Do we have to sacrifice the Messiah?

GESINE PALMER

Innocence has no sense that in is.1

In 1966, in the famous Interview published in the weekly journal Der Spiegel, Martin
Heidegger said the following often quoted sentences: "Die Philosophie wird keine
unmittelbare Vernderung des jetzigen Weltzustandes bewirken knnen. Dies gilt nicht nur
von der Philosophie, sondern von allem blo menschlichen Sinnen und Trachten. Nur noch
ein Gott kann uns retten. Uns bleibt die einzige Mglichkeit, im Denken und im Dichten eine
Bereitschaft vorzubereiten fr die Erscheinung des Gottes oder fr die Abwesenheit des
Gottes im Untergang ..."2
This sentence, insofar as it can represent the whole philosophical world in which it grew, is
one of the major sources, which feed a large river in the philosophy of the event, the
"Ereignis". An important element of this philosophy is, for instance in the writings of Jacques
Derrida, a way of philosophizing the messianic, which is understood as an attitude of
expectation as such. Naturally, in being defined as a mood of expectation, the messianic
functions as a notion that stresses the limits or limitedness of action as well as the limits or
limitedness of philosophy rather than their strength. It does so, however, in philosophical
language and action, and its philosphers know what they do, or so it seems. They themselves,
admirably sensitive towards all possible double meaning in every word, accumulate aporias
1

This line from a song by the Turin Brakes seems to allude to the following poem by
Gertrude Stein: "No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no
sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no
sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and
delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight."
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), U.S. author. (Written 1923), originally published in Oxford 1927
( May 28, 1927). "Are There Arithmetics," Reflections on the Atomic Bomb, Black Sparrow
Press (1973).

and double meanings or dialectical figures and paradoxes in their own speeches as well, and
in the end the more naive reader is often left with the impression as if no stone has been left
on another, no word has retained the meaning it used to have, and everything that seemed to
be plainly evil, now seems to have a flipside of necessity and therefore of taking part in the
good, if anybody still thinks to know what good might possibly mean. Good, with this
philosophy, cannot mean, apparently, what the more sterdy schools of philosophy write in
their catalogues of virtues or their iron rules of procedure, neither can it be exhaustingly
charactarized according to the categorical imperative, which has been blamed to be but a
Western invention after the "cultural turn" and stands under severe criticism in the West itself
since de Sade, Nietzsche, Freud and a way of "anthropologizing", which itself cannot deny its
Western shape either.
In the following I shall ask some questions concerning 20th century discourses of the
messianic, questions that might put a finger on some mistakes, and I shall probably make my
own mistakes, which hopefully will find their corrections.

1. Who and what is to be saved by "a God" in Heidegger's sentence?

This sentence is so impressing, perhaps, because (once again) it shows a philospher and his
philosophy in the very moment in which "they" (the philosopher and his philosophy) discover
their own limitedness, their vulnerability, their own need of the other, and their own unability
to force the other into being there. However, it hereby reveals before all the incredible
claim which stood at the beginning of this way of philosophizing: Nothing less is the demand
which the philosopher has towards his philosophy, nothing less than to bring about an
immediate change of the world. But why should this world, this poor whole old world, this
Zustand der Welt, be (passively, note this) changed in toto? Of course, there is so much
suffering and evil, one might say, that there could hardly be need to ask why it should change
entirely. But there is no reason to think that Heidegger wants to allude to the equally famous
saying by Marx, or is there?3 And then: This entire world, doesn't it already change all the
time? As far as my naive eye can see, it does. So maybe it is only philosophy itself that
imagines the world as standing still because only with the world standing still we could hope
2

Spiegel-Interview 1966
I am speaking of the sentence in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, which is still engraved in the
Central Hall of the Humboldt-Universitt in Berlin. Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur
verschieden interpretiert. Es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verndern,.

