Realized Eschatology and Truth: The God-to-come in Miranda, Meillassoux, and Badiou

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Badiou, Eschatology, Jose Miranda, justice, Meillassoux

Well, Miranda’s Marx and the Bible was not nearly as entertaining as his manifesto Communism in the Bible. In the amusement department, I’m a bit disappointed. However, that’s not intended as a complete knock on the book and its value. First of all, I knew that this read would be very different from his seventy-eight page missive on primitive Christian communism. So, I was prepared for a change. And second, it was actually pleasant to read a sustained work of Biblical exegesis that also included fairly large treatments of Marxist theory.

The central theme of the book might be summarized as follows: God is justice. Seem a bit reductionist? Perhaps. Such is a common criticism leveled against Miranda. However, he goes through painstaking efforts to exegetically demonstrate that this thesis is the common theme of the Bible. Primarily concentrating on the Exodus, the writings of the Prophets, the Psalms, and Pauline texts, Miranda employs a thorough study, using the best available resources from his day (especially Von Rad, Bultmann, and Kasemann; although other exegetes abound) in order to prove that the “proper” Christian understanding of God, as outlined in the Scriptures, is a de-ontologized God-to-come. This God-to-come however is not be thought of in terms of ontology. Rather, for Miranda, since God is justice, the hope for a future God is one that is the hope for the eschaton, the realization of justice in the kosmos, of mispat.

Also drawing heavily from the work of Levinas, justice for Miranda is best understood as interhuman compassion, horizontal love, selfless action for the poor and needy – the Other. And this justice is expected because Yahweh is the “God” of the OT who entered human history through justifying activity (i.e. the Exodus). This irruption into human history becomes the unique identity marker of God for Miranda. In fact, this is how idols and false gods are identified as well: those who do not stand for and effect justice are false. Likewise, the atheist is the one who does not fulfill his/her human ability to pursue justice.

How does Miranda define justice? Love and eschatology. He recognizes that there is a forensic element to justice. But this forensic element must not be understood primarily in terms of covenant or law (Sinaitic), for the latter were later developed ideas that modified the primal concept of mispat. Positively, the forensic aspect of justice is one in which God sides with the poor and restores them by giving to them what was taken from them, and also judging the rich by taking from them. This duality stems from Miranda’s insistence that God is not against possessions per se. He is not against property as such. Rather, God is opposed to the differentiation of wealth. He argues in Communism in the Bible that during the desert years there was no differentiation of wealth, and as such there were no social strata. However, once the people entered the land and began to settle, they established cultic activity and started favoring particular social roles over others, which then in turn led to material differentiation. This historical progression is what led to the division between the just and unjust, the exploited and the rich.

Miranda believes however that this bifurcation can be overcome. Comparing the utopian vision of the realized eschaton to that of Marx’s hope that “the world would be transformed when the relationships among men become true bonds of love and justice,” Miranda goes further in claiming that the ultimate transformation of the world is the resurrection of the dead, the mispat of the entire kosmos. He claims that death, as a product of sin entering the world, reversed the original state of life, but that through a commitment to the principle that things are always changeable, death can be defeated. Citing Marcuse’s influence, such hope is characterized as a “new mode of ‘seeing’ and qualitatively new relations between men and between man and nature” (284).

Summarizing in the “Epilogue” he writes:

Contrary to everything we can include within our ontological categories, Yahweh is not, but rather will be. He will be when there is a people who fulfill certain conditions. Thus we are able to understand expressions like this: “Because of his name, Yahweh will not reject his people, for Yahweh has wanted to make you his people” (1 Sam. 12:22). Yahweh is essentially an eschatological God, and all his intervention in history is directed toward forming a mankind in which he is finally able to be.

Then on the next and final page he continues:

[The] biblical authors implacably insist that a god who is conceived as existing outside the interhuman summons to justice and love is not the God who revealed himself to them, but rather some idol. Moreover the whole Bible is directed toward creating a world in which authentic interhuman relationship is possible and is a reality.

God will be only in a world of justice, and if Marx does not find him in the Western world it is because he is indeed not there, nor can he be. As Freud attests, “There is no longer any place in present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings.” All our rebellion against Western civilization and against its acute extreme called capitalism is the attraction exercised on us by a future world in which justice, authentic love, is possible. Then, in the societal relationship of justice, and not before, the authentically dialectical mind will have to see if God exists or does not exist. Anything else would be vulgar materialism or dogmatism.

