel.2 However, in visiting a lighthouse recently,3 I was struck by the
unity that the image and the message of Derrida convey. What concerned
me was not the lighthouse itself, but the way in which the visitor is drawn
irresistibly to the ocean, as if wanting to melt into and lose oneself within

Thanks to Shaun McVeigh and Bill McNeil.
1 E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Schmidt D.J., trans., 3rd ed. (Cambridge
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 199.
2 M. Blanchot, ‘Letter to Jacques Derrida on the Question of the Book’, in E. Jabes,
The Book of Margins R. Waldrop, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).
3 Cape Byron, Australia.

Law and Critique 13: 29–50, 2002.

© 2002 Kluwer Law International. Printed in the Netherlands.
30 TARIK KOCHI

the waves. As I stood in the darkness on the cliff-face, I held below me

an untamed world of water and foam, smashing against the continent. I
know I had been told of this place before. This place, where this huge
southern rock sits open to the ocean and where it is beaten by unrelenting,
unpredictable waves, ever unceasing, never wavering, where one could
drown in the foam: this is one place where being faces the event ‘to-
come’. As I stood caught by the torment of the waves, I was, conceivably,
with another, the ghost of Marx, and together we witnessed (as would
wandering souls) the violence and terror that accompanies the place of
‘justice’, where the thought and the act amount to an impossible transla-
tion . . . . Indeed, what I was witnessing was a haunted place; one where
being stretches out to embrace the unpredictable expanses of the ocean
and, in return, is perpetually teased and slapped in the face by the waves.
This calling of the land to the ocean, to become the ocean, resonated with
Derrida’s promise/command of an absolute openness towards otherness.
The question, however, remained: is this calling an appropriate account of
ethics, and should the ethical remain disinterested in the political?
For Derrida in Specters of Marx,4 the question of what remains of Marx
today is bound to the way in which philosophy deals with ethical questions
and of how this relates and translates to the political. Through the spirits
of Marx we find an unaccomplished and untamed messianic promise, the
command to act in the name of the event ‘to-come’. This command, which
is ever unceasing, is always calling us forward. However, it is never satis-
fied by the journey into the realm of political. Derrida’s treatment of the
Marxist tradition operates by extracting its messianism and mourning the
remainder. In doing so, he attempts to lay the basis, following Levinas, of a
radical form of ethics structured upon otherness, which acts as a critique of
the rule of capital and as a motivation for new forms of action and political
association/disassociation. What becomes clear from Derrida’s discourse
is that the messianic promise/command is never reducible to political
implementation. Rather, any attempt to do so betrays the command, as
the command itself is impossible. In this respect, Derrida moves to open a
space between ethics and politics.
With this in mind, I intend to propose a reading of Derrida alongside
Ernst Bloch, who focussed upon utopian philosophy and worked within the
‘messianic spirit’ of Marx. Bloch’s attempts to attach an ethic of natural
law to the Marxist tradition bound to his utopian dialectical operator, the
‘not yet’, may help to highlight the problems of Derrida’s approach and
perhaps offer some solutions. Bloch’s treatment of the messianic tradi-
4 J. Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. P. Kamuf, trans. (New York: Rutledge, 1994).
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 31

tion demonstrates that the space opened up by Derrida is not novel but,
rather, is the basis of messianicity itself, the impossible translation that
spits on the present in the name of the future. Further, Bloch’s future
leaning ethic, human dignity, which is the source of the ‘not yet’, demon-
strates the importance of a partial grounding of the ethical command, if
any translation into the political is at least to be attempted. This runs
contrary to Derrida’s approach, where the absolute openness to the other
evades any conceptualisation of the good. It concentrates more upon the
responsibility of being responsible to openness, rather than the question
of who or what we are to be responsible to, or the result and manifest-
ation of this responsibility. For Derrida, the place of politics or the law
is the stance of intervention of the third to decide between competing
claims while, on the other hand, the political for Bloch is the dignity-
obsessed subject bringing forth justice with his or her own hands. Derrida
displays a manifest disinterest in the messianics’ injection into the polit-
ical, purposefully ignoring the question of how the thought is re-created
in the act. This demonstrates the in-built scepticism of messianism shared
by Bloch’s critique of the positivisation of natural law, whereby messian-
icity is built upon the perpetual negation of law/politics/being in favour
of an affirmation of futural otherness. What is suggested through Bloch is
that the negation and the affirmation are sourced in, and must be brought
upon, by and through, the subject – it is the subject who is pained,
who dies, who dreams, and who works against degradation to set his or
herself free. Hence, the messianic is firmly entrenched in the political
and must work against miscalculation: the miscalculation of a hegemony
which falsely labels injustice as justice, and the miscalculation of the
subject/organisation/revolutionary, in the attempt to bring the ‘not yet’ into
realisation. In this respect, we are left with differing accounts within the
messianic tradition of what it means to be an ethical actor in the realm of
the political, if one can act at all.

D ERRIDA’ S I NHERITANCE

Specters of Marx5 concentrates upon the question of an inheritance, or

inheritances of the Marxist tradition. For Derrida there are numerous
‘spirits’ of Marx, and various inheritors lay claim to the purity of his
message. Investigating, extracting, exorcising this message is the predom-
inant concern of the text. Derrida states:
5 Ibid.
32 TARIK KOCHI

It will always be a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx . . . . When the dogma
machine and the ‘Marxist’ ideological apparatuses (States, parties, cells, unions, and other
places of doctrinal production) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have
any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future
without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without memory and the inherit-
ance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For
this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be
more than one of them.6

