The promise of time:towards a phenomenology of promise

This work renews the thought of a pure future beyond all that is given and outside of any immanence of self-presence. This thought is the thought of a promise of time that opens us, on the basis of an irreducible mortality, to the advent of redemptive, messianic future that is the incalculable par excellence. Along the lines of Heidegger’s notion of ‘Phenomenology of the Inapparent’ as a point of departure, and taking inspiration from thinkers like Schelling, Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin, this work attempts the possibility of phenomenology of promise that - no longer founding upon eidetic consciousness - takes its bearing from our exposure to the excess of an immemorial promise that groundlessly exposes us to an event that arrives from an eternal remnant of time beyond all ‘end’ and all ‘completion’. In this manner, it argues that the highest ethico-political task of our time is to keep our human condition open for the promise of the immemorial that founds us on the basis of its fundamental irreducibility to human capacity or power, in relation to which all attempts of self-foundation and self-presence lose their legitimization and justification. This claim of the unconditioned, thus, marks the limit of the immanent politics of self-consumption in today’s world. However, such an attempt demands deconstructions of the metaphysical foundation of the historical reason a witness to the messianic arrival of justice that alone can redeem the otherwise unredeemable sufferings of the past.