What Am I Talking About When I'm Talking About Messianism?

Sketches in Messianism

Last November I published a book called The Messianic Commons. I have been in some danger of leaving it behind under the tyranny of The Next Thing. What follows is the beginning of a series on some the terms that run through the heart of that book.

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Over recent years I have received occasional messages from people asking, what do I mean by the term “messianism”? And what do I mean when I describe this or that as “messianic”? I've found this difficult to answer.

I’d like to ask more about the question. Most of us know roughly what a messiah is. I guess the question is about use. The noun “messianism” and the adjective “messianic” are not so common these days, even amid heightened religious and political dreams and anxieties. So how am I using them? What am I doing?

Is this a particular angle on Christianity? Or a departure from it? Is it a repackaging of a conventional faith in new paper? Or old paper? Is it a religious repackaging of Marxism? Or religion itself repackaged in a glamorous veneer of radical politics? Is it a trick? Or a trap? Indeed, “the artist sets a trap” said Marshall McLuhan. Sometimes I do set traps, though usually for myself as much as anyone else.

There are two realms where this sort of language does presently circulate. One would be Messianic Judaism: a religious movement of Jewish people practicing a faith somewhat akin to evangelical protestantism. Perhaps some enquirers are trying to work out if my book The Messianic Commons has something to do with that. I would be curious to know what they might make of it, but my use of the word makes no particular association that way.

The other realm hovers about a particular thread of thinkers of the last 100 years: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Jacob Taubes and Giorgio Agamben. Their use of the terms certainly has marked me, as will emerge in future posts.

When everything changes, when eras rupture and collapse into new eras, there tends to be an explosion of language: new visionary poesis and a new lexicon of slurs. Terms become disputed. Meanings shift. New ways of describing enemies, problems and possibilities come into view. Some terms are fossilised: fixed into the dead weight of the past, seemingly irredeemable from the associations that are becoming newly clarified. Other terms become carriers of new possibilities, or of old possibilities ripe for reawakening.

I don’t think I can define with precision how I'm using these terms, and I also don’t want to. I don't want to build borders around their correct use, or fetishise them, or champion them as some new thing. I’m compelled by messianism because it's both a library of diverse stories and also a blank page of possibilities. There is something inherently unrevealed in these terms. I’d rather dance than explain dancing. The artist is not interested in art, but in life. Or, I am, anyway.

The posts that follow will be explorations in movement: what do these words seem to do, or reveal? Where do they clash? Where do they indifferently pass by.

When it's late summer I'll go blackberry picking. I've done it enough to know that after I've stood there and collected the good berries, I don’t just move on. If the plant seems agreeable, I shift myself six inches to the side. Suddenly, I see all the good fruit I’d missed, obscured behind leaves and branches. A subtle change of posture reveals all kinds of things. Returning to the world under a considered shift of terms may, likewise, reveal much.