Rebels never die

I’ve been thinking recently about being a leftist, even when I am uncomfortable with the left. Why do I keep talking about “a new left”?

How do we understand “the left,” even if we pluralize it? It is not a set of issues and positions, or of qualifications for membership. It is not a moral code or a collection of political principles. It is not simply another assemblage of commitments and practices.

The left cannot be so easily defined. Its content is always a response to its context. But even as it changes, it is still the left and I feel attracted to it even when I disagree. What is the basis of that affective unity (in-difference)? What are the bonds that tie us together?

A new left understands that the left is what we are constantly building, storying. But also, that it is as much about how we build it as it is what we build. And that process is the affective heart of the left.

The process of building a left appropriate to its context follows what I will call a diagram^[1], which lays out the routes that define—for me—the left: the processes of organizing to make the world better. It becomes especially important to hear it in moments of crisis, when worlds collide, when old worlds collapse and new ones are born. When we face a landscape of monuments, barbarisms, and rubble—in our case, of modernity and our contemporary realities. When we need to re-affirm the processes themselves.

This new left is neither particularly new nor a reiteration of the old. It is not an idea, a possibility waiting for us in the future. It is the present written in a future tense, the future as here with us now. It is the past written in the present tense, again, as here with us now.

At the moment, I can offer four paths or cornerstones that might help us to hear an already present new left, to feel the affective bonds that make us leftists: ideas, double consciousness, tikkun olam, and democracy. I’ve used them all before, but the connections are different this time. Maybe the harmonies will be as well.

They put you down, they say I’m wrong

Ideas—concepts, stories, thinking—matter. They matter to the world, and they matter to me because they matter to the world.

Why do ideas matter to the world? They provide necessary tools and knowledges for almost everything we do. The ideas we use shape how we understand—and hence, how we respond to any situation. Better ideas give us better information, more useful knowledge, more powerful perspectives. They enable us to tell better stories.

This is a particular understanding of the relation between ideas and the world; it offers a particular vision of the political intellectual. A political intellectual thinks about politics, creates knowledge about the issues, studies the enemies, considers various perspectives, etc. All in the service of making the world better.

As useful and sometime necessary as it may be at times, it assumes a separation of ideas from the world and politics; they are external to, exist independently of, one another. It sets politics outside of thinking and imagines a thinking uncontaminated by politics.

If you take the relation for granted, or if you assume that there is only one possible—and proper—relation between ideas and politics, you’re likely continue doing the same things over and over. If you assume the relations are simple interactions, you are already assuming the independence and will likely miss the powerful affective forces at work. Bad stories make bad politics.

It is becoming increasingly common to deny the difference all together. Ideas and politics are inseparable because they are the same. Some people reduce ideas to politics or, at the very least, assume ideas are inevitably (and often, desirably) contaminated from the very beginning. Ideas are always and already politicized; everything, including intellectual work, is always, in the first and last instance, a political act. Other people reduce politics to ideas, usually presented as ethical, moral, or political principles, or as utopian ideals, with its pragmatics put off in a corner.

What if we start by assuming that ideas and politics are neither separate, interacting, nor equivalent? That they are inseparable because they only exist in their particular relations? Our stories about what’s going on are affectively bound to how we live our lives and our sense of constraints and possibilities. Ideas matter to the world because they are bound to actions, just as actions are impossible without ideas. Actions without concepts are blind; concepts without actions are empty.

Concepts are not answers, only tools. And they do not exist independently. Their ability to cut into reality, to say something useful, depends on what they contribute to, what they can do in, a larger organization of conceptual and political relations,

Different organizations bring ideas and politics together or set them apart differently. They define the distances and possible attractions, and the affective power of any particular instance, and how much effort is needed to forge new relations. They delineate what it means to intellectualize politics and politicize thought.