for an answer to our good old philosophical question ti estin, what is? The estin itself, even if
only as a question, stupifies the world so what seems to be an insight into the powerlessness
of philosophy, in fact, reveals a horrible imaginative almightiness at the very moment in
which this almightiness of philosophy is being withdrawn or denied: If it was philosophy that
stupified the world in the eyes of the philosopher, his insight that he cannot bring it back into
motion by mere philosophy makes him try to look out of the window of his world. (So far, I
am, of course, almost entirely in the line of Rosenzweig whom I sort of apply to the
Heideggerian sentence)4.
The philosopher now tries to look out of his philosophical chamber in which he thinks the
world to be in a Zustand. And what does he see then? Heidegger remains Heidegger, and the
tyrannical element which, according to Hannah Arendt, is part and parcel of the philosophical
impulse, remains in power even in the sentence "nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten".
Heidegger states that the only thing we can do is, in philosophy and in poetry, to prepare the
grounds for the event of God's appearing or, he adds, of his "Abwesenheit im Untergang", his
absent in decline?
But why should we prepare grounds for his absence in decline? What could be the meaning of
a God who is not there and does not help us? How can a God who is absent, save this "us",
about whom Heidegger is speaking without giving a hint who belongs to us and who doesn't.
The meaning even of an absent God who leaves "us" with but one wink or even with nothing,
the salvatory meaning even of a God like that, would be perhaps that he can heal us from the
idea as if we could do everything, as if we were those on whom the world depends in its being
something which we might find out as an answer to our wonderful question "ti estin". This is,
psychologically speaking, very important, a very important stage in the development of every
single human mind, according to the ways in which we judge human psychic development
here, in our cultures.5 Because even a God whose mere abesence we feel, makes us realize
that we are needy, that there is a yearning towards the outside which cannot be satisfied by

Cf. Jrgen Habermas: "Ein Jude nahm Heidegger, dem philosophus teutonicus, diese
eigentmliche Besinnung (auf den Sprachleib der Logik, GP) vorweg", in: Ders. "Der
deutsche Idealismus der jdischen Philosophen", in: Philosophisch-politisch Profile, FfM
1987, S.39-64, hier S. 43.
5
I am very well and even regretfully aware of the fact that I cannot go into the details of
particularly Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which has been so brillantly made fruitful
for a philosophy of the neighbour in the book of Ken Reinhard, Slavoj Zizek and Eric Santner
(The Neighbour. Three Inquiries in Political Theology University of Chicago Press 2005). In
the effort to escape any fixation in alltoo systematic constructions and still say something of
systematic value I have to find my own way of jumping out, remaining, though, in admiring
the high spirits of others seeking other points of departure.

any return to ourselves and by a world that seems to be entirely subjected to our knowledge
and power. But can we simply integrate such a psychological wisdom here? I would not even
know whom to ask for permittance. The guardians who never left their posts at the borders
betweeen the scholarly disciplines, wouldn't even put me on their list because my work must
necessarily be a hybrid in their eyes, and the ability to live intellectually in one school has
been forgotten when God's angels handed out my personal equipment. I learned a lot from
philosophers, psychologists, theologians and scholars of religions, and somehow I tried to
integrate these lessons rather than to keep each neetly apart from the other. This is how I
understand the idea of "making sense" of something, and in order to make sense of this
sentence by Heidegger, the psychological need and the ethical or perhaps religious
demand to leave the idea of personal almightiness cooperate nicely. (And by the way, I might
be with Derrida here, who seemed to recommend not to ignore psychoanalysis in
philsophizing, and in talking about the borders between the disciplines in a half magical way
of a narrator about angels, I might try to practice a narrative philosophy, if this helps anybody
to get along with this way of speaking without calling it confessing. But let us not lose
trace). A God, even in his absence, the idea of a reality of God, even an absent one, maybe
davka the idea of an absent one, can save us at least from the embarassing and horrible
illusion of total self-empowerment, which in the case of Heidegger includes the feeling of
something like thinking control over the world. If the world in its Zustand is under the control
of his all embracing philosophizing (and only then), it is only a God who can save the
philosopher: from the terrors of his own power. Heidegger here seems to arrive at the point
from which Rosenzweig started in the Star of Redemption, where he claims that after
fulfilment of philosophy in Hegel's system only Theology can bring back the philosphizing
human to philosophy. But indeed, Heidegger says, and Rosenzweig would have agreed, this
healing cannot be achieved by mere thinking. Thinking itself, however, can reach so far as to
find out that it itself is not enough? Heidegger says, the only thing we can do with all our
Sinnen (reasoning?) and Trachten (striving?), in Dichten (?) and in Denken (thinking) is to
prepare the grounds for the God to come or to be absent. At its limits, the absoluteness of
Heidegger's notions, is still in power. It is still the whole world in its Zustand, and not the
philosopher, for whom the necessity to be saved is meant, hence here, in the case of this
famous saying, it is still he who dictates how this act of saving has to be thought of, and the
event of salvation remains as absolute as dark in what can possibly be intended. Still, he
might be right. Speaking as a liberal and as someone who believes that there might be a truth
of a matter as well, neither the relative "power" or authority of the gesture of speaking can be

so powerful as to spoil a truth in a matter or to justify it in toto. Proceeding is not everything.

