Genealogy and the Unprethinkable: On McGrath’s Political Eschatology

I reconstruct the interplay between two gestures that characterize Sean McGrath’s most recent book, Political Eschatology. First, McGrath develops a thorough genealogy of secular modernity in which he focuses both on the disenchantment of nature brought about by the notion of God as transitive cause of the world, and the importance of an eschatological understanding of time for the modern belief in historical progress. Second, McGrath draws from Schelling’s philosophy of revelation to propose that a truly eschatological conception of time should at once affirm the poverty of human reason in the face of genuine novelty in history, and postulate that redemption and justice are events the sources of which are wholly transcendent to the discursive faculties and spontaneity of human subjectivity. In the last section of this review, I explore the consequences for political and ecological thinking that McGrath draws from his eschatological methodology.