RECOGNIZING POSSIBILITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE MESSIANIC DIMENSIONS OF BEING, LANGUAGE, AND SPACE

Abstract

This thesis seeks to reveal the messianic potentialities that inhere in the fundamental categories of experience. I analyze diverse sources in western intellectual history, from the classical period to our contemporary epoch, to discern techniques to think through our collective malaise, that is to both identify the dynamics that have produced our malaise and how to use thought and recognition as acts of generative resistance. I will argue throughout that the common modalities of experience: language, space, and historicity, even if they reveal themselves as lack, through their (dis)concealment gesture at messianic forms of life, and I will try to conceptualize these forms as dispositives we can use to renew existence.