Introduction

The title of this book, Violence and Messianism, is neither merely a paraphrase of an influential 20th-century text, “Violence and Metaphysics,” nor indeed a simple homage to Jacques Derrida and Étienne Balibar, who have guided my doctoral work and with whom I discussed the arguments developed here. My overall intention is to reread Derrida’s famous text in accordance with a suggestion made in his late texts, Voyous and “Prière d’insérer,” of “messianicity [messianicité] without messianism.” The phrase that Derrida would take up and explain often towards the end of his life presents a bone fide paradigm of a deconstructionist move or act, and fits in with the understanding of violence in his text on Lévinas. By substituting the adjective “messianic” with the neologism “messianicity,” Derrida is seeking to purify messianism of all traces of the Messiah, of Judaism, and religion in general. Thus, he effaces the position and subjectivity of the one who awaits, who calls and promises the coming of the other or of the Messiah. He transforms the subjectivity of awaiting into a neutral waiting (a waiting without waiting, without horizon of the event to come). Further, the various protocols of retreating from the other (I am not waiting for the other, I am not waiting, this is not a waiting, it is a waiting without waiting) are necessary to guarantee that the awaited event (the other, the host, the Messiah, justice, democracy, etc.) effectively comes about. Specifically, I am particularly interested in two injunctions by Derrida: the requirement to “give this messianicity force and form” (how? whence? who and when?), and that we never leave the philosophical register, never abandon the institution of writing, that is, the philosophical text.