The World to Come: Essays on Ethics and Politics

Description

At the heart of the messianic thinking lies an unconditional idea of redemption. The messianic idea of unconditionality is based upon a qualitative distinction between the unredeemed world and the world to come. It is fundamental to this messianic idea that this distinction can’t be grasped as transition or mediation. Taking his inspiration from thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig, Saitya Brata Das renews here this task of the unconditional, the task of thinking “the advent of pure future that is always to come, unenclosed in the bounds of law or in the cages of the “worldly”. He thereby draws profound ethico-political implications from such a thought that opens up the infinitude of the future from the heart of our finitude, and shows that such thinking is the very task of our time.

Saitya Brata Dasteaches at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is associated with the UFR Philosophie, Université de Strasbourg, France, and with Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris, where he was Post Doctorate fellow during 2006-2007. His first book length study called The Promise of Time: Towards a Phenomenology of Promise is published from Indian Institute of Advanced Study, India.