Journal for Cultural Research

ISSN: 1479-7585 (Print) 1740-1666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcuv20

Derrida and messianic subjectivity: a hauntology

of revealability

Jacob W. Glazier

To cite this article: Jacob W. Glazier (2017): Derrida and messianic subjectivity: a hauntology of
revealability, Journal for Cultural Research

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2017.1338600

Published online: 12 Jun 2017.

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Journal for Cultural Research, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2017.1338600

Derrida and messianic subjectivity: a hauntology of

revealability
Jacob W. Glazier
Department of Psychology, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that the category of Received 9 February 2016
hauntology should replace the canonical understanding of ontology. Accepted6 January 2017
By invoking the trope of the ghost, hauntology helps to demonstrate
KEYWORDS
how there still lingers in the absence of a thing, a spectral element Deconstruction; Jacques
that is more real than its corporeal counterpart. Thus, the ontological Derrida; eschatology;
category of time is replaced by deconstruction with an anticipatory hauntology; messianism;
temporality abstracted from the transcultural messianisms of planet subjectivity
Earth, which is called messianicity. By framing this analysis through
the epochal deployment of what Derrida coins as globalatinisation, I
will argue that the concept of messianicity can be applied to a specific
mode of subjective production, subjectivation, to help demonstrate
the failings of not only the event of revelation (Offenbarung), but also,
by pushing towards its paroxysm in an hauntological spirit, the so-
called originarity of revealability (Offenbarkeit) its still entanglement
in the politics of light. Going beyond Derrida here, what this amounts
to is a certain hauntology of revealability whereby the arrivant, the
First, is accepted under the umbrella of the messianic pledge of faith
just to have itself doubled by a darker power that has never had to
haunt itself into its eschatological or teleological throne.

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very
construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time.
That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement
of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. (Derrida, 1994, p. 202)
The dark subtext hidden within Jacques Derridas development of hauntology in Specters of
Marx colours in a certain retroactive sense, a more macabre reading of the project of decon-
struction. As the opening epigraph is not scared to admit, a darker power holds sway over
any advancement of the general structure of being, which is to say a movement of exorcism
that seems to guard against the unfurrowing of the process of becoming. This hauntology
is in an opposite and simultaneous movement, the invoking or conjuration of the beings
themselves an occultation that works behind the staged scene of corporeality.
Derrida (1994) argues that these rites of hauntology should replace the canonical and
privileged notion of ontology. That is to say, being in line with the logic of other deconstruc-
tionist concepts, such as the trace, part of the justification, given by Derrida, is predicated

CONTACT Jacob W. Glazier jglazier@westga.edu

2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. W. GLAZIER

on the very nature of language and, more generally, as the deconstructionist definition of
iterability maintains, the taking of the conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility
(Derrida, 1993, p. 15). In other words, by invoking the trope of the ghost, hauntology helps
to demonstrate how there still lingers, in the absence of a thing, a spectral element that is
more real than its corporeal counterpart that has as many effects or more than things
considered to be real.
As further evidence for the viability of hauntology in the spirit of deconstructionist cri-
tique, the normative hang-ups that go along with ontology, such as phallogocentrism
(Derrida, 1978), could conceivably be disentangled from their genealogical and hierarchical
power alignments. Given that such a conception would be a sort of metaphysics of absence
as opposed to the normativity of the metaphysics of presence, however, then what can be
said about how hauntology would deal with traditional ontological categories like space,
time and beings? In other words, what may result or pop-out of subjecting ontology to the
horror tinged metaphorics of hauntology as well as its literal, analytic counterparts? Since
the Derridean notion of hauntology points to a certain empty space without presence, the
ghost of a substance, it therefore informs the precise deconstructionist notion of temporality
that, as opposed to taking the signifier time as its nominalisation, in certain contexts, decon-
struction, instead, casts the absent presence of temporality in terms of the messianic. In this
way, the substance of the presence arrives messianically in the form of a return (Reynolds,
2014, p. 7) producing a specific retrospective kind of knowledge.
As such, I think it is prescient to tackle this temporal problematic: How does, under the
rubric of hauntology, messianic temporality perform, secure or hypostatise epistemological
meaning? I will argue that hauntology, following Derrida elsewhere, invokes the category
of messianicity as opposed to messianism the former being a particular temporal waiting
whilst the latter is more universal anticipation, a messianism empty of content (messianicit
sans messianisme).1 Yet, in slight contradistinction to Derrida, hauntology, I suggest, neces-
sarily calls for pushing messianicity even further than its deconstructionist context. This is
demonstrated through hauntologically interpreting the being of subjectivity and developing
a specific kind of subjectivation2 or setting the hauntological parameters by which subjec-
tivity is produced.
Such an analysis is given sense only by the coming of an event using the deconstructionist
neologism of globalatinisation, or more technically, the arrival of a revelation towards which
the teleology of globalatinisation is anchored. As I hope to demonstrate using Derrida as an
agreeable interlocutor here, the truth structure of revealability gets under globalatinisation
in the sense of exposing the performativemystical foundation of the agreed upon circula-
tion of epistemologies, e.g. the Law. However, using the strategies of hauntology and through
its demonstration by the subject, I will argue that not only are the politics of revealability
still ensnared by the traces of the revelatory structure of globalatinisation, the politics of
light, but even the messianic structure as such requires the population of another category
what I am calling the doubling of the First.
Following the literary senses of hauntology initially put forth in the inaugural epigraph,
what this self-reflexive haunting looks like is, again, a certain form of darkness. Yet, to place
the onus on apparatuses of subjective production as a demonstrable place from which to
start, I want to first examine, in an abstract sense, how the various messianisms of globala-
tinisation could yield prima facie any notion of messianicity to begin with.
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 3