The other to proceeding, the opening of a new proceeding by this other to proceeding, which
seems to be intended in the Ereignis bears similarities with what Rosenzweig called
revelation. Revelation, not understood as the uncovering of a hidden truth or a divine
scripture, once and for all, but revelation understood as the process in time in which God,
Man and World regain their truth and their reality against all those philosophical operations
that turn them into things other than they appear to be.6
But the idea that the whole world should be saved by a divine intervention in its superficial
sense reminds more of apocalyptical ideas.
2. What happens, if we bring in the name of the Messianic intoHeidegger's setting?
In his famous Capri talk from 1994, Jacques Derrida marks "the messianic", the "messianistic
without messianism", as "first name", and "Chora" as the second name. He explains his
messianistic without messianism as an opening towards the future. This opening is only an
opening, he continues, if it exposes itself to absolute surprise, if it expects the best and the
worst. It is, with Derrida, an expectation without expectations, a movement of opening
towards the future that does nothing in order to prescribe the future how it should become.
Messianistic expectation without expectations is supposed to be undetermined by any
particular revelation, it is, although he puts this in quotationmarks, "a general structure of
experience". Still, an irresistable urge for justice shall be connected with this expectation,
according to Derrida. Although universalist and structuralist in its claim, this notion by the
very name of the messianic carries a claim for justice in it, which probably marks a significant
difference between the thinking of Heidegger and the thinking of Derrida. The "-istic" would
then signify what Derrida calls the "universaliable" of the notion, while in the use of the
letters of the meshiach, the traces of a particular, of a specific idea of justice are not to be
overlooked. One can imagine the oil on the skin of the annointed, annointed is usually a king,
and to annoint him makes his body shine. To combine an allusion to this act with the notion
of a future which shall be open and different and able to surprise but also with a strong urge
for justice why? A new king makes a new age? Of course, it is very banal to say and still:
the idea of combining a strive for justice with the hope for a king of justice who will come
and never be the same person as soon as the oil has been absorbed by the king's body and a
6

The shortest introduction into what FR means by reality and revelation in contradistinction
to Religion is still his own in the "Urzelle", but also very valuable is his booklet

real person claims to rescue all other real persons, of course this combination has an internal
connection to specific sources, and somehow Derrida seems to make an attempt to reintegrate
once again the truth of these sources with the truth that is uttered by the philosopher of the
Greek-German tradition whose Christianity Derrida stresses time and again. With Derrida, to
put it simple, the world does not stand still, it is in motion, and the only things that do stand
still, are the more or less erroneous concepts of philosophers and dogmatists of religions. Not
a world in its Zustand is to be saved, but a moving world is to be saved from the threatening
grasp of the philosophers who stupify it? Time and again Derrida and his school make
admirable efforts to prove how much politics of "mondialisation" that fix exclusions and
repressions are being guided and executed by tough notions, and they seem to see a very
important task in cracking those notions and opening space for the possibility of a concrete
event of justice. In determining the attitude they strive for, they bring in the name of the
Messianic, alluding thus to ideas of a divine intervention by a figure that has developed out of
the sources of Judaism. Even if Derrida expressly denies any hopes for such a messianic
figure and only wants to deal with the "general anthropological structure" of expectation, it is
precisely this mood of expecting a messianic figure that can be read in the apocalyptical texts
of late antiquity. It seems to me, however, to differ significantly from what it stands for with
20th century philosophical texts on the messianic. I hope, however, to make this difference
itself fruitful for an understanding of the new texts on the messianic.
3. Apocalyptical fatigueor: How do apocalyptic texts combine time and justice?
The point where the messianic comes in, is generally perceived as the very point where the
philosophers decide to refrain from every attempt to have the future ordered by the programs
of yesterday or today. The messianic time seems to be the time to come, a justice to come.
This justice, according to Derrida, is free from any legal definition that would subsume its
possibilities to our restricted plans.
At this point I feel tempted to make a mistake knowingly: I feel tempted to exclaim that in
the historical texts which we have about the Messiah, in those texts at least, that stem from
late antiquity, a time which has been described as a time in which a messianic feaver had
spread over the entire Mediterranean, denial of the legal structure of justice could not be
thought of and if so, it was no longer exactly Jewish, it rather became Christian.7
Understanding the Sick and the Healthy...
7
Mistakes of this kind are being made unwittingly by many serious scholars these days, I
mean the mistake to argue with historical detail to a systematic framing of "cultural memory".
As to the "parting of the ways" of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity I refer any

