Hope as a theopolitical virtue: eschatology and end of time politics

This chapter explores the meaning of hope as a theopolitical virtue in a nihilist era. Within the nihilist horizon, hope as simultaneously a theological and a political virtue is envisioned as equidistant both from arguments that favour a sanitised separation of eschatology from politics and from those that tend to recruit it in the service of earthly, political or technoscientific, utopias. In this context, eschatological hope becomes a type of counter-politics that transforms the very idea of what politics stands for: neither the politics of sovereign or revolutionary violence nor the technoscientific effacement of politics, but rather the counter-politics of happiness, resistance, messianic profanation, and theocratic an-archy. In this perspective, hope as a theopolitical virtue is affirmed within a terrain where politics and theology are no longer separate or juxtaposed discourses and where a certain nihilist take on the theological is always already political, transforming the latter from within.