Subjectivation and the forms of messianism

Having been developed by some of Derridas contemporaries and colleagues, the technical
term subjectivation means the way that subjectivity is produced through specific disciplinary
means. Foucault (1985), for instance, contrasts the self-cultivation and aesthetic creation of
subjectivation with modes of subjection (assujettissement), which describe the ways in which
subjects are constituted by contemporary modes of stamping through apparatuses like
capitalism, the juridical and penal system, Oedipal family relations, neoliberal governmen-
tality, and other social institutions or forms of power. In difference to subjection, using the
words of Davidson (2016), a mode of subjectivation is sustained by practices or techniques
of the self that go towards the creation of oneself aesthetically (p. 59). This is what Foucault
referred to as arts of existence. The French term subjectivation is also used by Deleuze and
Guattari in, most notably, A Thousand Plateaus (1987) where it is translated in the English
edition as subjectification. Here, Deleuze and Guattari employ it in an analogous manner as
Foucault, even if in more macro sense, in order to refer to the way that the linguistic, affective
and semiotic nature of subjectivity becomes coded through arborescent machines or elides
these very machines using lines of flight, therein becoming something other or mutant. The
term has become somewhat common place in poststructuralist French and Italian theory
and can be found, specifically, in the queer and gender work of Butler (1990), the post-co-
lonial and Marxist theories of Hardt and Negri (2000), the study of neoliberal identity creation
given by Lazzarato (2014), and an analysis of the semiotics of capitalism by Berardi (2012).3
The importance of power for subjectivation is paramount. Power is everywhere, on this
account; not just located in structured intuitions like the university or prison but is rather
dispersed, mobile and injected throughout society and put into practice via various discur-
sive regimes. Power is to be understood both in the negative sense as a policing, repressive
function (pouvoir) and in a positive sense as means of production and creation (puissance).
As such, subjectivation can be seen in an ontogenetic fashion, insofar as it channels the flow
of these lines of power. Foucault (1978) emphasises this point in The History of Sexuality
Volume 1, where he writes that power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it
a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex
strategical situation in a particular society (p. 93, emphasis added). Key, here, is to understand
that the strategical is always arbitrated by regimes of truth and falsity relative within any
given historical analysis. Thus, it is not the case that the subject chooses as a function of
willpower, desire or intention the best, most advantageous or efficient mode of operation
to put into play. On the contrary, subjectivation is the inscription upon the subject by the
strategical situation into which it is thrown. To draw out the overt political tones, again,
Foucault (1978) states that there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and
objectives (p. 95), which is to say that it never does not carry with it modes of subjectivation,
implicit and embedded within a bundle of possible and immanent power relations.4
Given that subjectivation is always structured by forces of power, could it be that there
is a special case of subjective production that would allow for a certain formation of a
hyper-subjectivity? In other words, is it that what various traditions have called the Messiah,
their inherent reliance on a particular messianism, is pointing the way towards just such a
form of subjective production that represents a limit case for the notion of subjectivation as
such a certain idealised and future sovereignty that would actually arrest the subjects
juridically inscribed formations? Viewed from the level of subjectivation, then, the various
4 J. W. GLAZIER

forms of messianism developed in this essay have the double-bind effect of producing
subjectivities that remain pious towards their eschatological projections but also may chal-
lenge a traditional notion of subjectivation rooted in power in a certain sense when pushed,
breaking free from their traditional sedimentation in historic, symbolic and genealogic con-
structions forming what may be called a messianicity of subjectivation.
To sketch this further, it is necessary to first get down the various distinctions that Derrida
makes with regard to the forms of this anticipatory temporality, which is to say the category
difference between messianism and messianicity. The term messianism refers to the expec-
tation of a specific Messiah germane to the traditions beliefs. As examples, this may include
some of the worlds religions and eschatologies stemming from the forms of Islam, Judaism
and Christianity.5 Put into somewhat psychoanalytic language, messianism entails an
anti-castration approach to futurity such that, not only is the emancipatory promise imag-
inary (represented in a strict symbolic lineage), but the future is hurried i.e. violent demands
are made to satiate wish fulfilment. It is worthwhile to note that messianic time and historical
time are mutually exclusive, insofar as messianic time is a rupture in the normal progressive,
diachronic passing. This distinction contrasts messianic time with a temporality extracted
from Enlightenment thinkers, perhaps most notably that articulated by Hegel (1977).
To see how Derridas conception differs, Hamacher (2008) articulates in the edited volume,
Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, in no uncertain
Marxist terms, that the messianism of Christianity is, in a word, the messianism of commodity
language, its promise of redemption the promise of commodities: they embody a general,
constant and transhistorical value (p. 174). This illustrates how the notion of the Messiah
may covertly have been incorporated, in this case from Christianity into larger global struc-
tures or abstract machines like capitalism. The point is that a homology in temporal logic
exists between the messianism of Christianity and the commodity fetish as developed by
Marx.
The difference between deconstructive messianism and the forgoing transhistorical mes-
sianism is that the former, again to return to psychoanalytic terms, takes itself as castrated
and the future content as a heterogeneous, an impossible other, whilst the latter projects
homogenous figurations onto futurity. Poleshchuk (2014) develops this eschatological same-
ness of the transcultural messianisms, grounded in a pious determinism of waiting, when
writing that the messianic image signifies a certain order of temporality which includes a
structure of waiting: nothing could interfere, change or even escape this waiting for the
future, since waiting is the very essence of futurity (p. 57). As a consequence, this form of
messianism can be distinguished by the fact that it not only refers to cultural and historical
particulars, naming the teleology of the planetary eschatological traditions, but also by its
unique take on this teleology such that it is a forever deferred anticipation.
In slight contradistinction, deconstructive messianism, or the particular form of messian-
ism developed by Derrida, places the notion of justice as holding sway over the empty or
emancipatory promise held out into the future: the fact that this expectation of the coming
has to do with justice that is what I call the messianic structure (Derrida, 1997, p. 23). In
fact, Derrida goes on to argue that justice resists any attempt at a deconstruction precisely
due to its being tied to the structure of messianism, and it is this fact that allows for the
guidance and development of an ethical rubric for deconstructionist practice. The nature of
this kind of temporality, the future to come of a heterogeneous Other, is not only the
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 5