Derrida is at pains to emphasise that there is more than one ‘spirit’ of Marx.
This is an attempt to deconstruct the law of filiation, particularly patrimo-
nial filiation, as a challenge to those who claim the legitimate inheritance
of Marx.7 This plurality of spirits raises a problem of inheritance, which
then becomes a question of how to respond to a heritage that hands down
contradictory orders.8 Derrida asserts that this challenge is met, in part, by
the notion of an active inheritance, one that denies any presumed unity and
only consists in a reaffirmation by choosing. Hence, one must filter, sift
and criticise and sort out the several different possibilities that inhabit the
same injunction.9
Part of Derrida’s work in sifting raises the appearance of the ghost of
the dead king of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This spectre returns to disturb the
present, rendering time “out of joint”.10 In two respects Derrida’s use of
the ghost serves to challenge ontology. Firstly, the ghost operates to upset
Western capitalist notions that history and ideology are at an end, that the
world is fixed and closed. The ghost,11 as a medium of awakening, tells
us not only that “time is out of joint”, but also that “something is rotten in
the state of Denmark”. Secondly, Derrida’s use of the ghost is a challenge
to Marxist ontology, a vivid separation between what he identifies as the
‘spirit’ and what remains as the corruptions of the flesh. Derrida attempts
to kill off the structures that have claimed to represent, as legitimate
inheritors, the body of Marx. He does this through a ghost who speaks.
Thus, he separates the voice from the body, from the party, from the state,
from all that he sees as rotting, from the corpse.12 Through the apparition,
6 Ibid., at 13.
7 J. Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons’ in M. Sprinkler, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium
of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1998), 231.
8 Ibid., at 219.
9 Supra n. 4. at 16.
10 Ibid., at 19.
11 This ghost for Derrida relates to a ghost of Marx and/or a ghost of Heidegger.
12 Supra n. 4, at 54: The body that Derrida is willing to kill off is what he refers to
as: ‘defacto ‘Marxism’ or ‘communism’ ’, which he describes as: ‘the Soviet Union, the
International of Communist Parties, and everything that resulted from them, which is to
say so many things’.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 33

Derrida attempts what he claims to be a radicalisation, a transformation. He

claims:
. . . one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most ‘living part, which is
to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question
of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition of life and death. This
inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as necessary.13

Derrida’s focus upon the ghost concerns his claim that there is a haunto-
logy in Marx’s text, a certain irreducible spectrality and differance at work,
a logic of haunting that for Derrida is the condition of possibility and
impossibility of any conceptual order.14 According to Derrida, Marx is
a hauntological thinker, this is what his texts say and this is the logic
that governs them, that makes them possible despite themselves. On the
other hand, Derrida claims that Marx also wanted to be rid of spectres
and ghosts, particularly the spectrality of religion. Marx’s discourse was
directed against the Young Hegelians who restricted their critique of spec-
trality to the realm of consciousness and objects. However, Marx took
this further and directed his exorcism against the spectre of ideology,
these being the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical forms
through which the ideas of the hegemonic class became the ideas of the
epoch, and also against the spectrality of the bourgeois economy, charac-
terised by the fetish character of the commodity form and phantom nature
of exchange value.15 Derrida claims that Marx wanted to found his critique
of spectrality on what Derrida refers to as an ontology, which is critical
but pre-deconstructive and that Marx’s text cris-crosses at various points
between the deconstructive and pre-deconstructive, between hauntology
and ontology.16 Hence, Derrida’s general hypothesis here is that Marx’s
analysis and critique of the Young Hegelians, of the German Ideology and
of bourgeois political economy is deconstructive and hauntological, but it
becomes pre-deconstructive when that critique is referred to or founded
upon an ontology of presence, effectivity, praxis and objectivity.17
The spectre, in bridging the space between life and death, ushers
in or captures a certain ‘spirit’ of Marxism, the messianic conception
of a democracy and justice to come. The messianic is characterised
by the fundamental relationship between critique-and-anticipation and
anticipation-and-critique, whereby:
13 Ibid., at 54.
14 S. Critchley, Ethics, Politics and Subjectivity – Essays on Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), 145–146.
15 Ibid., at 146.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., at 147.
34 TARIK KOCHI

Now, if there is a spirit of Marxism, which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only
the critical idea or the questioning stance (a consistent deconstruction must insist on them
as it also learns that this is not the last or first word). It is even more a certain emancipatory
and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate
from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any
messianism.18
This critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of
what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience
that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event. In its pure
formality, in the indetermination that it requires, one may find yet another essential affinity
between it and a certain messianic spirit.19

For Derrida the ‘spirit’ of Marx is “what remains as undeconstructable”,

“a certain experience of emancipatory promise”, a structural messianism
that is without religion, a messianic without messianism, which is the
idea of justice distinguished from law, right, or human rights and the
idea of democracy, distinguished from its current concept and forms of
today.20 Derrida uses the messianic to develop a structure of the promise
of a future always ‘yet to-come’. This general structure brings law/justice
and decision/undecidable “back to the primary terrain of their opening to
the radically heterogeneous” – the impossible that makes responsibility
possible. Hence, the messianic is the originary opening to the other, it is
concerned with the affirmation of what is ‘to-come’ – the wholly or radical
other.21 Derrida’s messianic is one without eschatology, without pre-given
promised land, without determinate content. It is simply the structure of
promise which is inherent in all experience and whose lack of content,
resulting from the radical opening to the event, to the other, is the very
possibility of justice and gives its only meaning to democracy ‘to-come’.
Singularity, as the terrain of justice, involves the radical undecidability,
which makes the decision possible.22
Derrida is at pains to distance his reliance upon the messianic ‘yet to-
come’ from the ‘weak messianism’ of Walter Benjamin and from ‘Utopian
thought’. He argues that the messianic anticipation is far from being
described as ‘weak’. Rather, it relates to the pursuance and contesting
of the analysis offered by theory and speech acts or a phenomenology
of existence. That is, the possibility of taking into account, on the one
hand, the paradoxical experience of the performative promise that organ-
18 Supra n. 4. at 89.
19 Ibid., at 90.
20 Ibid., at 59.
21 S. McVeigh et al., ‘A Judgement Dwelling in Law: Violence and the Relations
of Legal Thought’, in A. Sarat, ed., Violence and the Possibility of Justice (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001), 29.
22 E. Laclau, “The Time Is Out of Joint”, Diacritics 25/2 (1995), 91.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 35

