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.