messianic for deconstruction but also enables Derrida to articulate this relation as a site of
justice.
Justice, in the above sense, is tightly bound to the notion of messianicity. This is due to
Derrida (1994) insisting that both terms rely on a form of time that remains out of joint as
an anachronic disjointure (p. 33) creating the ground of the present through this de-total-
ising condition of emergence. This is to say that justice is impossibility for and towards which
deconstruction must already aim. Framing justice in this way allows Derrida to preempt the
filling in of the open horizon of justice with normative forms of representation and practice
that would lead deconstruction away from itself and towards a form of justice that has
everything to do with standard models and nothing to do with the conditions of possibility
that give rise to these very models. It is therefore right to say, as alluded to previously, that
justice is therein undeconstructible (Derrida, 1994, p. 33) since its time is of the nature of
deferral, a unique kind of deferral that is not exactly diachronic but rather must always remain
out of place.
Tosas (2014) phrases this temporal dimension by saying that for Derrida the messianic
consists of this perpetual dislocation (p. 362). Such a perpetual dislocation not only sets
Derridas theory of messianism apart from other theorists, such as Agamben, Levinas and
Benjamin, but also positions it uniquely in relation to the Law such that the dislocation, for
deconstructionist philosophy, constitutes the unrelenting engine of life (Tosas, 2014, p. 362).
As if to add support for this claim, Ware (2004) echoes such a point when arguing that the
disjointed time of messianism allows Derrida to view the future-to-come as the site of justice
(p. 107). Therefore, following in the logic of the previous analysis of historical and traditional
forms of messianism, what I am calling deconstructive messianism, can be distinguished by
the fact that it is a certain transcultural abstraction, or a quasi-transcendental6 to use
Benningtons (2000) language, developed from the Earth eschatologies and appropriated
into deconstructionist philosophy taking as its teleology a form of justice.

From messianism, towards messianicity

The above distinctions of messianism, either the historical and cultural eschatologies of
Earth or Derridas version in light of deconstruction, still remain committed to a teleology
that takes an object as sense, even if this object is perpetually (or forever) postponed thus,
perhaps still taking its negative inverse as meaningful in the form of deferral. That is to say,
they are still dictated by the sense this object has with regard to how the tradition of the
messianism frames its understanding of its temporality. As such, they would consequently
be arbitrated by the policing powers of subjective production, in the form of modes of
subjection, disciplining their followers to remain committed to a certain eschatological path
or to remain pious towards a future event. However, I want to maintain that Derrida never-
theless offers a roadmap to an understanding of messianism, or what he calls messianicity
without messianism (messianicit sans messianisme), that pursues a way to understand the
concept of messianism when it is emptied of all future content, including Derridas own
version of messianic justice as well, therein maintaining just the anticipatory waiting struc-
ture tout court. Derrida calls this absolute, empty structure messianicity7.
In order to make the move from specific forms of messianism to messianicity at the level
of subjective production, it may be helpful to contrast the secular approaches to tackling
the messianic problem as developed by Benjamin and Derrida deconstructionist
6 J. W. GLAZIER

messianism contrasted to a more historical, dialectical and non-future-oriented weak mes-