ises every speech act and every performative act in relation to the other; and
on the other hand, the point of intersection with this threatening promise,
the horizon of awaiting that informs our relationship to time, to the event,
to that which happens, to the one who arrives, and to the other.23 Further,
Derrida tries to distinguish his messianicity without messianism from what
he calls ‘Utopian thought’, claiming that the messianic is anything but
utopian, as messianicity mandates that we interrupt the ordinary course
of things, time and history, the here-now. That is inseparable from an
affirmation of otherness and justice which must negotiate its conditions in
one or another practical situation with a locus of analysis and evaluation,
a responsibility of examination and re-examination. He argues that one
could not account for the possibility of Utopia in general without reference
to messianicity.24
Derrida attempts to cut anticipation from its co-option and corruption
by tradition. Yet, he is compulsive in his separation between the spirit and
the body, sceptical that life can properly imitate art. Derrida stresses the
importance of not confusing the ‘spirit’ with the spectre as the ‘spirit’,
which is necessarily contaminated by its attachment to any bodily form.
Hence, the ‘spirit’ must exist “before its first apparition” even in the form
of a promise or a hope. The promise must be detachable, separable from
its material, historical forms, in order not to be exhausted by them and,
as such, the ‘spirit’ of Marxism (that is, one of its promises) will survive
the parties’ unions, and mass organisations, and is to be realised one day
in the future in new, perhaps better forms.25 The form Derrida alludes to
is that which is “belonging to anonymity”, and carrying the name of the
“New International”. The “New International” involves another dimension
of analysis and political commitment that cuts across social differences
and oppositions of social forces.26 It includes those who remain true to
the ‘spirit’ of Marx and especially those who have resisted and have
been hypercritical of Marxist dogma. The “New International” includes
those who have proceeded in a deconstructive fashion in the name of
a new Enlightenment, without renouncing the ideal of democracy and
anticipation but, rather, by trying to think it and put it to work otherwise.27

23 Supra n. 7. at 250–251.
24 Ibid., at 249.
25 W. Montag, “Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida’s Specters of Marx”, in M.
Sprinkler, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx
(London: Verso, 1998), 77.
26 Supra n. 7, at 239.
27 Supra n. 4, at 90. Derrida only offers vague and scant politicisation of the ‘spirit’ of
Marx in terms of what he describes as the ‘New International’. His claim at 84 is that it:
36 TARIK KOCHI

T HE P ROBLEM OF I NTERVENTION

At a political level, Derrida has been criticised for his resistance to propose
a concrete basis of intervention in the place between now, and a justice
and democracy that is ‘to-come’. Eagleton argues that the lack of a
persuasively coherent voice regarding the interaction between the messi-
anic and the political is a weak point of Specters.28 Further, he argues that
Derrida’s proposal of the New International, that “without status, without
title, without name . . . without party, without country, without national
community” and without organisation or method or ontology or appar-
atus, is the “ultimate postructuralist fantasy”. It is an opposition without
anything as distastefully systematic or drably orthodox as an opposition, a
promise that would betray itself in the act of fulfilment.29 Ahmad argues
that the New International invites us to participate in an extreme form of
anti-politics, one which absolutises the monadic individuals who constitute
no community and announces itself in virtually religious cadences.30
Bennington attempts to refute such criticism on the basis that it funda-
mentally ignores Derrida’s approach to philosophy. He argues that the
political demand made of Derrida is a repetition of a long tradition in which
the philosophical concept of politics is both subordinate to metaphysics
and superior to it. This understanding arises in the tradition in various
forms: in the relation between law and being, ought and is, theory and
praxis, knowledge and action and so on, and could be said to derive from a
split in philosophy’s understanding of itself and its relation to the usually
reproachful other. If Derrida were ever simply to answer to the demand
to provide an answer, which the demand could hear and accept, then his
own thinking could be safely located in the metaphysical tradition he has
claimed to overcome. Hence, Derrida, providing a political answer to his
refers to a profound transformation projected over the long-term of international law,
of its concepts and its field of intervention. Whereby just as the concept of human
rights has slowly been determined over the course of centuries through socio-political
upheavals, likewise international law should extend and diversify its field to include, if
at least to be consistent with the idea of democracy and of human rights it proclaims,
the worldwide economic and social field, beyond the sovereignty of States and of the
phantom-States we mentioned a moment ago.

28 T. Eagleton, “Marxism without Marxism”, in M. Sprinkler, ed., Ghostly Demarca-

tions: A Symposium of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1998),
85.
29 Ibid., at 87.
30 A. Ahmad, “Reconciling Derrida: ‘Specters of Marx’ and Deconstructive Politics”, in
M. Sprinkler, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of
Marx (London: Verso, 1998), 105.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 37

political critics, would prove just the opposite of what they would take it to
prove, and so Bennington argues that Derrida stands a chance of proposing
something radical about the political, to the extent that his texts do not
simply answer to that demand.31
Derrida’s thinking in relation to the political decision explains the ambi-
guity of the ‘New International’ and its ties to the democracy ‘to-come’.
Bennington argues that the traditional view in relation to the political
decision would be that a certain amount of theorising or interpretation is no
doubt necessary as a preparation for action. In contrast Derrida maintains
the paradox that theorising and interpretation are structurally intermin-
able and can never prepare for the interruptive and precipitate moment
of decision and action; however, the decisiveness of the decision depends
none the less on its structural relation to endless analysis. Thus, while
traditional political thinking believes that it can determine decisions by
writing the theory of their practice, for Derrida a decision is only a decision
to the extent that it cannot be programmed in this manner. A decision
determined by prior theories or reasons would not be a decision, but the
simple administration of a program. Thus, for a decision to be worthy of its
name it must supervene in a situation of undecidability, where the decision
is not given, but must be taken.32
Zizek sums up well the Derridian tension whereby the messianic
promise of a democracy ‘yet to-come’, on account of its radicalism,
remains forever a promise; it cannot ever be translated into a set of deter-
minate economic and political measures. The ‘yet to-come’ is not simply
an additional qualification of democracy but its innermost kernel, whereby
the moment democracy is no longer ‘to-come’ but pretends to be actual,
that is fully actualised, we enter totalitarianism.33 This urgency for the need
for justice refers to the unforeseeable emergencies or outbursts of ethical
responsibility, the urgency to answer the call, to intervene in a situation that
is experienced as intolerably unjust. However, Derrida nonetheless retains
the irreducible opposition between the spectral experience of the messianic
call to justice and its ontologisation, its transportation into a set of positive
legal, political measures. Thus, what Derrida mobilises is the gap between
ethics and politics.34
Zizek argues that the ethical is thus the background of undecidability,
while the political is the domain of decision which involves taking the full
risk of translating the impossible ethical request for messianic justice into