Such organizations and the relations they assemble, are expressions of a diagram.^[2] A diagram is not a deep structure hidden from us; it is not a perspective. You can hear it; it figures the deep and powerful connections that ideas and politics can have to one another, the harmonies and connections that might not be obvious. You can hear the possibilities for change that they make available.^[3] You can hear the sorts of judgments^[4]—of thought and action, of differences and values—they allow within a way of living and struggling.

A diagram is a condition of possibility for the particular relations between ideas and politics, most commonly realized in a set of commitments, struggles, and principles. Those are easy to make clear, but they often result in disagreements and arguments—and that is good—that can result in serious fractures—and that is not so good if we are deaf to the diagram that binds us together as a left.

A diagram is a guiding and orienting figuration of the possibilities of judgement and choice. Think of how the compass defines our cartographic imagination. Think about the power of a musical key or time signature. Think about geometrical figures. These are all conditions of possibility of how we live in and think about the world.

Neither the diagram nor its specific expression (as a relation between ideas and politics) are guaranteed, even if they have become habits of thought?^[5] They are both built and affirmed in in our practices.

Fifty years in the academy has given me the time to shape an intellectual practice, mostly by appropriating (stealing only from the best) a number of concepts: relation, contestation, construction, complexity, contingency, unity-in-difference, the popular, structure of feeling, affective landscape, and of course, stories. I have experimented with different arrangements, changing their emphases and implications, attempting to construct a useful intellectual diagram.

Which is inseparable from a diagram of the left. Thinking about a new left raises questions about an alternative set of relations but also about an alternative way of constructing it. It invites us to think about the political diagram of the left as a unity, that is inseparable from and drives my intellectual work.

You want more and you want it fast

The most common contemporary diagram of the relation of ideas and politics—although it has a longer history in and even before modernity—is teleological. Ideas set a goal, a telos, not yet realized. And politics is the attempt to realize that goal. A teleological diagram presents a politics driven by an idea.

It is all about reaching goals. The goal may be implicit or explicit; it can be specific (defeat Trump) or utopian, or anywhere in between. It can be defined by political principles or apocalyptic visions. It can be framed in social, ontological, historical, religious, moral, speculative, or mythical imaginaries. It can be a totalizing vision of what is to come or simply glimpses of an alternative to what exists.

Not all teleological diagrams are the same; there are important distinctions beyond having different goals. First, imagine a continuum stretching from absolutist to relativist teleologies. An absolutist teleology is a quest for a single final Truth and an end to politics, whether they are imagined as perfect or “realistic” (as in ‘be realistic’). In the end, there can be only one, even if it is only a stepping stone to the next telos. A relativist teleology makes all goals equal. It doesn’t matter what goal you seek as long as you have a goal. Most teleological diagrams operate in the space between absolutism and relativism.

Second, teleologies imagine their journey differently. Some start with an idea or vision of the absence of evil as its telos. The journey is a battle to defeat, vanquish, conquer evil.

Evil is given; it has a substantive presence in the world. And it (the devil) may appear anywhere, in many different guises, from the White House to corporate capitalism, from liberals to communists. Such diagrams often assume that if you eliminate evil, good will suddenly appear and flourish. But the good ultimately remains undefined, even something of a mystery: heaven, paradise, grace, communism, the “true” America, etc.

Others start with an idea or vision of the good as its telos. Their task is to prevail over—overcome—the obstacles that stand in the way of arriving at the good. We battle against —eliminate, undo, or overcome--whatever roadblocks or impediments we face. We seek ways out of, beyond, the consequences of racisms, sexisms, colonialisms, or liberalism, etc. We use the state apparatuses—passing laws, adjudicating in courts, and contesting elections. But such diagrams pose two problems: victories often leads to feelings of entitlement, and they often ignore the more difficult challenges of changing the structures of consciousness and feeling that have made the status quo acceptable.

These two versions of a teleological diagram are often, mistakenly, described as conservative and liberal respectively, but those are already too narrowly political; the relation between a diagram and politics is not so simple. Besides, most teleological politics partake of both (but I don’t think it can be described as a continuum, more like a composition).

