Anticipation, critique and the problem of intervention: understanding the messianic: Derrida through Ernst Bloch

This paper looks at the concept of the messianic as a means of understanding the Marxist tradition, particularly the relationship between the ethical and the political. It examines the positions of Jacques Derrida and Ernst Bloch, whereby both utilise the messianic as a means of upholding an ethical space which is not reducible to being,while at the same time emphasising the need and demand of the messianic to be brought into being. This contradiction operates as the basic characteristic of the messianic and it is asserted that Bloch, rather than Derrida,offers a stronger version of the messianic and the relationship it constructs between ethics and politics, by attaching a notion of the good, that of human dignity which operates to guide the ethical command. While Bloch's dignity may lead to the position of sacrifice when engaging within the political, the co-ordination of the ethical by dignity does not itself sacrifice ethics as a totality.