sianism as found in Benjamin. Ware (2004) notes this distinction when arguing that
Benjamins model of weak messianism is incapable of approaching the messianic promise
to come because such a promise always lacks self-presence and will therefore never fit within
a dialectical constellation of time (p. 100). Benjamins so-called weak version of messianism
is predicated on the principle of retroaction such that the meaning of the past becomes
reshuffled given the rupture of a messianic event in the present. That is to say, we can no
longer view history as a chronological order but as a constellation that, by a messianic static
charge, can rearrange itself in a flash (Ware, 2004, p. 102). In this way, Benjamin reverses
theological messianism into a theory focused on the revised meanings of the past, in a
certain psychoanalytic spirit, instead of a messianism determined by and faced towards the
future.
In contrast to Benjamin, Derrida maintains the futurological dimension of messianism
understanding this deconstructionist take as lacking a self-presence strictly in regard to a
future Other, therein leaving open space for a non-deterministic waiting contra theological
forms of messianism. Since Derrida insists on grounding messianicity ontologically as a
future event and since there is no content to the event except the fact that the event is
diachronically a necessity, then it follows that such a conception allows for envisioning a
certain form of messianism at the level of the production of subjectivity with regard to the
previous discussion, processes of subjectivation as opposed to modes of subjection. Here,
Ware (2004) makes just such a point when suggesting that the possible influence this new
conception of time [i.e. Derridas] has on our understanding of the subject, however, remains
an open question subjectivity is, at bottom, messianic (p. 100).
To unpack Ware on this, the open question created by such a temporal structure is held
out in front of subjectivation as a kind of carrot-farce in the sense that it is existentially nec-
essary to ground temporality in relation to an anticipatory telos i.e. holding open the
possibility of overcoming the existential temporal structure. In its most abstract sense, this
is what Derrida calls the structure of messianicity itself (the emancipatory promise) (Ware,
2004, p. 105). Pushed to its paroxysm, then, messianism loses its ability to hold an object as
sense, which empties it of any content or meaning. That is, it acts as an empty variable,
barren, holding the space for nothing, not even justice. It would be on this account that
messianicity as such is strictly a temporal impossibility.
Indeed, such emptiness creates the possibility for a subjectivation based on precisely this
temporal structure of messianicity. Ware (2004) articulates a twofold sense by which to under-
stand exactly how subjectivity itself is messianic:
Subjectivity is messianic, for both concepts revolve around the promise of reaching self-presence,
a promise which is, in itself, impossible. The messianic subject, insofar as it struggles ceaselessly for
this ontological claim, nevertheless remains as an affirmation of that impossibility. (p. 112, emphasis
added)
The emphasised point would appear to be a kind of subjectivation grounded in affirming
the very impossibility of the messianic possibility.
This struggle towards the Messiah, to say it somewhat illustratively, takes on a certain
comportment of fear precisely because of the nature of this kind of temporality. Derrida
(1997) says as much, albeit in less theoretical terms, when framing this problematic in the
following way:
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 7

There is the possibility that my relation to the Messiah is this: I would like him to come, I hope
that he will come, and the other will come, as other, for that would be justice, peace, and revo-
lution at the same time, I am scared [emphasis added]. I do not want what I want and would
like the coming of the Messiah to be indefinitely postponed. (pp. 24, 25)
The terror of frustration comes from the sheer fact that subjectivation excludes the desire
for the Messiah, i.e. desiring for its impossible arrival. This form of subjective production
would contain the absolute empty temporal structure of futurity such that it loses all content
(justice, democracy or equality) (Ware, 2004, p. 105). Again, if messianicity is to be understood
as more radical version of the deconstructionist kind, in the forgoing sense, this would result,
as Derrida intimated, in a temporality predicated on fear, the terror of a future arrival of the
Other in the self.
Yet, Derrida (1997) seems to insist there is faith, no doubt (p. 23), even going on to claim
that faith as such has its origins in the structure of messianicity (Derrida, 2002a). Placed at
the level of subjectivation, is this faith a subjective mood or an ontological structure germane
to the temporality of subjective production? In one sense, the messianic subject experiences
an anticipatory driven sense-towards-the-future but, more strictly, this is illusory, insofar as
the existential consistency of the subject is only predicated on an empty futurity that prom-
ises to be filled in; hence, the role of faith.
Rather than taking the lead from a deconstructionist account of messianism as some
transhistorical or quasi-transcendental structure of justice that is more abstract than the
various theological messianisms, I want to take-up Derridas work on the notion of an abso-
lute, empty structure of messianicity, with its comportment of fear, and the assertion that a
certain kind of faith is implied with such a concept.

Globalatinisation and revelation

This faith, as I will later articulate, requires a certain piety or pledge that creates the exorcistic
terror derivative of such a mode of subjective production. Importantly, all forms of subjec-
tivation can only be made sense of with regard to their larger social, historical and cultural
context. Given that Derridas messianicity is germane to deconstructionist soil, it follows that
such a larger socio-symbolic framework can be made sense of in light of another decon-
structionist concept: namely, the planetary and globalising phenomenon that Derrida
(2002a) calls globalatinisation.
Globalatinisation, in terms of its theological predicates, is fundamentally a Christian
deployment of power: in Derridas (2002a) words, it is (essentially Christian, to be sure) (p.
67). This means that, as the neologistic nature of the term suggests, it is both planetary
(global-) and genealogically Latin or catholic in nature (-latinisation) such that its historicity
is made up of world-forming mechanisms that have been deployed diachronically under
the covert rubric of secularism. In a certain Marxist (1906) sense, then, it can be said that the
term refers to a totality, one by which an originary escape or return to an Other is unequiv-
ocally foreclosed.
Pushed futurologically, the process heralds the coming of a new planetary event that
has as its symptom the geopolitical conflicts between the transcultural messianisms. Or, as
Derrida (2002a) says, the war of religions deploys itself there [i.e. through globalatinisation]
in its element, but also under a protective stratum that threatens to burst (p. 67). The bursting
of the event onto the scene or the coming-to-head of both religion, in its more transhistorical
8 J. W. GLAZIER