Teleological diagrams are often concretized in quasi-universal principles, including freedom, equality, virtue, purity and more recently, harmony (with e.g., nature) These principles animate notions of progress, which assume a goal and a process—whether of conquering or prevailing. You don’t know that you’re progressing unless you know where you’re trying to go. You have to know the goal in order to know if something is progressive. Insofar as people concretize the goal differently, they may end up at each other’s throats. These principles also define how we judge others.

You can learn a lot about current struggles over liberalism and modernity by following the history of the battles, since the 17th century, among these principles. The left has often staged its own battles between freedom and equality. Struggles over what they mean and whether they belong to individuals or collectives. Struggles over whether the two can be realized together or whether one has to be sacrificed on the altar of the other.

Teleological thinking/politics can be useful in certain conditions; it can be both enlightening and hopeful; it can offer a charismatic call to solidarity.

But it has become increasingly problematic, even dangerous. Having a goal means you are looking in one direction, toward that goal. You are not looking at other possible directions, other paths. Any assumption about where you are going, what is waiting for you down the road, constrains what you can do, what you can hear, because everything has to be defined by its proximity to or distance from that goal.

Worse, the constraining effects of goals can easily slide into a coercive power. Teleological diagrams often become colonizing, proselytizing their truth and converting non-believers. Sometimes by force, realizing what Bernard-Henri Levy calls the totalitarian threat. After all, if you know the truth, shouldn’t you impose them on others if you can? And if a few have to suffer so that others find the truth, isn’t that part of the calculation we have to make? Aren’t they guilty anyway—of standing with evil or standing in the way of the good?

She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl

What might a different diagram sound like, one that rejects utopianism and revolution, telos and progress? One that doesn’t start with a clear distinction between good and evil, or good and bad. One that doesn’t start with an idea but a practical process of making the world better. One that would call the left together as an open possibility.

The Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1897, described “the souls of black folk” as double consciousness. The pragmatists at the time were already suggesting that people have multiple identities, which are tenuously woven together to form their sense of self.

Du Bois was pointing to something more specific, more troubling, and more enabling: That Black Americans lived in two different worlds, with two conflicting, contradictory identities. They live neither totally inside nor outside either one; they are caught between, always moving between two world. And they belong to, are at home in, neither.

They don’t exist in a magical, liminal, or third space, literally between the worlds. They live, inescapably, often simultaneously, in both worlds. How they navigate either one is partly determined by the fact that they are always living in the other as well. They are a walking paradox. A problem.

Double consciousness lets you hear the world differently, allows you to hear things that you might not otherwise. It opens your ears to resonances and realities in unexpected places.

Double consciousness is not unique to Black Americans. It can describe the experience of emigres, colonial and diasporic subjects; And this includes jews—the first and perpetual emigre, the eternal outsider. Diasporic subjects, for example, may dream of an original home, but it exists only in their imagination of an irrecuperable past. They cannot go home (despite occasional efforts.) They cannot escape their two worlds.^[6]

Last week, I told Zachariah that one of the touchstones in my search for a new left was the New Left Club at Oxford University in England. (Stuart Hall, my mentor, was a member.)

I didn’t tell him that there was not a single Englishmen among the original members. They were all emigres, displaced from somewhere else, geographically and often by class and race as well. They all lived between two worlds. And they sought a new left.

The initial impetus was two events in 1956: the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt (the Suez crisis, the Sinai War) and the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of the popular uprising in Hungary. These represented the failures of both the enlightenment west and the Marxist east.

They came together because they shared a life of double consciousness. They recognized that their experience provided a lens through which to seek a better understanding (analysis, story) of the (then) contemporary world, and a new, popular socialism, capable of responding to the complexities of power and of speaking to people within their everyday lives. They called for a new left.

Rebel, rebel, how could they know?