But then I would not only get into other troublesome discussions and lost in minutes of
historical reconstructions, I would primarily miss the point, since this does not interest any
philosopher who does not wish to place himself in a historically correct way into a line of
tradition but who wants to outline a tendency that he sees in texts and traditions. Still, my
uneasiness with Derrida's notion of the messianistic, could not be settled. In order to meet his
point, I would have first to draw on another distinction, which struck me some years ago: A
distinction in thinking and expecting justice between the different movements of Judaism in
late antiquity. (And of course I can only draw some very gross lines here, which will be very
much in need of differentiation and correction). Prophetic Texts in the Hebrew Bible expect
justice as a healing of the world according to what is intended in the law, in the legal parts of
the Torah. Even those beautiful texts of Yesayah 65 about the new heaven and the new earth
have the essential meaning of the law, justice and peace between all beings producing
something more beautiful than mere beauty, reach out from the human world into creation as
a whole. Their idea is not as is the case with the new philosophical idea of the messianic a
new justice undefined by any legal program, a mere opening, their idea is a new validity of
the old law. In his introduction to Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, Hermann
Cohen described the Messianic as the peek of monotheism because the Messiah buries the
difference between the ideal of ethics and the reality on earth. Cohen so describes the ethical
function of the notion of the Messiah as the monotheistic contribution to philosophy which
comes to counteract the Greek tendency to eternalize that difference and to make up for it by
way of esthetics: In contradistinction to Greek resignation towards injustice as a necessary
evil, Messianism is the idea of the reality of the good on earth. It comes to correct that "faule
Vernunft", which keeps legal prescription and human reality strictly and eternally apart. The
Messiah, far from bringing this world and its law to an end, with Cohen's reading of the
prophets, will found morality in the human world. This kind of messianism Cohen claims to
derive from the prophets.8
Apocalyptical texts of the later type, however, are different. They do not announce the
foundation of morality in the human world, but the final execution of judgement at the last of
days. Their Messiah will restore a justice that has been demanded but never fulfilled only
through a final judgement, demanding the sinners even after death for every single deed they

interested reader to Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines. The Partition of Judeo-Christianity,

Philadelphia 2004.
8
Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums 21988, p.24f and the chapters XIII and
XIV in toto.

have done or with the more Christian types for their belief or unbelief.9 Both streams of
prophetic writings, the Biblical and the later, share a certain pessimism concerning the worth
of this world. In order to see the difference here, it is good to take other texts from the Biblical
period into account which express the pessimistic mood with distance from actual political
situations, as Job and Kohelet. While Job and Kohelet lament man's being born because of the
observation and experience that the unjust folks live in peace when the just folks have to
suffer, the apocalyptical concentration on restoring the validity of the law by final judgement
brings about a shift in attitudes towards law and justice in general. In the dialogue between
Job and God, God is being accused by the human for his injustice towards the poor man who
is left alone with the task of doing good and seems to be even punished for his attempts to
practice justice. It is divine injustice which causes Job to exclaim that he'd have preferred not
to be born. Still, Job stays with himself then, he himself would prefer not to have been born,
he does not say anything about others who should be drawn to judgement in a general
apocalypse.
In the dialogue between "Sha'altiel" and "Uriel" in the "Forth book of Ezra", we find long
passages that evoke a desire for a final judgement in order to restore those who have been
suffering from unjust persecution on earth. In their tombs the martyrs are restlessly waiting
for their restitution. But at a certain point the human speaker gets terrified by the idea of the
day of final judgement. He asks whether one human can plead for another in this judgement,
and getting the answer that this will not be possible, he exclaims that it would be better not to
have been born and: that the earth should not have produced Adam, and if so, that he should
have been withheld from sin, for what can be good in living in fear, pains and struggles and
afterwards to be subdued to punishment again? The weariness of those who suffered from the
injustice of the world, visibly turns in this text towards the idea of justice itself as soon as this
idea is being performed to the end and endangers even those who have suffered from injustice
of others, to be held responsible for their own unjust deeds. Absolute justice is a horror, the
text tells us, if executed. The difference between Job and those who feel frightened when it
comes to imagining a final judgement is, that Job is sure he has done his best and doesn't
deserve the pains he is afflicted with. I would not call this innocent, however, I'd rather state
that the opposition of guilt and innocence is not at stake with Job. Job does not claim that he
is innocent, he claims that he did his best to be just. The apocalyptics, however, dream of
innocence and begin to doubt their own innocence as soon as they have finished to paint their
9