Overall, I was pleased with the book. The depth that the OT and NT discuss justice and the differentiation of wealth was illumined nicely. I also like the idea of God de-ontologized, as well as the ontological openness that Miranda ascribes the material existence. In fact, there was a lot of resonance with the work of Meillassoux and Badiou. As has been articulated by Michael Burns in his essay “The Hope of Speculative Materialism,” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, Meillassoux rejects the dichotomy of God exists/God does not exist  for “divine inexistence.” As Burns notes, “This thesis rests on the assertion that while we can clearly argue that god does not currently exist, we have no reason to believe that he could not one day exist, and thus the notion of a God-to-come is philosophically tenable” (323). Also rejecting dogmatism and drab materialism, Meillassoux’s God-to-come is “the contingent, but eternally possible, effect of a chaos unsubordinated to any law” (324). There are similarities in Miranda’s work that also run across a Badiouian terrain. As Burns highlights, for Badiou there are “two dominant strands of materialist philosophy”: democratic materialism and materialist dialectic (331). The former is summed up as “there are only bodies and languages.” This is equated with bio-materialism. Materialist dialectic on the other hand is summed up thusly: “there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths.” Truths are the exception to what is there. They are the excess. As Burns says,

[For] the materialist dialectician, truth provides the possibility of an ‘except that’, a possibility capable of inaugurating a completely new situation which shows the logic of the previous ideology to be non-necessary and contingent. This is why the materialist dialectician always has room to hope that things could be otherwise, and this hope creates a space of creative dialogue with the sort of religious position that would also hold to the possibility of justice and hope of the creation of another world (332).

Miranda, I think, would fit well into such a Meillassouxian-Badiouian materialist dialectician matrix. As has been already noted, his commitment to the unbounded openness of the future, while not given much flesh, serves as the impetus that undergirds the historical process leading to the realized eschaton, the God-to-come. And his notion of dialectics is one that steers clear of bio-materialism. Although, it could be argued that Miranda falls into the “materialism of life” category (á la Negri per Badiou’s criticism), I think the following passage demonstrates Miranda’s fit into the materialist dialectician camp:

Particularly inadequate is the definition of matter, which in Newton’s hands is reduced to the pure abstraction of quantity. Such unreal distillates are the necessary consequence of the merely contemplative approach of Western science. On the other hand, dialectics has to conceive of matter in such a way that it includes in matter the existence of love, of heroism, of unselfish dedication, and of intuition of the absolute moral imperative [my emphasis] (274).

In other words, for Miranda, the summary for materialist dialectic would be, “there are only bodies and languages, except that there is mispat.”

Lycidas and Eschatology

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Eschatology, Lycidas, Milton

Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more, [ 165 ]
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore, [ 170 ]
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves;
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With Nectar pure his oozy Lock’s he laves, [ 175 ]
And hears the unexpressive nuptiall Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move, [ 180 ]
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now Lycidas the Shepherds weep no more;
Hence forth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood. [ 185 ]

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’ Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray,
He touch’d the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:
And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills, [ 190 ]
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

As one delves into the depths of Lycidas, he or she is confronted by a barrage of literary and historical images which all accord to present a mega-narrative on Milton’s view of theodicy. Beginning in line fifty, Milton asks the mythological creatures of the sea why they were unable to save his drowned companion, Edward King, only to realize that not even Orpheus’ mother could save him from dismemberment. After a few lines of introspective questioning regarding the possible futility of “laborious” academic study, Milton again turns his focus to abductive inquiry. Finding no sufficient answer from Neptune, the poet concludes that the ship, which was built during an eclipse, must have been cursed in its construction. With no sufficient answer presented, unpredictably, Milton closes his poem with a song of joy regarding the final fate of young Lycidas. He declares to the “Shepherds” that they are to “weep no more” (line 165), for young Lycidas will rise again, by the power of the one that “walk’d the waves.” This ending not only confuses many readers, but it also illumines the NT theme of the resurrection in a very non-theodical (pardon the neologism) sense by demonstrating, much like the book of Job, that life’s occurrences, and thus God’s way, are inexplicable.

The book of Job is a story that outlines God’s control over suffering. However, unlike many in the Christian tradition through the years, I am unconvinced that the book of Job is to be understood as providing the ultimate explanation that Job and his companions were seeking. Rather, the line of questioning from God at the end of the narrative does not ever answer Job’s questions, but instead asks the resounding, “Who are you, oh man, to answer back to God?” This ending is unsettling for those of us seeking for answers for life’s problems. And even John Milton, in Lycidas, finds himself falling into the same speculative process. However, rather than present a pithy explanation of God’s sovereignty, Milton answers his questions in the most Biblical way. He leaves the questions unanswered, and thus proclaims the resurrection of Lycidas as the ultimate answer. In other words, Milton does not try to provide some sort of philosophical theodicy explaining God’s ultimate control over individual events in history, but rather is satisfied to proclaim the eschatological hope of resurrection as the ultimate concern and answer for persons in history.