As our current reality has become increasingly contingent and contested (not for the first time), we might consider whether a diasporic^[7] diagram provides a better ground for the left, and fruitful conditions for a new left. It won’t be obvious, and it won’t announce itself. But we can hear it coming from all sorts of places, including other traditions of double-consciousness. (I think I hear it in some contemporary activist voices.^[8] ) And it bears important similarities with some non-modern and indigenous traditions. It will undoubtedly sound strange.

I will explore it as a jewish diagram. Perhaps because I’m still trying to find a way to speak as a jew, to give voice to my jewishness. But more importantly, because it offers a useful way to figure the diagrams of double consciousness. I am not making a theological claim! You don’t have to believe in the content of my story to hear the diagram at work.

Let’s talk about Judaism (again). Judaism doesn’t have a goal. It doesn’t believe evil exists (although it does have malicious spirits—dybbuks). Instead the evil in the world results from yetzer hara, a natural capacity for human to do wrong. Its sense of the good is deeply embedded in this world rather than some ideal or telos. It does not offer a teleological diagram.

The founding moment of Judaism is the Exodus and the Covenant at Mt. Sinai, where Yahweh made a promise to the chosen people. The promise is neither a goal nor a mystery. It is quite specific: to return the Israelites to Israel, the land of their ancestors. The Israel of the promise is not the refuge, the exit-strategy it became after the world wars and the Holocaust. The Messiah will lead the jews back to Israel; he [sic] will also bring peace to the world but that is less a goal than proof of the Messiah’s claim. (Since the Messiah has not yet arrived, some orthodox jews don’t recognize the state of Israel).

The Covenant is beyond politics; it is the jewish diagram. Along with its promise, it commands an obligation: to address human suffering. Fulfilling our obligation will not guarantee the Messiah’s arrival, because our obligation has no goal and no end. But not fulfilling our obligation may delay the Messiah’s arrival.

Every diagram makes powerful affective communities possible and particular forms of judgment necessary. In modern teleological diagrams, the boundaries around the community are generally solid and important in ways that render those outside vulnerable. Those outside are to be judged (and usually condemned) for their errors and sins. Such judgments are the responsibility of individuals, whether or not they speak with a particular authority; they are often bound up with the scriptural authority of sacred texts.

The jewish community is defined by its obligation—a burden of responsibility—to the outside, an obligation to address others’ suffering wherever we find it. You can’t unburden yourself or share your responsibility by converting others to the faith. Others can, however, fulfill their—our—obligation. Jews often joke that someone, perhaps a friend, is really Jewish although they don’t know it yet. They understand the obligation and embrace it.

The jewish diagram demands judgment (alongside its celebrations) not of others but of oneself. And judgments belong to the collective rather than the individual (although it has been increasingly individualized and experienced as personal guilt). No individual holds the power of judgment in their hands. They are formed collectively as judgments of the collective. Just as no one holds the truth of the sacred Torah because it is subject to endless commentaries and commentaries on commentaries (Talmud).

Many jewish (and non-jewish) philosophers have argued that suffering binds us together as humans—not only our own but also the recognition of others’. We can and we do suffer. We can and we do share the suffering of others. We all experience the world through suffering. And jews have known suffering—and we will often remind you of that fact, not because we want your sympathy but rather, your understanding of our burden. (Will AI ever suffer or feel another’s suffering?)

In the Covenant, suffering does not have any metaphysical connotations, nor can it be assigned to the failures of political ideals. It is here, present in our lives, constructed in relations. It is always material, a fact of people’s lives. It can be personal or social, physical, economic, psychological, or cultural.

We will never eliminate suffering because it is it is written into our humanity if not into life itself. We cannot eliminate all suffering because much of it is not the result of human choice and action. We may not want to eliminate all suffering because it is often a source of human creativity.

The Covenant defines an obligation to mitigate, minimize, interrupt, and prevent suffering, and certainly not to ignore, erase, or increase another’s suffering, wherever we can. For we are answerable to, responsible for, the suffering we encounter.