and theological sense, and Latinisation, in its genealogical deployment of power, predicates
itself on an unforeseeable type of arrival.
Derrida justifies his appeal to a meta-structure (i.e. globalatinisation) insofar as naming
or critiquing it in the spirit of deconstruction will usher in a certain justice as opposed to
allowing a purely homogenised, fascist or capitalist all-encompassing new world order. Such
a meta-language is all the more pressing, since as Derrida is not shy to admit, the very term
globalatinisation inflects that even the Christianisation of the world that has been taking
place, in its universal catholic sense, is running out of breath and this expiring breath is
blasting the ether of the world (Derrida, 2002a, p. 67). The ether of the world has not only
not been under its rightful guardianship, ontically, due precisely to this so-called globalat-
inisation, but has also become perverted as the necessity of the meta-language or logical
structure intimates thus, its requisite return to something other.
What is this alternative? Such a question leads Derrida to historically situate this new
internationalism via its dialectical and aporic structure that simultaneously makes it a factical
necessity whilst also showing it to be bottomless or without precedence. He writes,
Since the end of the Second World War, in particular since the founding of the State of Israel, the
violence that preceded, constituted, accompanied, and followed it [globalatinization] on every
side, at the same time in conformity with and in disregard of an international law that therefore
appears today to be at the same time more contradictory, imperfect, and thus more perfectible
and necessary than ever, turn toward the messianic structure found amongst the different world
religions and eschatologies. (Derrida, 1994, pp. 72, 73, emphasis in original)
Such an analysis Derrida sums up with the phrase the appropriation of Jerusalem, wherein
the war of the world order is ranged in order to ensure its culminative event, a certain tran-
straditional messianism; one that, as a matter of cosmic enforcement reaches its totality and
becomes something other than it was a new form of internationalism or planetary secu-
larisation under a One. In other words, this is the shedding of the various messianic escha-
tologies beneath a symbol of their very structure: what Derrida calls messianicity.
The event, therefore, figures as a guiding structure sine qua non for the appropriation of
Jerusalem such that it prefigures a certain opening and, therefore, collapse a collapse in
the symbolic-historical field that not only yields an alternative, a different form of the appro-
priation of the teleology of the city, but also a new kind of totality. This is, no doubt, falling
under the auspices of a new internationalism, as Derrida continually reiterates, whilst also,
as a certain genealogical or transhistorical consequence, inducing a fleeing of its very arrival.
This arrival that also produces its own disappearance is termed by Derrida the impossible.
He writes that this condition of possibility of the event is also its condition of impossibility,
like this strange concept of messianism without content, of the messianic without messian-
ism, that guides us here like the blind (Derrida, 1994, p. 82, emphasis in original).
Furthermore, the condition of impossibility that is marked out by the messianic structure
or, that is to say the various eschatological heritages, acts as a gatekeeper against the arrivant
such that it at once accepts the coming whilst simultaneously etching out the arrivant as
strictly a figure, in a certain literary sense a tropological or metaphoric non-messiah that
then must be dealt with: the various messianisms would still install at the borders of the
event in order to screen the arrivant (Derrida, 1994, p. 82, emphasis in original). Such a
dealing with is in its very nature what Derrida, imported from Husserlian phenomenology,
reappropriates as revelation (Offenbarung).
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 9

There is a clear distinction between the revelation of the messianisms via the Earth escha-
tologies rooted in history and a beyond or a next-never-arrival of the very structure of these
traditions, messianicity. But, in terms of the revelation as such, it is clear that the appropri-
ation of Jerusalem and, by extension, the world order is indebted to just such an expectation
of revelation. However, on certain ontological grounds, this is fundamentally or, as per
Derrida, originarily misguided.
Relying on Heidegger here for help, the structure of being, or the ontological difference
as such, calls for a form of revealability that gets behind the myriad historically constituted
forms of messianism:
It would accordingly be necessary that a revealability (Offenbarkeit) be allowed to reveal itself,
with a light that would manifest (itself) more originarity than all revelation (Offenbarung) [And,
again] in its most abstract form, then, the aporia within which we are struggling would perhaps be
the following: is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung), and
hence independent of all religion? (Derrida, 2002a, p. 53, emphasis in original)
This last question I take to not just be rhetorical; that is to say that revealability is not only
not susceptible to the event of disclosure called for by the secularised appropriation of
Jerusalem but more powerful such that it discloses, in a more cosmic sense to be sure, the
very structure of these discursive messianisms: revealability. It would, therefore, not be par-
ticularly of this place, in the sense that messianicity would lift the arrivant away from the event
of revelation and towards some wholly Other situated structure.
What are the logics of this wholly Other into which the arrivant is whisked away? The
messianism, now emptied of revelation and all of its planetary, symbolic-historical content,
reveals itself as belonging, as it had all along, to the very experience of faith, of believing, of
a credit that is irreducible to knowledge and of a trust that founds all relation to the other
in testimony (Derrida, 2002a, p. 56, emphasis in original). The so-called trust that founds the
production of knowledge in the sciences, religions and messianisms collapses or is recon-
stituted and forgotten about such that the foundation of Law, its undergirding performative
and mystical a priori (Derrida, 2002b), is both re-established planetary and concurrently left
behind.
Derrida, in somewhat poetic language, has this to say about the transition from revelation
to revealability: this messianicity, stripped of everything, as it should, this faith without dogma
which makes its way through the risks of absolute night, cannot be contained in any traditional
opposition, for example, between reason and mysticism (Derrida, 2002a, p. 56,57, emphasis
in original). Yet, the arrivant is not without help as the specter of the revelatory structure
appears to be surveying it during the plunge into its absolute night. This ghostly gaze and
its infection throughout the arrivants symbolic appropriations is, in a certain sense now, the
pledge of faith or, again, the cultural and technoscientific alterity that exists between each
of the events, revelation (Offenbarung) on the first hand, and revealability (Offenbarkeit), on
the second hand.
There is, then, a more primordial religious experience that casts its ethereal incorporeality
over both of these notions of truth. Derrida articulates this hidden and other power as
[Preceding] the critical and teletechnoscientific reason, it watches over it as its shadow. It is its
wake, the shadow of light itself [emphasis added], the pledge of faith the testimonial performa-
tivity engaged in technoscientific performance as in the entire capitalistic economy indissociable
from it. (Derrida, 2002a, p. 79)
10 J. W. GLAZIER

I want to highlight that Derrida insists on the alterity that exists between the transhistorical
event of revelation and the more originary showingness of revealability; that is to say, the
very institution of the arrivant as both an event of culmination and its necessary taking flight.

