ABSTRACT
Why should anyone bother with religious ideas? Are they not the most outmoded, reactionary and useless forms of expression? Not if they make us see reality in a different way. What we are faced with in these dangerous times is a complete and total global catastrophe. Capitalism turns away from this disaster (of which it is the cause) by promising an endless future of the same. Only a time which breaks with this time can truly prevent it from happening. We are faced with three futures: the future of the disaster, which is the reality of capitalism; the future of progress, which is the fantasy of capital; and that future which interrupts this fatal double of the real and the fantastical. Such a future is the messianic. Messianism should be clearly distinguished from any kind of millenarianism. It does not seek the “end of times”, a world beyond or behind the world, but the transformation of the present by the hidden possibilities of the everyday.
