Thinkers like Žižek, Badiou, and Taubes, at some point, leaned toward a left-leaning interpretation of Christian eschatology and St. Paul, without managing to escape the religious matrix of political theology. It would seem there is no escape: eschatology inevitably has a religious character. Therefore, the question of the possibility and necessity of a secular eschatology must be posed and answered with sufficient clarity in order to find a way out of the theological turn in contemporary philosophy.
The need for a secular eschatology stems from the struggle for a domain that has thus far been occupied by religion: the long term and the transformation of humanity as a whole. In the long term, religion has referred to major economic and historical cycles, but it overlooks the very idea of the definitive end of a way of life based on successive modes of exploitation. As for the transformation of humanity, it refers to formulations in which immanent social reality encounters the transcendent in order to be saved and redeemed. The demand for answers has led to a proliferation of religions, sects, spiritualities, and metaphysics, each positioning itself as the absolute truth.
The Popol Vuh presents an image that serves as a starting point for thinking about the end of time in a different way. The Mayan gods created various types of human beings until they arrived at the current ones. First, the men of clay, then those of wood, and finally, those of corn, who are humanity today. The gods realized that the men of corn saw and understood everything with perfect clarity, and could even compete with them. Therefore, jealous of their own creation, they clouded their vision; thus, their understanding became limited and confused.
This third humanity, now transformed into capitalist humanity, inherits and takes to its extreme the various forms of exploitation and oppression that have occurred throughout history; thus, slavery and patriarchy remain as one of its pillars. Human beings are not only blinded, but on the verge of total blindness. It is no longer the gods who seek to annihilate them, but themselves, because they have jeopardized their own survival. It is their actions that are leading to barbarism.
Secular eschatology questions the possibility of the end of this third humanity and the beginning of the fourth. It will be the birth of a new humanity, not merely an improvement or partial replacement of the previous one. In this sense, this future, in its fundamental aspects, is not contained within the present world, and it cannot emerge from an Aufheben because it reveals the limitation of being both a negation of the negation and a transcendence of the past. Certainly, the new humanity will take the elements of the current way of life that are indispensable to it, but these will be placed in an entirely new world, to such an extent that they will probably not even be recognizable.
This is not about making another grandiose, metaphysical, or religious gesture, about totalizing history and reducing it to an abstract principle, or about placing a messianic structure at the end of time. It is THIS world, THIS time that has been called into question; it is THIS present humanity that must give way to a new humanity. Totalizing tendencies lead to the emergence of authoritarian phenomena, which have been devastating.
The expectation of a new humanity cannot be resolved with an appeal to hope. Hope, if devoid of any specific content relevant to the present, is simply another form of resignation. Furthermore, there is no messiah or sacred history waiting for us. This is about complete secularization, not a variant of religiosity.
The difficulty stems from the absence of a promised heaven and, therefore, from not knowing what form this new humanity, this fourth humanity implicitly contained in the Popol Vuh, will take. We know what it will not be: capitalist, oppressive, destructive of nature, patriarchal, racist; but we know neither the path nor the destination. Theology precisely attempts to fill this void and this anxiety about the future. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro express this in all its drama: Is there a world to come? Rehearsal about the fears and the Finnish .
If things were to end here, we would have merely escaped one dead end only to enter another. It is certainly the task of humanity today to find the path to reach that elusive future. Where to begin? Where to head? Where are the signs of the times to come?
The perpetual present of capitalism, which closes off the future, exhibits fractures, divisions, and ruptures through which glimpses of non-capitalist and non-oppressive temporalities emerge. Flashes of lightning in the dark night illuminate the sky for a few moments. There we can glimpse what the new world will be like and intuit where we are headed.
Every social struggle, every mass mobilization that clashes violently with the forces of order, every sufficiently radical and profound theory, every prolonged resistance, creates the image of the time to come. There, the collective appropriates history, the normal course of the established order is broken, and the will to emancipation is restored, even if only provisionally.
There, too, collective, communal, democratic, and horizontal ways of life present their astonished face. They disappear, swept away by capital, by despair, by the pull of ultraconservative ideologies; but they remain in memory until the next great battle. How can we preserve and consolidate them? How can we permanently build a collective that faces the horizon of emancipation?
Faced with the impending catastrophe, an eschatological attitude must be adopted. A will for transformation, guided by the best possible representations, is set in motion, among other mechanisms, through the cannibalistic ethos, hacker procedures, and the function of the Trans* operator.
The cannibalistic ethos devours the culture and thought of capitalist society in order to subdue and undo them, and with its parts, already reconverted into something else, builds a new culture.
Hacker procedures that alter the savage algorithm of domination and introduce into its sequences a direction that leads to the world to come that we long for.
The Trans* operator, whose operation teaches how to explode the fields fixed by the established order, the orthodoxies that explode into heterodoxies, the worlds unified by domination splitting and dispersing in all directions.