31 G. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 23–24.

32 Ibid., at 25.
33 S. Zizek, “Melancholy and the Act”, Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), 665.
34 Ibid., at 666.
38 TARIK KOCHI

a particular intervention that never lives up to this request, that is always

unjust towards some of the others. The ethical domain proper, the uncon-
ditional spectral request that makes us absolutely responsible and that
cannot ever be translated into a positive measure or intervention, is thus
perhaps not so much a formal frame for political decisions, but rather their
inherent impossibility, signalling that no determinate decision can ever hit
its mark.35 In opening this space and characterising it by an impossible
translation, it would be illogical for Derrida then to attempt to set down
a practical or administrative strategy to implement the ethical command.
The strength of Derrida’s argument comes from this aporetical approach
to philosophy, which remains critical of any tent of miracles, whether they
are Marxist or capitalist evangelism.
In this sense, the messianic sets up the infinite ethical space from which
the question of being and non-being can be thought. It is an attempt to
wrench the tradition away from its concentration upon the political and,
instead, to understand a Marxist spirit in terms of its own ethical command
via setting up and re-opening a ‘quasi-transcendent structure’.36 This struc-
ture opposes being and the to-be, life and the after-life. The ethical position
of ‘quasi-transcendence’ is opposed to the here-now, it is like the voice of
Hamlet’s father or our own, a voice that comes from beyond the grave to
speak to us, and hence to ourselves, about now and the future. What is
of primary concern here is the responsibility to the responsibility, being
responsible not only to the future but to the other and others. Inevitably,
there is always injustice to some of the others, as one cannot respond to
the call or request of every other, and hence as Derrida claims, concepts of
responsibility, decision and duty are condemned a priori to paradox and
aporia.37
This promise of the event, the command of the absolute other, creates
a constant state of anticipation. However, this state is also a condition of
uncertainty, the never knowing of whether the ‘to-come’ is of democracy
or totalitarianism. As the ‘to-come’ is itself uncertainty and undecida-
bility, it does not propose a definite ethic upon which to base the act
of invocation of the event. Indeed, there is no ethical imperative to be
necessarily committed to any type of society, whether it be democratic,
or totalitarian.38 It is only by the joining of the terms ‘democracy’, and

35 Ibid.
36 Supra n. 7, at 254. Derrida maintains that the universal quasi-transcendental structure
that he calls messianicity without messianism is not bound up with any particular moment
of (political or general) history or culture (Abrahamic or any other).
37 Supra n. 21, at 31.
38 Supra n. 22, at 93.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 39

or, ‘justice’, to the ‘to-come’ that allows an ethical flavour to be gleaned

from Derrida’s messianism. The injunction, the order, remains to a degree
problematic in that one hears the command, but neither knows what it is, or
what to do.39 Of course, Derrida is not proposing a messianism awaiting a
new totalitarianism but, rather, he invokes the messianic to disrupt/disturb
presence with an ethical responsibility which appears as generally liberal
and humanitarian.40
We are left with the dilemma of which other to respond to, whose
claim do we uphold and intervene in the name of? It could be argued that,
by precisely asking this question, we are attempting to reduce Derrida’s
discourse to the level of the political, collapsing the essential critical space
opened by the messianic and, therefore, ignoring Derrida’s gesture of
ethics as aporia. On the other hand, does such an approach misunder-
stand the nature of ethics, in that an ethic has an obligation to itself to
do more and would cripple itself if it ignored its responsibility? With this
in mind, it would be worthwhile to examine Ernst Bloch and his version of
messianicity, understood in terms of natural law, to determine whether we
relate the ethical to the political without the collapsing the former into the
latter.

I NHERITING H OPE

For Bloch, philosophy must become the “the conscience of tomorrow,

partiality for the future, knowledge of hope”.41 Bloch’s project is best
understood through his ‘Open System’ which denies the traditional
assumption that the ontological structure of the world is settled.42 Hence,
according to Bloch, both man and the world are ‘not yet’: they are unfin-
ished and in an unconcluded tendential state, and need to be changed in
39 Supra n. 33, at 675: This point is alluded to by Zizek through his contrast between the
ethical commands of the Pope and the Delai Lama.
40 Supra n. 4, at 85. The flavour of Derrida’s ethic is a response to the crises of interna-
tional law whereby his ‘New International’ denounces the limits of human rights discourse,
foreign debt, and the inequality of techno-scientific, military, and economic development
which prevails today. The ‘New International’ also denounces the claims of triumph of the
ideal of liberal democracy and the capitalist market noting that:
No degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never
have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on
the earth.