It is the burden of jews (if not ultimately of humankind), our mark of the Covenant (as opposed to the mark of Cain). Levy puts it more eloquently albeit too individualistically: “I live with the unpleasant, inevitable thought that my position, my possessions, my prosperity, the air I breathe, my confidence, my dreams, my peaceful sleep have been—just a little bit—taken from someone else.”

There is no end to our responsibility and obligation; but again, that obligation is not individual. It is a collective obligation; it belongs to the jewish people (even if we run from it more than we embrace it). It was the great Rabbi Hillel the Elder who first spoke about loving thy neighbor as thyself, who first spoke of welcoming the stranger because we were once (still are) strangers. Jesus was a prophet living in this jewish diagram.

Whatever flaws and weaknesses people, including jews, repeatedly demonstrate, we are capable of being moved not only to tears and anger but to action in the face of others’ misfortunes and suffering. We are capable of compassion.

The Covenant commands an ethics of compassion and care for others. Compassion, literally suffering with others, is neither pity nor sympathy; it is a profound awareness of the suffering of others and the felt need to relieve it.

The crucial character of this ethics is that it is does not have any foundational principle outside of itself, or any goal outside the present. It is a pragmatic and contingent ethics, built on only the naturalistic assumption of suffering and compassion as human affective capacities.^[9] Once we have agreed to live such a life, do we need the theological Covenant any longer?)

Compassion is never selfish or self-interested; it is not about my suffering. Nor is it about the suffering of those closest to my heart, those whom I already care most about because that leads you back into selfishness.

Despite claims of “compassion fatigue,” compassion is unbounded and inclusive. (Better to call it “solicitation fatigue.”) There is no end to our capacity for compassion. Feeling compassion over here does not mean you cannot feel the same compassion over there.

But the Covenant does not command a perfect life, nor does it set a goal to be reached at some future point. It is not the life of the saint (or even a rabbi) that we must aspire to, but the life of an ordinary person living the Covenant, constantly acting and judging the limits of their own actions.

A life of compassion is not a telos. The Covenant does not speak to the future. It speaks in the present tense, in a prophetic voice. Listen and learn, feel and judge, hear the future that is already here with you, made present in suffering. The choice is here, now, in our collective hands.

This ethics of compassion can produce its own solidarities, its own ways of belonging together. We stand together in our recognition of our shared obligation. We may disagree about our diagnosis, make different judgments, commit to different struggles, offer different strategies and tactics, be willing to make different sacrifices. Still, we stand together.

We like dancing and we look divine

This ethics is the beginning of a politics, tikkun olam, to repair the world.^[10] To make it better. It is a practical matter of people’s lives, to leave the world better than you found it, by doing mitzvahs (good deeds, compassionate acts), fulfilling the commandment.

Tikkun olam directs us to address the harm (injustice) that has been and is being perpetuated by humans. Not all suffering is the result of injustice, whether intended or not. Not all suffering is harm. Whether we are able to cure someone’s illness, we can repair a system that denies them medical care.

While tikkun olam condemns those who are responsible for diminishing and immiserating people’s lives, its judgments are not about blame, but where suffering needs to be and can be addressed.

It does not begin and end with the enemy; it breaks with the long tradition of politics understood as an adversarial war—a negative politics. That doesn’t mean that there will not be antagonisms or opponents, that there will not be battles that have to be fought. But they do not define our politics. Obligation and compassion do.

Tikkun olam focuses on the conditions of people’s lives. Its politics is an ongoing struggle to make lives better—to minimize suffering—without assuming it knows what “the good life” would be; it is a positive politics that is not defined by any goal beyond what our compassion hears.

But it is not primarily about individual suffering although alleviating such suffering—treating the symptoms of harm— would be a mitzvah. It is not about changing one person at a time, although it couldn’t hurt. It is not merely the need to be kind. (Obviously, be kind!)