The final eight lines of Lycidas change focus dramatically and serve as the practical element of the poem. Realizing that life is fragile, admitting that he could very well end up like Edward King, and trying to remain eschatologically consistent, Milton concludes that it is not the “uncouth Swain’s” responsibility to find the answer to such awe-full questions. There is a two-fold sense of resurrection that Milton hints at. First of all, the afore mentioned aspect of future resurrection, joy, and hope undercuts the entire final stanza. But there is a more profound and immanent theme that Milton emphasizes. This second theme is that of new life. In Pauline fashion, Milton’s “Swain” (which undoubtedly was himself) received new life. He attempted to tap into the mysterious counsel of divine providence, only to realize that such things were unutterable, when finally he embraced the eschatology of hope that is only found in the resurrection of “him that walk’d the waves.” And having answered his existential crisis, the Swain picks up his mantle and continues on to “fresh Woods” and “Pastures new.”

Milton of course did head to “Pastures new” shortly after this poem was written. After writing Lycidas, Milton engaged himself actively in public and political life in England, began family life, and did not pick up the shepherd poet’s pen again until old age. This poem thus signifies a major Event in Milton’s life. Never shying away from academic exercises, he nonetheless focused his life on immanent, terrestrial matters. For Milton, it was in these platforms that eschatological life is lived, and to ignore such would be to live unfaithfully in a world that is often short and unfair.  

Making Theodicy Properly Eschatological

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David Bentley Hart, Eschatology, Theodicy

The famous Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked that “the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine is the doctrine of original sin”[1]. He said this in order to empathize with the fact that very few people will go so far as to deny the infamous “problem of evil”. Some have attempted to do so (e.g. Mary Baker Eddy), but a flat out denial of what is most basic to our being is bound to be less than existentially satisfying. If one believes in a traditional monotheistic conception of Divinity, then one must grapple with the existence of evil in the face of this God. If He is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then how can evil exist in His world? If He has the ability and He has the motivation, then why do we, especially those who are deemed His chosen people, still suffer? This is the dilemma we face.

One way to reconcile this supposed logical inconsistency is to radically redefine the term “omnibenevolence”. Many so-called “determinists” do exactly this. Determinism is the belief that what is “good” in God is simply what He does by nature. Murder is wrong because God does not murder; and lying is wrong because God does not lie. Therefore, the statement “God is good” is a logical tautology. Since “good” is defined as “what God does”, then God can do no other than be good; or “be Himself”. While this seems prima facie to allow moral relativism (couldn’t God one day decide lying is good?), many Christians have latched on to this uber-sovereign notion of God’s character. If God is completely “above” our finite moral categories, then He can, and should, commit atrocities in order to further His plans. After all, “who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this’? Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?”[2] Thus the problem of evil is eradicated. Unfortunately, however, this theological move makes God into the devil. Such a re-definition forces the problem of evil to become the problem of God. As Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart observes,

”There are those who suffer from a palpably acute anxiety regarding the honor due the divine sovereignty. Certainly many Christians over the centuries have hastened to resituate the New Testament imagery of spiritual warfare securely within the one all-determining will of God, fearing that to deny that evil and death are the “left hand” of God’s goodness in creation or the necessary “shadow” of his righteousness would be to deny divine omnipotence as well.”[3]

Determinism fails to account for the goodness of God and the freedom of man that the Scripture seems to assert. Not the goodness of God that turns the Infinite God into a divine Santa Claus, nor the libertarian freedom of the philosophers that turns finite man into a little autonomous god; but that of the Scriptures: “As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live”[4]. The goodness of God that is thoroughly kenotic and incarnational: the Infinite becoming finite in order to make the finite, like Him, infinite. The freedom of man that makes mankind responsible for his actions rather than making God a sovereign schoolyard bully that takes pleasure in pilfering our proverbial lunch money for His own ends (as if He needed such a thing?). Allowing God to be the Hegelian synthesis between good (thesis) and evil (antithesis) only pushes the problem back further. In fact, it might be said that the problem becomes no more. For, if God is the problem, how can there be a solution?