The "moralisation" of "belief as such" is probably the very Christian invention, which has
the greatest consequences for our lives, and particularely for our psychic orders and disorders,

revengeful pictures of final judgement, at least so I read the forth Ezra. In the beginning of the
book, the just humans who have been tortured to death in the struggles of their times are
waiting in their tombs for the end of days, for the day of judgement, they are depicted as
sufferers under a restless wave of unjustice that buried their struggles for real justice, and their
longing for the day when their good deeds will be gratified and the truth of their law will
come out is described in strong words. Their pain albeit is a national pain, the laws are driven
down by powerful conquerors and those who have been true to their own law have been
killed. Time itself can no longer bare unjustice, hence the end of days will come necessarily.
But in this text more than in others it is very expressly stated, that in that last moment at the
end of time there will be no motion, no mercy, because everything that drives this world,
including evil, will be done away with. And where there is no evil so is the angel's answer
to Sha'alti'el - there is no longer need for mercy, and where there is no need for mercy there is
no mercy. Here we have one attempt to redeem evil while retaining the judgement over it. It
doesn't seem to be a very successful attempt, but still it is impressing and enlightening in the
things that follow from its failure. When the dialogue between Sha'alti'el and Uri'el arrives at
this point, the twist in horrors takes place. Maybe, even the heroes in their graves are not
innocent enough to stand in such a final judgement (most of you here know more
repercussions of this in the rabbinic literature than I'll ever learn in my life). And there will be
no grace and no pleading of one for another, there will be no memale maqom, everyone will
meet his own judgement. In the face of this horror it is better to leave this tomorrow to those
who will live then and to care for today. The call "wake up" calls this Ezra or Sha'altiel from
their apocalyptical fatigue back to present and the idea of justice back into their time, but it
leaves the problem of justice and injustice finally unsolved. Its unsolvedness seems to be
crucial to me. The inheritence of the apocalyptical excourse to the idea of final judgement
burdens from now on the very law and the very idea of justice with the suspicion, as if law
and judgement were one and the same thing, and as if everything were depending on but one
moment.
At this point of messianic thinking the wellknown theorem of deferment comes in.
The idea of postponing final judgement and salvation without giving it up, seems to be hinted
here and has later been widely accepted as the Jewish attempt to keep up the desire for justice
and a way of living with the factual injustice of the world. The tension which is necessarily
produced by the idea of postponing an arrival at justice to a time that cannot arrive, is
supposed to be a "good" tension for the sake of gaining real time and hence real life. As
but that again would be another essay.

soon as this good tension breaks down under the pressure of excessive unjustice, a great many
of people become weary, the danger of an apocalyptical destructive mood grows. This mood
is destructive because of the judgemental element in it. The world is in toto wrong. The times
are bad, and total disorder is being brought into an opposition to a total order. If the "changing
of the guards" shall be once and for all, however, it can only be achieved by a stupifying of
time itself, as Kant systematized in his essay on the end of all things, hence it is impossible to
think of.10 The aspect of once-and-for-allness in one moment - but not another - is the
fundamental problem of all connections between time and justice because they can never do
justice to any life. Fixation of morals an justice in one decicive moment changes the object of
horrors in the Fourth Ezra: First the horror was created by the fact of suffering of the just, then
it shifts to the idea of absolute justice conceived of as final justice in this text from the first
century.
4. From a horror towards final judgement to a horror towards any legal fixation of what
justice could be
In order to arrive from this kind of text at a horror that not only affects the idea of an executed
final judgement but also the idea of any legal structure in justice, however, a third step was
necessary and is hinted at by the new interest that philosophers have taken in the letters of
Paul for some twenty years now. Of course, I cannot deal with Paul here, only say something
about what is being read now and what is being usually omitted in philosophical
interpretations of Paul's Messianism. Paul's letters can be read (and have been read so by
philosophers who followed some hints given by Jacob Taubes) as an expression of very
serious scepticism towards the world-arresting qualities of law in general, his Messiah, who is
supposed to have already been there, can be understood as one who did not bring apocalypse
but promised a new justice which is not be achieved by the deeds of the law but by the grace
and mercy of God. The attitude which is left to the human in the face of such a grace is an
unreserved openmindedness towards it. This is one possible reading of the difficult expression
pistis in the writings of the New Testament and in Paul's letters in particular. It can find
support by many Christian theologians. But there is a problem with Paul, which seems to be
ignored by philosophers like Badiou and Taubes and Agamben and Zizek, if they refer to Paul
10

Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, Wood, Allen W. and George Di Giovanni
(trans. and ed.), 1996, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press The End of All Things. 1794.
Allen W. Wood (trans.), 221-31. Religion and Rational Theology, Wood, Allen W. and
George Di Giovanni (trans. and ed.), 1996, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

as the author of an idea of future which is supposed to be far more than the simple
eschatological anouncement of a new world. It is the problem of the cross itself as soon as it is
not stripped of the content of the event and the story (and it seems to me that of the said
philosophers only Zizek tries to make sense of the very act of crucification in its brutal
content).
To put it metaphorically: The whole apparatus of philosophical and theological dialectics, an
apparatus that admirably helps to understand an idea of absolute change, conversion, breaking
up the frozen demands of limited and limiting legalism, seems to be built on the demand,
which is also enclosed in the word pistis and can create a horror towards it: the demand to
look away discretely from the fact that in the christological construction a human individual is
being killed for the sake of mankind, as it is said. It is a murder, a lynch murder as Girard put
it, though not undoubted, that stands in the center of the Christian religion, and every believer
must think herself to be benefitting from a murder, a sacrifice. Every believer in passion and
resurrection of Christ is supposed to believe that some individual has been killed in order to
wash away the sins of all others by his blood. Every believer in Christ is supposed to be guilty
enough for that one individual to suffer a horrible death.
5. Do we have to sacrifice the Messiah?
As a historical phenomenon, it seems to be of no little significance that in the very moment, in
which Christians in Germany and all over Europe had all too much reason to feel real guilt,
deadly guilt for the death of millions of Jews, the generation of those who did not share the
guilt personally but felt it as a burdon that toughened the faces of their parents, looked for
new ways of interpreting the New Testament, or, if they did not wish to remain Christians at
all, rediscovered Freud's Moses and kept an interested eye on everything Jewish in
philosophy.
While those who entered into a Christian-Jewish dialogue or monologue tried to find ways of
interpreting Paul's polemics against the law in a way that did not end up in blaming the Jews
for their so-called legalism any longer, the more philosophically inclined scholars embraced
Scholem and Benjamin and their considerations of Messianism.
Apparently for the latter, in order to save the philosophical treasures hidden in the theorems
of a messianism that does not end in apocalyptical fatigue and the terrors of an equally
apocalyptical awakening, we have to sacrifice the idea of a personal messiah who would
comfort us in our all too earthly troubles without depraving us from all pleasures of life. A
pity somehow, but at least we would no longer have to imagine ourselves as benefitting from

