Not yet: The faith of revolution

Abstract

This essay seeks to contribute to revolutionary understandings of time through an examination of Derrida's 1993 book Sauf le nom, and the poet and mystic Angelus Silesius, whom Derrida reads in this book.The essay counters Martin Hägglund's claim that deconstruction and negative theology are fundamentally opposed to one another by tracing the work of impoverishment in Silesius's poetry. The essay then employs this understanding of impoverishment to deconstruct the concept of desire in Hägglund's 2008 book Radical Atheism, proposing as an alternative to this concept a 'faith of revolution' that is tied to a certain understanding of the future.