41 E. Bloch, “Principle of Hope”, in W. Hudson, ed., The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst

Bloch (London; Macmillan Press, 1982), 82.
42 Supra n. 41, at 81.
40 TARIK KOCHI

the direction of knowability. Moreover, the world at hand is not ‘true’, the
world is in process and objectively problematic, its content is ‘not yet out’,
and the task is to push it forward by theory-praxis.43
At the basis of Bloch’s ‘Open System’ lies hope, which is not merely
psychological, but a fundamental determination within objective reality in
general:
Expectation, hope, intention to still unbecome possibility, is not only a fundamental char-
acteristic of human consciousness. Concretely rectified and grasped, it is a fundamental
determination within objective reality as a whole.44

For Bloch, hope is not guaranteed, it can only be based upon militant
optimism, which recognises that the process contains the possibility of
success, but also of destruction. Further, hope can correct and reformu-
late itself, it can become an educated hope, docta spes, hope grasped and
understood in a dialectical materialist manner, with a firm basis in real
possibility.45
Bloch argues that the dialectic of history that spins every present
into being can only be understood as the workings of both presence and
absence, of having and not having. Hence, every present is necessarily
incomplete, and Bloch contends that such incompletion is reflected in
dreams, in refusals of every variety, in homesickness, and in language
in the future tense. Measured in this way, the essential characteristic of
the present is the incompletion and restlessness that marks it. Ultimately
it is characterised by the forward-pressing urge latent in every moment,
called hope.46 Indeed, the essence of Bloch may be found in a quote from
Tacitus, placed at the conclusion of Natural Law and Human Dignity:
One can only laugh at the narrowness of spirit of those who believe that
the power of the present can extinguish the memory of future times.47
Bloch’s utopian ‘not yet’ is intimately bound with his dialectic, which uses
remnants of the past to revitalise and illuminate the present and lead us
to a better future. Hence, the past contains both the sufferings and fail-
ings of humanity as an indication of what to avoid and redeem, but also
unrealised hopes and potentials, which could have been and can yet be.48
The present moment is thus constituted in part by latency and tendency:
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., at 105.
45 Ibid., at 105–106.
46 D.J. Schmidt, in E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, 3rd ed., D.J. Schmidt,
trans. (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), xxiii.
47 Supra n. 1, at 316.
48 D. Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique”, in T. Moylan and J.O.
Daniel, eds., Not Yet Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso, 1997), 81.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 41

unrealised potentialities are latent in the present, and indicate the tendency
of the direction and movement of the present into the future. This three-
dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory
consciousness that at once perceives the unrealised emancipatory potential
in the past, latency’s and tendencies of the present, and the realisable hopes
of the future.49
Bloch’s version of Benjamin’s weak messianism of memory involves
not accepting what is against me, but recovering that thought which will
help me win freedom from a heteronomy.50 Within Bloch’s project along-
side the recovery of genuine elements of aspiration and anticipation that
lie at the heart of utopian expressions, sits a philosophical system which is
essentially critical and which is concerned not only with recovery, but also
with distinguishing between truth and falsehood.51 As such, tradition can
be liberated from its untruth because the excess of ideology contains the
kernels of truth and salvation.52 Bloch’s reading of the natural law tradition
is an attempt to extract this kernel; one which, in viewing the position of
human dignity and justice as ‘not yet’, proposed a challenge to hegemony
and positive law. For Bloch, the best of the natural law heritage, “remains
in abeyance and is still to be appended”.53 In this respect, Bloch attempted
to combine and demonstrate the importance of a combination, of the crit-
ical power of natural law and the dreams of social utopias. Both were
characterised by an openness of something that was ‘not yet’, the former
directed towards human dignity, the latter towards human happiness.54
For Bloch, natural law began with the Sophists but crystallised in the
Stoics, in their opposition to established orders, out of a respect for, and
anticipation of, human dignity. This focussed upon the notion of upright
carriage and of a remembrance of a Golden Age encompassing equality
and democracy.55 This current ran through most prominently the writings
of Thomassius, Rousseau and Kant, but also was taken and corrupted by
Aquinas, Locke and Hobbes.56 For Bloch, the worth of natural law consists

49 Ibid., at 81.
50 D. Kaufman, “Thanks for the Memory: Bloch, Benjamin, and the Philosophy of
History”, in T. Moylan and J.O. Daniel, eds., Not Yet Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London:
Verso, 1997), 40.
51 R. Levitas, “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia”, in T.
Moylan and J.O. Daniel, supra n. 50, at 67.
52 Supra n. 50, at 36.
53 Supra n. 1, at xxix.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., at 12–13.
56 It should be noted that Bloch’s reading of the history of natural law may be regarded
by some as unconventional and unorthodox.
42 TARIK KOCHI

in extracting its true essence or ‘spirit’ from any corruption of its presence
when reduced to positive law. Thus, he called for a re-appropriation of
the Tri-colour of liberty, equality and fraternity, once cleansed of their
bourgeois-inspired limitations, in an effort to remedy the ethical lacuna
within Marxism and radicalise the present.
In most respects the bourgeois revolution was unquestionably more bourgeois than revolu-
tion, but as the abolition of class privileges, it instituted a powerful cleansing process; it still
contains that promise and that concrete, utopian form of promise which the real revolution
can hold onto. This is the stipend of human rights, and if it has the taste for more, then
there is very little of it in history up to this point, which by virtue of its basis was so limited
and obstructed, and which by virtue of its postulates was also anticipatory of humanity.
Freedom, equality, fraternity, the orthopedia of upright carriage, of human pride, and of
human dignity point far beyond the horizon of the bourgeois world.57

For Bloch, the promise of dignity ran not only through natural law, but also
in the veins of Marx. Hence, at the foundation of Marxism lay a ‘revolu-
tionary salt’ inherited by Marx from the natural law tradition, and at the
basis of critique lay an anticipation, the notion that human dignity is ‘not
yet’. Bloch placed an emphasis upon many of writings of the young Marx,
which allowed him to legitimate a humanist revival against the coldness of
the Marxist tradition. Marx states:
The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that for man the supreme being is man,
and thus with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a
debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being-conditions that are best described by
the exclamation of a Frenchman on hearing of an intended tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They
want to treat you like human beings!58

What is presented through Bloch is the messianic or utopian promise

attached to an ethic sourced in humanism, one related to a misunderstood
and mutated tradition of natural law. His utopian ‘not yet’ ties the messi-
anic affirmation of the event ‘to-come’ with the respect for human dignity.
Bloch constructed a dialectical, mutually determining relationship between
utopia and human rights, between justice and happiness, liberation and
law.59
Liberation and dignity are not automatically born of the same act; rather they refer to each
other reciprocally – with economic priority we find humanistic primacy. There can be no
true instillation of human rights without the end of exploitation, no true end of exploitation
without the instillation of human rights.60
57 Ibid., at 174.
58 K. Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1844)”,
in G. Benton and R. Livingstone, trans., Karl Marx: Early Writings (Great Britain:
Penguin, 1975), 251.
59 Supra n. 1, at 39.
60 Ibid., at xxix.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 43

