1st Edition

The World to Come Writings on Ethics and Politics

By Saitya Brata Das Copyright 2023

    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.

    Introduction

    Part 1: Essays

    1. Death and Immortality in Plato and Lévinas

    2. Ereignis: Heidegger on Art, Technology and Metaphysics

    3. ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die’?

    4. Walter Benjamin’s Messianic Conception of History

    Part 2: Reviews

    5. Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin on Language and Truth

    6. Time, Language, Law

    7. Theatre, Number, Event

    Part 3: Un-Concluding Postscripts to The Promise of Time

    8. Postscript 1

    9. Postscript 2

    10. Postscript 3

    Part 4: Fragments

    11. The Title: "The Divine Names"

    12. Death, Life and Law

    13. Reflections on Hölderlin

    14. On the Name

    15. Moment

    16. From the Other Shore

    17. The Infinite Speech

    Biography

    Saitya Brata Das teaches 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.