The doubling of the first

The flight, however, is darker in the sense of taking with, I argue, a certain doubling of the
arrivant what I will now call the First. Derrida seems to be prescient to this issue, when he
writes towards the end of the Specters of Marx that the empty structure of messianism,
messianicity, contains with it flavours sensations even of death.
Some, and I do not exclude myself, will find this despairing messianism has a curious taste, a
taste of death. It is true that this taste is above all a taste, a foretaste, and in essence it is curious.
Curious of the very thing that it conjures and that leaves something to be desired. (Derrida,
1994, p. 212)
This is a death more extended and torturous than what one might assume to be mortality
that is for sure. This kind of literary language, by Derrida, can be unpacked and rendered
more technically: I will develop this in the present section through a hauntological critique
of revealability resulting in, as has just been foreshadowed, the doubling of the First.
The darkness this brings with it is in contradistinction to the light of revealability, even
though whilst certainly more at-its-base than that of the secularised revelation again, a
light that would manifest (itself) more originarity than all revelation (Offenbarung) (Derrida,
2002a, p. 53, emphasis in original) a light that takes itself to not be truly a light at all (cf.
the polemics found in White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy; Derrida, 1974)
but in its very spectrality is a darkness, which foregrounds its powers of illumination in their
very possibility. Miller (2007) makes a similar critique, although not specifically through the
metaphorics of the light, when arguing that if, however, as we have seen, the distinction
between revelation and revealability is ultimately undecidable [then] what happens under
the title messianicity would be universal or, alternatively, linked to the Abrahamic milieu,
and therefore, historically contingent (p. 40). In other words, the neat connections between
messianism with globalatinisation and revelation and, conversely, messianicity with more
originary revealability seem to be somewhat arbitrary, insofar as the very term messianicity,
for deconstruction, still must invoke a certain lineage. However, I suggest that the preceding
problem arises when looking at messianicity through an ontological lens. As a solution, the
problematic may better be cast in the terms of hauntology.
Said simply, interpreting revealability through hauntology results in the darkness making
the light possible in its hauntological constitution precisely because of the arrivants relation
to the darkness as a correlate, supplementary and uncanny kind of alterity towards its reflex-
ive other. Indeed, this is the Other of the other wherein, and let us not forget the way in
which the light becomes hidden in the arrivant, it must rely on the darkness for protection.
Such is a strange kind of protection since its ontology, as Derrida would say, is predicated
on an opposite movement of exorcism: Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism.
Ontology is a conjuration (Derrida, 1994, p. 202) his definition of hauntology.
What is the double-parallax that moves from the side of exorcism to conjuration but the
very becoming sovereign of the arrivant and its double? The doubling effect is its spec-
tral-mirror forming Other hauntologically, in an aporic dark reveal, and, placed under being
itself, the messianic taking-the-place of the arrivant insofar as the First, again to use Derridas
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 11

distinction between revelation (Offenbarung) and revealability (Offenbarkeit), fades into its
more primordial Other through the conjuration of the double by the First through a sub-
jectivation of switching.
What are the techno-political motivations that undergird the oscillatory movement of
getting behind the light of revealability for the arrivant? If there is not some deficiency in
the way in which the shining-forth of revealability is taken to be a given, in an a priori manner,
then why would a supplementary structure of the arrivant, which is to say the Messiah, exist
ontically as its other? Again, it is a hauntological category mistake made by the Other as
to the nature of revealability itself the light as a predicate of darkness, the originarity of
revealability. Would it not therefore follow that the true sovereignty of the arrivant lies not
on its powers of showing, illumination and unconcealment but in a kind of obfuscation the
darkness enshrouding the arrivant in the protection of a guarded signification? This is, of
course in a reverse logic, its true sovereignty insofar as the arrivant is allowed to be exclu-
sively and only because of a new messianic shift the re-return of a hauntology of the First.
For, were it not this way, the revealability of the Messiah would reach a stasis and remain
stuck in the politics of light a virtual return to the disparity and homogeneity of the reve-
latory nature of globalatinisation.
Something new is required. A newness that has nothing to do with the hauntology of
messianicity in the first place but, rather, its desert-like abandonment, like a bolt of lightning
falling from heaven. This is to say, it would be a new kind of sovereignty different from the
First, but one that is enshrouded in a darkness that neither shows nor reveals but perhaps
remains to be seen in all its tropological senses, with it a sovereignty without messianism,
or the overcoming of the ontological difference, its oscillation between exorcism and con-
juration, the non-revealability of hauntology as such, its limit and impossibility. Such would
amount to its exact circumscription, again a hidden or encoded form of signification from
whence its powers of light(n)ing take their shape. As Derrida demands, it would comprehend
them, but incomprehensibly (Derrida, 1994, p. 10, emphasis in original).
On the one hand, this inability to comprehend is messianicity as such, which is really the
teleological travelling of the Messiah back to its source, and, on the other hand, it is the final
non-teleological arrival of the dark predicates of the First. Hence, as Derrida rightly points
to, there is no sense by which one is able to say anything about it since it is a kind of divi-
nation derived from the structure of messianicity. In this sense, it would have to be pure
sovereignty tout court the exact mystical foundation that founds the Law in the first place.
Again, a saving power, to reappropriate Heideggers Hlderlin in the light of this non-reveal-
ability, that haunts and not just performs as a hauntological sovereignty without its ontological
equivalents.
Who or what sits on top of this hauntological throne from whence the messianic structure
was allowed to take its form? It is a certain kind of ghost, to be sure, but a very special case
of spectrality, which inverts the logics of the arrivant and establishes itself as a pure and
anti-performative foundation upon which the Law founds itself the mystical and enigmatic
specter of all possible specters. This messianicity isthe dark spectrality of revealability as
such, never having to haunt itself into its escha-teleological sovereignty it would harbour
within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology
themselves (Derrida, 1994, p. 10). It would therefore be a power of powers, allowed to slip by
the ontological oscillation of subjectivation in terms used previously, the darkness that
obliterates the ontic character of the arrivant in the first place.
12 J. W. GLAZIER