Such concerns are too “presentist.” They assume the present is only what we can hear in some small set of channels, along some narrow wavelengths. The present is defined as a small interval shaped by the past and shaping the future.^[11]

But tikkun olam assumes that the present is something different, in which we can hear much more; we can hear tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and … The future is present; the past is here now. The present is the moment when different times co-exist and interact. (More to come.)

Repairing the world requires us to make judgments, not about some future telos but the world we live in and how to make it better. Judgment is an ongoing process of consideration, deliberation, and conversation. It is open-ended, always to be reconsidered tomorrow. And it is above all communal; that does not mean individuals are mere cyphers of the community but that their personal judgments are anchored in and arise out of the collective process of tikkun olam.

We make judgments about how to construct the present of our obligation. About how harm is being produced. About the work we must do, what we must know and where we must act. About the different levels and key nodal points where those levels intersect to produce harm, from the details of people’s lives to the socially mandated habits that shape those lives, to the systemic forces that shape those habits, always seeing the complications and contestations of each level.

We make judgments about the practical demands and possibilities of the present as the context of people’s lives. About where the work of reparation is both necessary and possible. About where and how we can do the most good in each situation, in each moment.

And we make judgments of ourselves. Our obligation commands us to speak truth not to power but to ourselves, all the while acknowledging that we never hold the Truth. We make judgments about what we are willing to risk, to sacrifice, to give up, to let go of—to ameliorate suffering. About the limits of our own will. About where we draw a line in the sand, knowing that we are proclaiming the limits of our own obligation, of our willingness to compromise; it is for us and not others.

Such judgments cannot be framed as a competition among “victims,” about whose suffering is worse, or who has suffered the longest (although sometimes, such questions cannot be ignored). While not all suffering is equivalent, not all suffering is comparable. Not all suffering can be “measured” in the same ways, for example, according to universal principles like equality and freedom or abstract imaginations of the good, the bad, and the evil. While these may be useful tools to stand against harm in particular circumstances, especially those lives subject to “inhuman, cruel, and degrading treatment” (Primo Levi), they may also allow us to avoid the complex realities of people’s lives.

Tikkun olam is an always contingent process that we are making up as we go, constantly asking where we can go, what we can do, now, together. It is an effort to be always vigilant about the harms that power creates, even though we have not caused them.

It is also a call to democracy. But democracy is not a state to be arrived at; it is not the paradise at the end of our long journey through the night. It is not a goal. It is not limited to state politics. It is an invitation into and an invocation of a process; It is a way of being political, of living as a political subject. (Unfortunately, the left has no story for how to live democracy.)

Democracy addresses harm and injustice by problematizing one of its conditions of possibility—the affective exclusion from participation in the democratic process itself. Democracy questions every exclusion; it is a self-reflective and continuously expanding process, an additive process, of inclusion.

It opposes any politics that closes the process, that makes politics into a war between Us and Them. Such populist politics (including ethno-nationalisms) assume democracy resides only with Us. That is why democracy is the necessary foundation of anti-fascism, anti-totalitarianism, and to some extent, anti-authoritarianism.

Democracy does not belong to a circumscribed community of people. It refuses to divide the world into two camps—the perpetrators of injustice on one side, the victims of injustice or those who suffer harm on the other. “Evil” empires, whether located in America or Europe (well maybe America today), evil systems such as capitalism, liberalism, or colonialism, and evil people, over there. And righteous victims, especially if they can be seen as resisting the evil empire, no matter what else they are doing, over here (with us).

It knows that judgments have to be more contingent, more contextual, and more modest. The world is too complicated for any simple judgment. Every society has its humane and its barbaric sides; most people do as well. They don’t need an empire or even a leader. That something produces suffering or even harm may not be the totality of its existence. And that something suffers harm may not be the totality of its existence either. Simple, totalizing condemnations and celebrations are unwarranted and may actually hurt our efforts.

Democracy does not oppose power but its consequences of harm. While it often resists forms of power, it reconfigures rather than erases power itself. It is not an easy process; on the contrary, it is always agonistic (but hopefully not antagonistic). It is constantly confronting and deconstructing whatever exclusions make harm possible, in order to create new forms of conviviality, of belonging-together.