Many theologians agree that re-defining God’s goodness in this way ends in nihilism. In contrast, some maintain that we must keep God out of the equation and allow man’s freedom to bear the blame for evil and sin. The best expression of this “Free Will Defense” comes from Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga:

“A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He cannot cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they are not significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He cannot give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.”[5]

This free will defense has strengths, and they are legion. First, the free will defense places the blame for sin squarely where it belongs: on those who have sinned. Second, it places God in the role of Judge rather than the dual roles of Judge-Defendant, having perpetrated the crimes Himself, a la determinism. And finally, the free will defense makes the gospel beautiful again by having God deliver man from his self-made predicament. Despite all these strengths, however, free will defenders still have one major difficulty: the problem of permission.

God is not directly responsible for evil; to this we agree. But is God indirectly responsible for it? Did he “allow” or “permit” evil in order to showcase all of His divine attributes? Many theodicies bank on this turn in God’s divine psychology. This view holds that God allows evil to occur in this world in order to ensure that the greatest good is achieved in the end. Following Leibniz, it is believed that God is obligated by His nature to create the best of all possible worlds. According to Leibniz, this would require a certain amount of evil, for some goods cannot be achieved without presupposing the existence of some evils. Forgiveness, mercy, grace, and justice are all thought to be attributes of God that necessitate the subsistence of evil in order to be dispensed.

Following Bentham and Mill’s Utilitarian ethics, God creates a redemptive-history that will balance itself out in the end. Here, the biblical notion of the providence of God becomes 19^th century continental moral philosophy with a dark twist. Hart describes this problematic view in stating that

“Many Christians clearly seem to wish to believe there is a divine plan in all the seeming randomness of nature’s violence that accounts for every instance of suffering, privation, and loss in a sort of total sum. This is an understandable impulse. That there is a transcendent providence that will bring God’s good ends out of the darkness of history – in spite of every evil – no Christian can fail to affirm. But providence (as even Voltaire seems to have understood) is not simply a ‘total sum’ or ‘infinite equation’ that leaves nothing behind.”[6]

Ivan Karamazov, the great atheist in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, responds to this notion directly when confronting his monk brother: “It is not God that I do not accept… I merely most respectfully return him the ticket”.

D.Z. Phillips, the great Wittgensteinian scholar, suggests that “to rescue sufferings from degradation by employing cost-benefit analysis is like rescuing a prostitute from degradation by telling her to charge higher fees”.[7]

The main problem with this method (despite its many strengths) is that it attempts to justify the existence of evil aesthetically. It makes the mistake of making evil necessary. If Augustine is right, and evil is a negation, a cancer, a nothing, then we should not explain evil in this way – if at all.

And thus we see the real problem in theodicy; what I will call the problem of correlational theodicies[8]. On one side we have an Aristotelian God who is so overly sovereign that He finds it necessary to contemplate only Himself for all of eternity, completely oblivious to all of the suffering that transpires on the earth. On the other side, utilitarian ideas of “goodness as utility” help interpret God’s process theology-like history. What we need to do in problem of evil studies is re-define our terms Christianly rather than first and foremost philosophically. Only in this way can we understand the puzzle of evil as Christian theologians.

When we speak of God’s sovereignty, which is most definitely a biblical concept, we often mix our categories. Our Evangelical theology often utilizes cosmological-scientific terminology in order to further explain our theological concepts. This is correlational theology. We need to take the advice of Wittgenstein and understand that each and every language-game can help solve its own puzzles, but it must solve these puzzles within its own language-game. Therefore, we must speak theologically about theology and cosmologically about cosmology[9]. The Bible (the grammar of our language-game) speaks of God’s sovereignty in redemptive-historical and, ultimately, theological terminology. When we speak of sovereignty we should do the same. Neither microcosmic determinism nor macrocosmic indeterminism will do the job. We need an entirely new picture of Christian reality in order to work out our theodicy.

If we, as Christians, are to understand God’s relation to evil, then we must first look to Christ, the Logos; that which enables us to know God. A Christocentric starting point leads us to one unambiguous conclusion:

“If it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God… Yes, certainly, there is nothing, not even suffering or death, that cannot be providentially turned toward God’s good ends. But the New Testament also teaches us that, in another and ultimate sense, suffering and death – considered in themselves – have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts.”[10]

“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”[11]

Inevitably, I hold that we cannot fully explicate evil. The problem of evil is eschatological in nature. There is always more to come. We look back to the cross in order to know the promise and we look forward to the end (actually, the real beginning) in order to know the answer. In this sense, as Wolfhart Pannenberg would say, truth is eschatological. We are always looking ahead to its arrival. When we are resurrected and our deaths are finally reversed, then we will know the solution to the problem of evil. God has already made the promise; now we must wait in faith for the doctor to enter into the waiting room and call our name.