Concluding in the future

In this essay, I have attempted to carry Derridas notion of messianicity beyond its confines
within its original philosophical home of deconstruction and into a form of subjective pro-
duction. This was framed by a deconstructionist understanding of the historically determined
state of affairs of planet Earth, which sets as its conditions of possibility the economic, social
and cultural deployment of power called globalatinisation. This assemblage of planetary
relations is predicated on a temporality that is, by definition, messianic namely, the culmi-
nation of the event resulting in a revelation (Offenbarung).
However, revelation is a secondary phenomenon, remaining stuck in the politics and
power structure of globalatinisation, as per Derrida, insofar as revealability (Offenbarkeit)
shows this by breaking free from all notions of theological messianism. In this way, reveal-
ability suggests an auto-critique of epistemological or truth notions of a messianic event-
to-come by getting behind the revelatory structure of globalatinisation. Nevertheless, I have
argued, Derrida fails to push the concept of messianicity far enough by not inducing reveal-
ability to reveal itself, so to speak. Or, in other words, by the logic of Derridas own argumen-
tation and new rubricof hauntology, the fact that revealability still secretly trusts a politics
of light means that it is entrenched in a colonialist tradition that takes as its arbitrary origin
just such a metaphorics of illuminism.
On the other hand, in order to push messianicity further, I have reappropriated the strat-
egies of hauntology and applied them to Derridas development of revealability. This has
resulted in, what I have termed, the doubling of the First, which contains within its messi-
anicity a temporality that has already been teleological and eschatological. This is a move
to a timeline that is not just performative, as in the notion of the messianic pledge of faith
inrevealability, but is, strictly speaking, sovereign. In this way, I claim, this argument still has
followed Derridas initial concerns, to a degree, insofar as by hauntologically interpreting
revealability, the ghost of messianicity or its unnamable supplement, conjures itself by
destroying its messianically temporalised other.
To further develop the forgoing analysis, in the future, it would be interesting to articulate
the haunting effects such a form of messianicity would be able to deploy. That is to say, to
take seriously the worldhood that both truth structures, revelation and revealability, pre-
suppose, it follows that this hauntologically riven doppelgnger of the first arrivant would
have certain a posteriori effects. Such effects would be predicated upon its level of sover-
eignty. To pose it as a question, what is the power of this new form of messianicity? It is
clearly not a mimetic recapitulation of the power logics of globalatinisation. Whats more,
given the anathema it has for revealability, the ontological effects it would produce must
be necessarily guarded, perhaps almost in a cryptological sense. Would it follow that such
a dark messianicity reclusively withdraws from the world as opposed to exposing itself to
it? Is such a concept, on this account, driven by a gradual fading or a steady detachment
from the predicates that the traditional messianisms exalt that is, fame, piety or
salvation?
These questions, and more like them, could be answered, I suggest, not by charting a
teleological trajectory of this messianicity through time and space; but, on the contrary, by
fleshing-out or conjuringthe messianic figure in an existentialist sense by analysing the
singularity of its being. Giving my version of messianicity figural or archetypal contours by
which to come alive might have the benefit of challenging older and dated notions of what
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 13

messianism is supposed to look like or be. This would certainly be one of the effects such a
project would have, not by syncretically bringing the messianisms together, but through
turning them around on themselves, one might say. By extension, it may follow that perhaps
the ultimate sovereignty of this double of the First would end up being its ability to auto-cri-
tique the ontology of its throne, its own messianic power.
In conclusion, Derrida is right to maintain, it would seem, that in all versions of messianism,
and even the abstraction towards messianicity, therein resides a certain notion of faith that
undergirds anything that can be categorised as messianicat all. So too, in a hauntologically
conceived messianicity, there would dwell a kind of faith, not in the deferred sovereignty of
the structure as such, but rather in the very process of hauntology itself. This is a self-piety
that gives the Messiah over to itself, a specific form of subjectivation expelled from globa-
latinisation that had produced the comportment of fear: I am haunted by myself wherever
there is Ego, es spukt, it spooks (Derrida, 1994, p. 166, emphasis in original).
Yet, in difference to the revelation of globalatinisation, a hauntological faith does not
necessarily assure the functioning of testimony or the preservation of shared epistemologies
but believes only in its own ontological conjuration. Of course, it is important to remember
that the cut also goes the other way: whilst trust is placed in the being to come of this mes-
sianicity, its exorcism simultaneously rebukes just such a notion of faith indeed, going so
far as to monstrously demonstrate the anti-character of its promise to be.