It is the collective effort to create new kinds of unities (-in-difference), the constantly changing effort to construct “We the people.” It does not claim that all power belongs to the people but rather that people claim the power to construct themselves as a people, and to continue to do so even as conditions change.

It has to remain open to differences and seek new ways of living with them. And of ameliorating the harm that those differences produce. Democracy, then, involves people constructing themselves in a political struggle to confront and ameliorate harm.

Democracy is a popular politics that locates the power of the people in the process of democracy itself. And it locates that process in the everyday lives of people. As a leader of the African National Congress once said, “not a minority, not a majority, but a people.” As protestors in Bogota chanted in 2019, “We are not against all. We are with all.”

I like to think of tikkun olam and democracy as musical compositions; they open us to others, to their suffering and our compassion. They reach beyond themselves to expand our sense of “we,” and celebrate the joy of our lives together. They can speak to the world.

The moment the music stops, the moment the process of “We the people” is stopped. The moment it proceeds according to the demands of a particular group. The moment it becomes a goal out there. The moment it accepts a comparative calculus of suffering. The moment it accepts some exclusions as inevitable, necessary, or legitimate. The moment it stops questioning itself. At that moment, democracy ends and we will have abandoned our obligation to repair the world.

You want more and you want it fast

I can hear the grumbling. Sounds great but isn’t the return to the promised land a goal?

Yes, but … The promise is known and concrete. It is not an idea nor does it offer or imagine an ideal. It is a fact, not something to be determined in the future tense. Perhaps it defines a goal for the one who makes the promise (but I doubt that God needs a telos), but does the recipient of the promise actually seek, work toward, that goal (something more than prayer)? If jews fulfill their obligation because they seek the return, they will not be fulfilling their obligation. You are not fulfilling your obligation if you do it for the sake of some goal other than simply fulfilling the obligation. Obligation cannot have a goal.

And besides, in the end, I don’t think we need the promise, the Covenant, to sustain our obligation. The obligation rests on our capacities, whether defined biologically or ‘civilizationally,’ for suffering and compassion.

Doesn’t repairing the world imply a goal?

Yes, but … only insofar as every human action has a goal, and the goal is not out there; it is right here, immediate and well-understood. We simply want to affect the suffering of the moment.

In that case, isn’t this just another version of short-termism? Repair what you can today. Build the democracy you can today.

Yes, but … Here things get weird, and we leave Kansas behind without any hope of finding a wizard. Every diagram carries a certain temporality, a sense of the nature of time and of how to live in it. I’ve always been surprised by how difficult it is to get people to think about time differently, to think of it as a construction and a site of contestation. To accept that time is relative.

We already live in many different times. Each generation goes through its own trajectory of changing and contested temporalities, both personally and socially. Each generation learns how to live in time and move through space in different ways, at different sites nad at different moments of its life. Most generations today think time was different—better, slower, more multiple and flexible—when they grew up. No doubt it was in some ways.

Societies experience different temporalities of change. Modern societies are generally characterized by ever-increasing rates of change, but at any moment, the changes may be happening, they may be lived in different times. For some, change is moving too fast to control or even translate into everyday lives. For others, time has slowed down or is repeating itself. And for still others, the changes have thrown their lives out of time.

Teleological diagrams commonly offer two conflicting but simple times: On the one hand, they “assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect.” It is divided into the past, present, and future: Look back to the past, look ahead to the future, always from the fleeting present. The future become the present which then becomes the past. Tomorrow becomes today which becomes yesterday. We can relegate some harms to the past and postpone others to the future for the sake of the present.

On the other, teleological diagrams operate with an apocalyptic time, imagining the end of time, e.g., the second coming, the revolutionary event. Only after the explosion or implosion of time will our telos be realized.

