Hope without Optimism

Saint George was seated astride a sharp blade with weights tied to his legs, roasted over a fire, pierced through the feet, crushed on a spiked wheel, had sixty nails hammered into his head, and was then sawn in half. To crown his indignities, he was later appointed patron of the Boy Scout movement

Nothing is more otherworldly than the assumption that the world as we know it is here to stay.

Indeed, unless one combats the inevitable, one will never know how inevitable it was in the first place.

26 In any case, all actions have the finality of death about them, since for good or ill they cannot be undone.

In this way one can live ironically, standing in and out of history at the same time, in the manner of those in St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians “who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with the world.” It is a stance as typical of the revolutionary as it is of the monk.

Marx’s celebrated eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which insists on the need to change the world rather than interpret it, seems on the face of it not to recognize that the latter is an essential precondition of the former.

It is not true that language can repair one’s condition simply by lending a name to it, but it is true that one cannot repair it without doing so.

As the case of Plenty Coups illustrates, the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees, from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined

Murder, for example, implies a faith in the possibility of change, the provisional nature of the present, and the open-ended character of history.

Is finding evidence of proto-Marxism everywhere one looks a question of being open-minded or tunnel-visioned?