Before Christ and the salvation that He brought was revealed to us, a man named Job struggled with the existence of evil. He tore his clothes and wept and complained, yet no answer came his way. His friends and neighbors tried to tell him that he must have done something wrong. After all, God is sovereign and God is fair. He punishes in accordance with the crime committed and rewards according to the degree of unswerving obedience shown. “Isn’t that how it is?” – Job’s friends must have wondered. Job could only say with existential despair, “I know that my Redeemer lives”. We can say much more now that Christ has been revealed. God has answered our prayer against evil in Christ. He became like us in order to suffer under the subjugation of the devil. He died the death that is ours to die so that we might live the life that is His to live. The world will always try to explain evil through victimization mechanisms and genetic manipulations, but Christ on the cross is our theodicy. Can we join the chorus of a groaning world: ‘How long, O Lord?’ – forfeiting the luxury of the easy resolution?

______________________________

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[1] Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities, p.24

[2] Romans 9:20-21

[3] Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 62

[4] Ezekiel 33:11

[5] Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 30

[6] Hart, p. 29

[7] Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 71

[8] Paul Tillich has coined this term in making a distinction between his theological methodology (correlational, i.e. using contemporary philosophical studies and trying to interpret Christianity through them) and that of theologians like Karl Barth (non-correlational, i.e. using contemporary philosophical studies and trying to interpret Christianity against them. With a bit of anachronism, one might see this as a deconstruction of the thought process of the world)

[9] Of course, this is not to say that the Bible has nothing to do with cosmology, nor to advocate an intellectual isolationism within arbitrarily-made philosophical categories; but simply to say that we must solve theological dilemmas in our own Christianly theological language-game.

[10] Hart, p. 86-87, 35

[11] Hebrews 2:14-15

An Excremental Eschatology

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Eschatology, Inane dribble, Luther

Luther is well known for using anal and defecatory metaphors throughout his more polemical writings (i.e. Table Talk), although most were aimed at the Papacy. However, the reformer was so fond of all things scatological, that he even utilized fecal wordplay in explaining his theology. He once expressed his readiness to depart from this world in the formula, “I am the ripe shard and the world is the gaping anus.”

I always knew that Luther was a piece of shit. ;-)

A Dialectical Eschatology

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Aesthetics, Analogia Entis, Eschatology, Freud, Romanticism

“It is one of the great romantic visions… vital in the systems of Hegel and Marx, that the history of mankind consists in a departure from a condition of undifferentiated primal unity with himself and with nature, an intermediate period in which man’s powers are developed through differentiation and antagonism (alienation) with himself and with nature, and a final return to a unity on a higher level or harmony. But these categories – primal unity, differentiation through antagonism, final harmony – remain in the romantics arbitrary and mystical because they lack a foundation in psychology. The psychoanalytical theory of childhood completes the romantic movement by filling this gap.” (Brown, Norman. Life Against Death. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985, Pg. 86.)

This line of thought intrigues me. Is there any way in which Christian theology can utilize this historical dialectic for its own purposes? Perhaps we could replace the ‘remembrance of the childhood state of play’ with a collective unconscious remembrance of the Edenic paradise. According to Freud, infantile sexuality finds its primary object-fixation in the Mother. On a macro level, would we do well to place God in this role, positing an Augustinian restlessness in the heart of every man? Could we say that our natural yearnings for this primal harmony, for a utopian society where evil is fully eradicated, are an unconscious paradise-fixation? Is this the aim of human art and beauty? Or does this give too much sway to the analogia entis?

Is Zizek Serious?

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Eschatology, Zizek

In a recent article from the New Humanist, the question is asked: Can a philosopher who approvingly cites Lenin and Robespierre be serious (let alone taken seriously)? The article makes the point that Zizek’s revolutionary politics are only in line with the aforementioned “terrorists” in that they employed a similar idea of The Act. Zizek’s method, to put it simply, is to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to free oneself from the hyper-reality of global capitalist liberalism, face the Desert of the Real, and make the Kierkegaardian leap into an authentic, but fully revolutionary, ethical life. Here’s a great blurb:

This takes us back to the nature of the site événementiel, the stage of the Act. Žižek says that “in a genuine revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realised, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justifies present violence – it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and future, we are – as if by Grace – briefly allowed to act as if the utopian future is (not yet fully here but) already at hand, there to be seized.” Žižek alludes here to the numinous, ecstatic dimension of revolutionary transformation. But it can also be realised before the Big Act, le Grand Soir, arrives. In fact it is the secret of any truly liberatory form of life.