Notes
1.
In the essay Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason
Alone, Derrida (2002b) suggests that this messianicity without messianism is a temporality
predicated on anticipation insofar as the Messiah, traditionally conceived in eschatology, is
replaced by deconstruction with the advent of justice (p. 56). This form of justice cannot be
known beforehand and therefore is, in a sense, blindly awaited. It must be, therefore, an event
that shakes, startles and surprises as an unforeseen interruption in the normal flow of history.
Messianicity is typically rendered in the formula messianism without content because the
mark that this signifier points to is ineffaceable (Derrida, 1994, p. 34, emphasis in original), the
taking upon oneself of a heritage that has as its telos a deconstructive kind of justice, which
arises from the very conditions of possibility themselves, conditions that are anchored in the
future-to-come of messianicity.
2.
In the first section, I will position this concept of subjectivation, taken from poststructuralist
theory, in relation to a group of philosophers and thinkers that have employed it rather
pervasively: these include such established figures as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattarias well
as the more contemporary theorists mentioned. Yet, perhaps it was Guattari who developed the
theory of the production of subjectivity (subjectivation) the most rigorously as, for example, in
some of his more well-known monographs like Chaosmosis (Guattari, 1995) and The Machinic
Unconscious (Guattari, 2011). In its most technical and theoretical treatment, Guattari sketches a
theory of subjectivation in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari, 2013) where it takes its most
mature form, therein representingthe culmination of his academic work.
3.
This list is certainly not exhaustive as tracing the ways in which subjectivity is produced
burgeoned during the last several decades largely due to the rise of the intimacy that the
subject now has with various technological gadgets, more so than ever before. Indicative of
this are the fields of post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013) and transhumanism (More & Vita-More,
2013) that have, only very recently, been able to set themselves up as reputable domains of
knowledge.
4.
I want to caution the reader that the analysis given of subjectivation and subjection is
necessarily incomplete. This is due to the impossibility of being able to adequately develop
14 J. W. GLAZIER

the terms and make the distinctions necessary in order to provide a substantive theoretical
framework leaving such an understanding, regretfully, presupposed in the current essay. As
iterated in the body of the text, subjection is usually taken to be repressive, the foisting of the
norm upon the subject while subjectivation, on the other hand, may be seen as the subject
creatively or experimentally reconfiguring that very norm for its own political or personal ends.
An excellent recent collected anthology on this very issue has been put together by Cremonesi,
Irrera, Lorenzini, and Tazzioli (2016).
5.
I am not making the claim that messianism is a feature of all of the worlds religions and
especially not that it is a necessary precondition for religion as such. I am, rather, trying to
illustrate how abstracting from eschatology might amount to a messianic likeness between
and among certain forms of religion. This is, in a certain gesture, following what Derrida (1994)
does in Specters of Marx when he, taking this move one step further, articulates the formality
of a structural messianism (p. 74) when developing his theory of justice. Later in the essay, the
nuance by which to position the various Earth eschatologies becomes all the more pressing
since the machinery at work in globalatinization homogenises these differences and formats
them to a standard notion of religion. This, as we will see, is held against the backdrop of a future
revelation that would consolidate, or perhaps better, incorporate these various distinctions
and traditions.
6.
The concept of the quasi-transcendental has been developed into a technical term in the
secondary scholarship on Derrida cf. Bennington (2000); Gasch (1986); Hurst (2005) and
Kramer (2014). To do justice to the concept would mean to understand the key strategies of the
deconstructionist project something for which the present essay does not aim. Nevertheless,
by way of a brief introduction, the term connotes a rhetorical double gesture of naming a certain
transcendental or universal structure while, at the same time, critiquing the very symbolic
structure within which the quasi-transcendental is named. In essence, the quasi-transcendental
is never a universal in the traditional philosophical sense of the term just as it is not a nominal,
relative particular. For deconstruction, the precise point is the textual intervention (e.g. the
setting to play of difference) being made in regard to its canonical situatedness, which is to
say its positionality draped against historical and cultural factors such as phallogocentrism,
heteronormativity, the metaphysics of presence, and so on. Therefore, the quasi-transcendental
is not historically stable since its abstraction depends upon not only the intersectionality of
various discourses, but also the being making the intervention.
Caputo (1997) mentions in his book The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
7.
Religion that it may not be precise to render messianicity as messianism without content.
Upon his reading, the future event that holds open a space for messianicity is the messianic
promise itself. It would be this promise, which deconstruction founds itself on that shatter[s]
horizons becoming not the horizon as such but the very disruption or opening up of the
horizon (Caputo, 1997, p. 118). In this way, Caputos conception is not too far from the findings
of the current essay if one is able to make the leap from the promise of disruption to its end
result, the closing up or doing away with the need for an arrivant. This is not the abandonment
of messianicity per se but a radicalised version of it, insofar as instead of being a hoped for other
that foregrounds the temporal meaningful horizon, the double of the First, as I will go on to call
it, engages in a subjectivation of switching that encrypts or shrouds the event of messianicity,
therebybecoming a darker version of the promise.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Jacob W. Glazier, PhD ABD is pursuing a degree in Psychology in Consciousness and Society at the
University of West Georgia. He has his Master of Science in Education degree in Clinical Mental Health
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH 15

Counselling from Western Illinois University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Augustana College.
Currently an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Psychology at the University of West Georgia,
Jakes research tends towards a transdisciplinary approach via theoretical and philosophical models
and includes subjects like critical theory, embodiment, and desire as well as their relation to praxis
and clinical practice. His work has been published in academic journals that include Psychoanalysis,
Culture & Society, Mortality, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and others.

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