Bloch’s utopian philosophy, based upon hope, is premised upon a respect

for human dignity. This ethic is an attempt to steer the dialectic clear of
falling prey to totalitarianism. The idea of the ‘not yet’ begins with human
hunger, and is manifested in human suffering and thus, Bloch’s utopianism
is essentially a humanist messianicity, one which derives its strength from
its substance, relying upon the importance of the relationship between the
passion of humanism and revolutionary intervention. For Bloch human
dignity is not an addendum to messianicity but, rather, human dignity and
social utopia must refer to each other reciprocally. Further, for Bloch, the
idea of justice can never remain an empty messianic promise, it must be
brought by struggle from below: indeed, justice is oppression if it is not
a justice that comes from below. For Bloch, genuine natural law was the
first to reclaim that justice can only be obtained by struggle. Natural Law
did not understand justice as something that descends from above and
prescribes to each his share, distributing or retaliating, but rather, as an
active justice of below, one that would make justice itself unnecessary.61
This is not to say that for Bloch, the ‘not yet’ would be realised but, rather,
as a concept of ‘justice’ itself, it does not contain a strong enough ethical
basis to direct the struggle of humanity. As such, it could be asserted
through Bloch, against Derrida, that the absolute awaiting of the other,
of justice, is not enough; it must be attached to the critical potential that is
accorded to human dignity. Bloch states:
. . . a sense of justice in itself, even one that is democratic, only has value as a signal and
nothing more. Even as a pure and direct sentiment, it is too vague, too easily reworked,
too susceptible to cliche; it needs a shrewd ally. Even if good sense is given a good ear for
listening, it must always be an ear that is capable of self-critique and assessment.62

This ‘not yet’, built upon the anticipation of the notion of human dignity,
resolves to mediate or humanise the space between radical otherness and
the here-now. It attempts to reveal the face hidden behind the visor of the
ghost. Of course, it is impossible ever to reveal or comprehend the face,
and what Bloch places behind the visor is merely the indefinite projection
of our own imaginary, perfected image. However, to give face to the ghost,
like giving a name to a stray dog, allows us to relate to, and even embrace,
the idea of messianicity. As such, Douzinas argues that the imaginary
domain, by bringing together the future anteriority of human identity and
of the human rights society, links the structure of subjectivity with that of
social utopia or, in Derrida’s terms, makes utopia the social aspect of the
messianic experience.63 In this respect Bloch operationalises Derrida.
61 Ibid., at xxx.
62 Ibid., at 5.
63 C. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000), 379.
44 TARIK KOCHI

However, the distance between both Bloch and Derrida in the concep-
tualisation of the messianic has repercussions upon the ethical standpoints
of each. For Derrida, the messianic is the absolute devotion to otherness,
the responsibility of the self to its others, it can be thought in terms of the
“other’s decision in me”:
The passive decision, condition of the event, is always, structurally, an other decision in
me, rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolutely other in me, of the other
as the absolute who decides of me in me.64

For Bloch, the messianic or utopian drive is born in the subject beginning
in human hunger and, thus, the subject creates a future representation of
the self no longer in this state of loss.65 In this respect the messianic
is wrapped in the dialectic in which the subject moves itself forward, it
begins in the negation of being and then the anticipation and affirmation
of a to-be from which proceeds the negation and so forth. This structure of
subjectivity within the dialectic impacts upon the question of messianicity
as sacrifice. Sacrifice is the revolutionary sacrifice of the subject in the
anticipation and struggle for human dignity. The guiding principle of the
ethical subject is primarily to absolve human hunger and, henceforth, to
overcome insult, degradation and the rule of the despot. The negation is
based upon an affirmation of otherness, which is the projected imaginary of
human dignity and this constructs a narrow footbridge between the ethical
and the political. For Bloch, messianicity is the ethical command in which
the political decision is already partially made. However, this position is
problematised by Derrida’s messianicity which precedes subjectivity. As
the other is before the subject, the messianic ethic cannot be thought of
as sacrifice. While the subject may mourn being, it does not do so for
the sake of itself but for its inadequacy of being unable to encompass all
otherness.

64 J. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, P. Brault and M. Naas, trans. (California:

Stanford Press, 1999), 87, quoted in S. Zizek, “Melancholy and the Act”, Critical Inquiry
26 (2000), 669.
65 E. Bloch, Principle of Hope, N. Plaice and S. Plaice, trans. (Cambridge Massachu-
setts: MIT Press, 1995), v.1, 65.
Bloch states:
The stomach is the first lamp into which oil must be poured. Its longing is precise, its
drive is so unavoidable that it cannot even be repressed for long.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 45

