Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @davidrieff

@davidrieff @nils_gilman Regarding our earlier chat ("By 'metaphysical', I presume you mean reality-based, unmediated, non-religious?" "Yes. Or rationality-based, if you prefer (certainly that's Eagleton's position)", here's Ferris, in that text, 'rescuing messianism from a purely religious context'.

This attraction is both a historical and a philosophical issue. Philosophical because it involves the question of the possibility of thought at a time when philosophy has become the experience of itself as a limit; historical, because what is being played out at this limit is the fate of an era, of a secular modernity that defi nes itself in contrast to theological claims. Within this philosophical and historical context, the messianic turn appears as an effort to extend secular thought beyond the limits of its Enlightenment origins—in other words, this turn announces a project to reconfigure modernity through the reinterpretation of the religious perspective against which modernity defined itself. Thus what is at stake in the messianic turn is the relation of the religious and the secular in terms other than those pursued by the Enlightenment and its organization of history and thought according to progressive, rational principles.
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This attraction is both a historical and a philosophical issue. Philosophical because it involves the question of the possibility of thought at a time when philosophy has become the experience of itself as a limit; historical, because what is being played out at this limit is the fate of an era, of a secular modernity that defi nes itself in contrast to theological claims. Within this philosophical and historical context, the messianic turn appears as an effort to extend secular thought beyond the limits of its Enlightenment origins—in other words, this turn announces a project to reconfigure modernity through the reinterpretation of the religious perspective against which modernity defined itself. Thus what is at stake in the messianic turn is the relation of the religious and the secular in terms other than those pursued by the Enlightenment and its organization of history and thought according to progressive, rational principles.