Tarrying with the Apocalypse: The Wary Messianism of Rosenzweig and Levinas

This article is aimed against the recent practice of narrowing the concept of messianism to its “hot” — or, in Kafka’s words, “impatient” — version, today usually associated with the name of Saint Paul (in Jewish, Christian, and post‐secular interpretations). This “impatient messianism”, championed by Taubes, Agamben, Badiou and Žižek (regardless of all differences between them), privileges the situation of apocalyptic anomy in which Law becomes sublated or, simply, negated. Contrary to these readings, I would like to remind us of a “subtler language” of Jewish messianism, elaborated mostly by Rosenzweig and Levinas, which treats the Law not as an enemy but as its — however ambiguous — ally.