the death of another, an idea that is all too horrible for a moral mind. And, apparently, in order
to save the philosophical treasures hidden in Christian dogma, we have to wittingly ignore the
brutality of the nucleus of the redemption story, in which a "father" has his son slaughtered in
pain in order to resurrect him later and only then to announce forgiveness. Even Girard who
tries so hard not to ignore it has nowhere to my knowledge been able to explain why one
innocent person had to be sacrificed in order to escape the scheme of sacrificing. Both
tendencies, the overtly Christian as well as the philosophical one which tries to make
philosophical sense of the Judeo-Christian heritage, as it is being called, have their specific
traps which they try to circumvene: Being part of an institution that has been doomed to
decline because its institutional structures have been qualified as a kind of "statuary legalims"
from Kant's time on, some Christians developed a sensitivity for the antilegalism and
antinomianism which is an integral part of eschatological and apocalyptic readings of Paul
and the other parts of the New Testament. They care to avoid blaming Judaism for it and
develop a sympathetic interest even in Halacha. The latter, in former times the "legalist aspect
of Judaims" and something easily identified with the "voice of the father", against whom one
could direct ressentiments that could not be directed against the church patriarchy, can now
serve as the "voice of the son", and a fervent sympathy with Jews and Judaism in Christian
circles often helps to protest against church patriarchy, the latter having become a bit weaker
in the last century. On the philosophical side, however, the interest in the messianic tries to
avoid a return into positive religious thinking while taking recourse to religious sources in
order to protest against an all too "rational" and self-assured enlightened universalism.
The strange thing with both tendencies is that they walk around in the cloths of someone they
desparately try to forget: the sufferer who still seems to claim with the whispering voice of the
textual sources that he suffered for the sake of their redemption, be he the suffering eved
hashem from Yesayah, who is supposed to be Israel, or be he the Jesus of the New Testament.
Do we have to sacrifice the idea of this messianic fiigure in order to interrupt the chain of
sacrifices that demands the slaughtering of innocents for sake of the sinners?
It could turn out that we rather should think anew about innocence and guilt. It might turn out
that we should conceive other than we used to of what it might mean to "save" "us" or the
world or what not. It might turn out that neither final judgement nor permanent strive for the
good nor mere openmindedness towards the future are able to dispense us from a tension that
is all the way between hope for justice, fixed ideas of justice and doubts against both.

As to my question whether we have to sacrifice the Messiah or even the Messianic I would,
for the time being, resume as follows:
- The Messianic as an apocalyptical "No" to the world as it is in toto, is seductive for
everyone as soon as the tension between desired justice and experienced injustic becomes
unbearable. It might then become a last comfort triggering new energy, and so it is obviously
used all over its history. The urge to liberate and to redeem all of the world together with even
that which is thought of as evil, is noble and one must not give it up. Still it should be seen as
nothing more than an urge or a desire, which must not overcome the real ethical will to
freedom and justice as they happen to depend on each of us in time and as they happen to
depend on real deeds and on our readiness to regret and to learn from our own mistakes,
errors, failures and sins. The seductiveness of the messianic becomes dangerous as soon as it
invites the illusion of innocence being slaughtered for the sake of all mankind which has as its
flipside a certain and well known readiness to slaughter or sacrifice others. By sacrificing the
idea of an innocent dying for the sake of others in messianistic theory and by merely
temporalising and structuralising the messianic, however, one loses trace of the dilemma
which is expressed by this figure.
- The "No" to the sacrificial logic is not depending on one final sacrifice but given already in
the law and there in the universaliable (which is to my mind the best impulse in Derrida's
notion of the Messianic: he names it in a concrete way and strives for its universaliability
instead of claiming to have it already as a universal notion) of the idea of chosenness:
The impulse to resist an unjust action that could end in someones death is always the
expression of a very mature feeling for the universal dignity of man. It expresses concern for
every individual and therefore a deep love and conscieousness of humanity in general. In real
life, however, or, if you will, in history, anybody who follows this impulse and resists her own
peers as soon as they plan to run down another group or an individual for what reason
soever, isolates herself from the logics of her fellows and thus runs the risk of becoming the
next victim of a sacrificial onslaught. In cases like that, isolation comes precisely because of
the endangered victims insisting on the generality of humanity. Hence it is the braveness of
those who do not fear from being singled out that helps the community to remember the light
of humanity. On this experience rest both the plight and the honour of the idea of chosenness.
- This means, however, that the one who risks his isolation is indeed innocent insofar as his or
her isolation is concrned. But this person is not by virtue of an absolute innocence an
exception to the law that seems to bind the others and that seems to compell them into

injustice. This person is rather one of them who might stand out only by a very little "more" in
understanding and (self-)conscience.
As long as the Messianic is combined with the more or less pathological obsession with one
innocent dying for the all others, I would suggest not to trust it. As soon as the Messianic is
driven so far as to blur all distinctions between good and evil, I would also suggest not to trust
it. Both forms seem to me to be contaminated by a fascination with mobs and their "others"
and a gesture of identifying with the murderous mob one might have had to suffer from.
I do not believe in a fatum that forces us to be either part of a mob or their victim, but I do
know that precisely if we chose to chose "the right thing" according to our universaliable
insights we can happen to fall prey to mobs even if we are not innocent. We can also prefer to
be subsumed to the mob in the eyes of a victim that does no longer have an opportunity to
distinguish single faces in clusters of aggressive others. And we do not know whether some
day somebody will redeem us from this burdon. But what would we be or do without the hope
for such a redemption?