F ROM E THICS TO P OLITICS

Can Bloch’s messianic ethical responsibility offer a solution to the prob-

lems Derrida faces in translating the ethical command into the political
act? In one respect it does, as by binding messianicity to human dignity,
the attempt of political or legal intervention is made in the name of a
certain concept of the good, our responsibility is then to re-configure the
political sphere to challenge all states where man remains an enslaved,
degraded and despised being. The ethical responsibility is not an embra-
cing or accommodation of any other, but the championing of the other who
is humiliated and suffering. The political or legal act is the intervention
between competing claims by the revolutionary subject whose work is
towards bringing dignity into fruition, the dissolving of the present in the
name of the ‘not yet’. However, in tying the messianic to an ethic based
upon human dignity, Bloch comes across the difficulty of moving through
socialist revolution, which involves intervening in the present to move
closer to the event ‘to-come’, while at the same time not compromising
the value of human dignity. This poses problems of revolutionary legit-
imacy for Bloch and is compounded when considering that, for Derrida,
within the messianic, events and decisions are radically unpredictable
arrivals of the other which entails the thought that the arrival is irre-
ducibly violent. This primordial violence upsets all traditional political
philosophies, which are bound up in a teleological structure prescribing
that telos be thought as peaceful.66 For Derrida, the notion of intervention
is revolutionary. Indeed, Derrida asserts the importance of intervention to
bring us closer to the event ‘to-come’, whereby everything under the rubric
of messianicity without messianism is inconceivable without reference to
revolutionary movements that interrupt not only states of conservation, but
even processes of reform.67 Hence, there is a contradiction in the leap into
the ‘not yet’ where the ethic of dignity is confronted and may be lost in the
violence of the event.
In one sense, Derrida’s concept of the messianic aligns with Bloch in
that Derrida is proposing a struggle for justice from below. He argues that
the messianic promise must not merely remain ‘abstract’ or ‘spiritual’,
but instead is to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice
and organisation.68 Further, “messianicity mandates that we interrupt the
ordinary course of things, time and history, here-now”.69 However, by
66 Supra n. 31, at 28.
67 Supra n. 7, at 242.
68 Ibid., at 245.
69 Ibid., at 249.
46 TARIK KOCHI

proscribing intervention Derrida opens up the recurring question of how

should this political intervention be organised. What should be its shape?
How should the ‘spirit’ translate into the ‘body?’ There is a tension here
between needing to intervene to invoke the event, and the knowledge that
a political programme will amount to a miscalculation, or worse, a total-
isation operating against messianicity itself. Hence, we have the ultimate
risk accorded to the messianic, the danger that it destroys itself in the
impossible translation from the ethical to the political. We are confronted
with the perpetual question of whether the ghost can challenge positive
existence, while relying upon the corruptible existence of the body to
maintain a truthful and endearing affirmation of otherness.
The difficulty of moving from the messianic ethical command to the
political act which is characterised ultimately by violence, unpredictability
and miscalculation is not rescued by turning back to Bloch. He provides
no practical indications about how socialist society is to be organised
and no procedural suggestions as to how a socialist society, committed
to high moral goals, can be prevented from resorting to amoral means
to achieve them.70 Further, Bloch has been criticised for his acceptance
of Stalinism and his naivete in the ability of class and party organisa-
tions to bring us closer to utopia. This, as Moylan explains, demonstrates
the dilemma of Bloch’s utopian method, whereby unless both moments
of the critical dialectic are maintained, unless the negative, denunciatory
moment and the positive, annunciary moment are both employed so that
each challenges the limitations of the other, then the utopian method
will fail through an acceptance of the provisional ‘success’ valorised by
short-sighted ideology.71
In this respect, Derrida should be praised for the recognition of this
dilemma and its relationship to messianic responsibility itself. Thus,
Derrida argues that responsibility and obligation towards the absolute other
carries with it the responsibility of a re-examination every moment and
that the responsibility is such that the re-examination must be carried out
without delay, and should in no case ever yield to the allure of utopia.72 At
what point, however, will re-examination or critique cripple the positive
act, what balance is to be struck between the two, or does balance render
us static, ethical but politically inactive and, hence, performing an injustice
to messianicity itself? If we are bound, as Derrida argues, to act in the name

70 Supra n. 42, at 171.

71 T. Moylan, “Bloch against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip
Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function”, in T. Moylan and J.O. Daniel, Not
Yet Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso, 1997), 111.
72 Supra n. 7, at 249.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 47

of the command of the other, what are we critiquing and constantly ques-
tioning, our positive act or otherness/messianicity/humanist utopia itself?
A way out could be seen through Bloch for whom anticipation, critique and
intervention moves us forward dialectically and as such, the messianic is
seen as a process philosophy. In viewing the ‘not yet’ as being in process,
we are able to hang on to the positive act as a partial progress and, thus,
neither fall into the mistake of conceptualising the act of legal or political
intervention as absolute success or absolute failure but, rather, as the in-
part translation of the ethical command which will always be subject to
re-clarification, self-assessment and re-intervention. The question of how
process deals with the violence of the event or the rendering of injustice
as a sacrificial lamb for the movement of history remains unresolved, but
what remains certain is that the conceptualisation of the movement from
ethical responsibility to political intervention as being in process must
never lose sight of the space between the realms of ethics and politics,
the thought and the act, so as to fuse the two mislabels injustice as justice.
In this respect, the space between what is and what is ‘not yet’, and
its impossible translation from ethics to politics is the messianicity’s most
powerful attribute. Whether as dialectic or as responsibility to the other,
the moment that both denounces being and orders us to be, while uncom-
fortable, perhaps even violent, denies hegemony and upsets critique’s
fall to orthodoxy. This active tension becomes a call to the intervention
that is often mistaken as justice. What the messianic tension assures us
is that intervention cannot amount to justice, but we may legitimately
work towards this goal, the impossible event, when our work stems from
below and when, it is tied to the image of the human face belonging
to community. Mobilising, maintaining and exploding this tension, while
simultaneously attempting to sew the chasm back together, involves a chal-
lenge to forgetting, a re-investigation of the memory of the past, a critical
and active inheritance of a tradition. Whether we are haunted by the past,
or return to it to extract its unsatisfied utopian or messianic content, both
Bloch and Derrida assure us that the past is important to an understanding
of the future.

H OW TO ACT R ESPONSIBLY ?

