Epigraphs: The Messianic, Law, Time

"Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim."

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task."

- Walter Benjamin

"Messianic time has the form of a state of exception...Here it is not a matter of a problem of political philosophy in the strict sense but of a crucial issue that involves the very existence of philosophy in its relationship to the entire codified text of tradition, whether it be Islamic shari'a, Jewish Halakha, or Christian dogma. Philsophy is always already constitutively related to the law, and every philosophical work is always, quite literally, a decision on this relationship."

- Giorgio Agamben

"Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction what remains undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice – which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights – and idea of democracy – which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today."

"[The messianic]or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration."

- Jacques Derrida