There is a spectre that haunts Derrida’s text which he tries unsuccess-

fully to dismiss. It is the spectre of religion that cannot be ushered away
by the mere attempt to secularise the term ‘messianic’. Indeed there
exists a danger in the rise of ‘post secular ethics’ by phrasing and struc-
turing thought in terms of the religious, while not properly accounting
48 TARIK KOCHI

for its baggage. This exists in stripping bare the religious concept and
raising it to the position where it is applicable to all political struggle,
regardless of context. What must be recognised, if we are to engage in a re-
understanding of the Marxist tradition in terms of the messianic, is that we
cannot ignore the messianic’s historical and religious context typified by
the battle for Jerusalem. From the story of Abraham and Isaac, the sword
of Joshua, the crusades, Israeli occupation and the Muslim suicide bomber,
the messianic and its notion of the event-to-come has been intimately tied
to one repetitious, inevitable conclusion: the inescapably bloody concept
of sacrifice.
We cannot delve deeply into the relationship proper between Derrida’s
accounts of the messianic and sacrifice. A brief diversion, however, into
Derrida’s relationship to responsibility and sacrifice may show the bene-
fits of listening to Bloch’s dignity-based hope. Derrida has clearly made
the link between the absolute responsibility to the Other and sacrifice. In
the Gift of Death he traces the intimate connection between the birth of
subjective responsibility and the apprehension of one’s irreplaceable and
singular death.73 Through the story of Abraham and Isaac, responsibility
to the absolute Other results in sacrifice:
Duty or responsibility binds me to the other, to the other as other, and ties me in my absolute
singularity to the other as other. God is the name of the absolute other as other and as unique
(the God of Abraham defined as the one and unique). As soon as I enter into a relation with
the absolute other, my absolute singularity enters into a relation with his on the level of
obligation and duty. I am responsible to the other as other, I answer to him and I answer
for what I do before him. But of course, what binds me in my singularity to the absolute
singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice
. . . . As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love,
command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is,
by sacrificing whatever obliges me to respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all
of the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray . . . .74

At this point Derrida leads himself into a difficult position whereby the
messianic command to be open and responsible to all others sets up an
ethical standpoint to critique being and the present. However, this responsi-
bility necessarily entails the sacrifice of ethics. Hence, ethics is sacrificed
for ethics. Yet his conundrum cannot be merely dismissed or washed away
by stating that duty and responsibility are characterised a priori as paradox
and aporia and, indeed, nothing other than sacrifice.75 Instead, there is a
conceptual difference between the destruction of the ethical standpoint by
73 J. Derrida, The Gift Of Death, D. Wills, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 51.
74 Ibid., at 68.
75 Ibid.
 ANTICIPATION, CRITIQUE AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERVENTION 49

the movement into political action or decision and the sacrifice of ethics by
ethics. Derrida may disagree and, in return, argue that any determination of
what constitutes an ethic apart from an openness to otherness immediately
involves the move into the realm of political decision, or that the ethical
is only the impossible relation to the other. This logic renders ethics as
only ethics when it has no basis other than openness and impossibility to
constitute it and would mean that sustaining ethics involves suspending the
ethical, suspending choice from the ethical.
Instead, it is argued that Derrida, when describing a messianic open-
ness, has already made the ethical decision for us, he has simply not
articulated it openly but it may be gleaned from a history of opposition to
human rights abuses, oppression and hegemony. If not, such an openness to
embrace and tolerate every conceivable other would have to involve a duty
and responsibility towards capitalist terrorists such as George Bush Jnr.,
a stance perhaps difficult to justify as falling within one of the ‘spirits’
of Marx. Further, it is argued that the example of responsibility as the
sacrifice of ethics, that of Abraham sacrificing a positive human ethics
of not slaughtering family members because of a responsibility and duty
towards God, does not entail the sacrifice of ethics as a totality but, rather,
the choice or preference of one ethical call/code/command over another.
Abraham chooses his ethic: it is obedience to God. Marx chooses an ethic:
it is disobedience to capital. This mode of decision entails sacrifice and
aporia, but it involves a sacrifice of a particular ethic in favour of another,
not of ethics itself. If this is not the case, then a messianic openness which
excludes choice so as to preserve an ethical space (as a distinguishable
but non-seperational ethical totality) should not be dressed up by Derrida
in the death robes of Marx as his ‘heritage’, that which he inherited, to
display an openness and responsibility to every other, including the all too
powerful and embracing other, capital.
On the other hand, Bloch demonstrates that the danger of sacrificing
ethics, or merging the critical space opened up by hope between ethics
and politics, does not occur within the act of determining the ethical, but
happens in the move from the ethical into political intervention. Thus,
when Bloch attaches a notion of the good, that of human dignity, as an
ethic sourced by hope, he does not sacrifice ethics or the place the ethical
occupies. Hope of human dignity opens critical ethical space, a utopian
space, which may sacrifice capital but not ethics itself.
Bloch’s position is certainly not without its problems, but these relate to
the space between ethics and politics, which is not the failure of the messi-
anic tradition but, rather, its ultimate strength. The benefit of the messianic
is that it opens this space allowing a place from which to critique being,
50 TARIK KOCHI

and render comical the assertions that the alliance between liberalism,
capital and technology has brought us close to utopia with only a degree of
fiddling around the edges to finish off the job. Hence, the Blochian ethical
actor is in the position to move beyond the world as given and to anticipate,
critique and intervene in the name of the ‘not yet’. Bloch helps to resolve
the difficulty created by Derrida’s explanation of the messianic by granting
to the subject a notion of the good in which to launch his or herself into the
political and bring the future steeped in human dignity into fruition. Hence,
the responsibility to the messianic and openness to dignity only comes
about through work, through bringing the messianic into being in the name
of dignity. However, it is precisely this bringing into being which means
that Bloch jeopardises the essential space opened up by the messianic and,
hence, endangers the ability to propose a more critical attack on the state
and positive law. Yet, the power of Bloch comes from a recognition of
the inevitability of abject failure of attempting to bring the ‘not yet’ into
being and it is upon this, which the messianic tradition draws much of its
strength. Bloch presents a means of understanding the ghosts of the past,
whether they be Marxist, or of natural law and utilises the messianic to
extract the kernels of thought upon which renewed hope can be built. This
reading of history is not aimed at fooling us, the charge of the subject to
the ‘not yet’ bears a history of unrealised dreams and hopes and failures. In
this sense, the messianic tradition amounts to centuries of a rock face being
teased and beaten and trodden upon by the waves. However, this dark and
brooding picture of the place of oppression, miscalculation, and injustice,
only strengthens the drive of the messianic subject to throw oneself into
the foam.

Law Faculty
Griffith University
Kessels Road Nathan
Queensland 4111
Australia
E-mail: T.Kochi@mailbox.gu.edu.au