What happens when these two temporalities collide? What happens when time abandons us? Consider a moment in which there is the felt absence of any future; teleological diagrams can only imagine futurelessness as an experience to be challenged, but the result is often a retreat into the present. But if the future has disappeared from our everyday experience, what basis is there for the promises and obligations, the reasons for our choices, and the grounds of our judgments?

The jewish diagram carries a different temporality, a different way of living in time. It’s not that time is simply more complicated, or that it is not as linear as we assume. Although both statements are true. It’s that time is changing all the time, especially in moments when worlds collide.

As Doctor Who once said, “actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.” Time is Schrodinger’s cat, both dead and alive, both now and elsewhen.

The jewish diagram operates in prophetic time, in that wibbly wobbly…time-y wimey temporality, in which the past, present, and future cannot be distinguished as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Tomorrow happened yesterday and yesterday will happen tomorrow. And the present is not what you think it is. It is a time always and already supersaturated with times.

Tikkun olam is constantly reconfiguring the past and future, a past that will happen, a future that has happened, in an as yet undefined present. There is no telling how far the present stretches in wibbly-wobbly time. Today can be a matter of hours, months, years, even a lifetime, encompassing what we think of as the past and the future. It can be whatever is necessary to repair the world. The point is you act not for the sake of the future but for the present, to make it better.

Democracy is already here, although I don’t think it’s doing very well. The future is not awaiting us; it is here with us, now. Or has it disappeared from our present? The past does not just haunt us from back there; it confronts us right now.

We are not waiting for a future apocalypse because it has already happened, yesterday, and it is happening today as well. The environmental/climate change movement keeps telling us that the catastrophe is coming, that we can see the warning signs, and that there is still time to stop it. But still, while they have persuaded many people, they cannot mobilize them to make the necessary sacrifices. Perhaps the problem is that we are already living in the catastrophe. How can you stop something that has already happened? That is here with us now?

This is prophetic time, the time of the obligation. We are not acting for the future but for the present. We do not act in the conditional tense— ‘what if’—but judge in the time of ‘now that.’ It is already too soon and too late; people suffer harm. We are responsible for them all, despite our uncertainties, because they are all part of our present. As I said, we’re not in Kansas anymore and the wizard won’t send us home.

Thanks to Chris L., Gil, Ron, Megan, Andrew, Greg S., Nic**^[12], John, Arturo, Steve, Tony, and Barbara. (Lots of wonderful conversations!)

Many of these words and ideas arose from a talk I gave to celebrate the translation of Cultural Studies in the Future Tenseinto Slovenian, at the ACS Institute and MEMPOP Conference, University of Ljubjana, Slovenia, April 23, 2026. Special thanks to Aljosa Puzar.

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^[1] Some might call it a historical ontology of the left.

^[2] I am appropriating it from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Others might use Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos, as opposed to logos and pathos, reason and affect, closer to ethos as character and disposition. In this instance, I cannot escape the fact that Schmitt was a key Nazi intellectual in the Third Reich.

^[3] Let me remind you: Listening is something we do as if we are in control or surrendering our control to another. But hearing is an opening to what is happening. It is an encounter (with something other) more than an action we do.

^[4] I am dangerously close to Kant’s synthetic a priori. What happens to that concept if you contextualize it, if you see its complexities and contingencies?

^[5] Unlike the old—patriarchal—song: “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage…you can’t have one without the other.” Of course you can; you could even when this song was a hit. But it took—and continues to take—serious effort, even struggle.

^[6] My own sense of “out-of-placenesss,” of being an outsider, was in part the double consciousness of the jew, even when I was not conscious of it. Equally, it was in part the experience of being disabled.

^[7] I prefer diasporic to double consciousness because it carries a sense of movement within it.

^[8] For example, in some afro-futurists, anti-colonialists, and feminists, as well as in some activists. I hope that we recognize and accept each other as being together in the common diagram of double consciousness.

^[9] Comparable to Dewey naturalism, his attempt to locate the possibility of community and democracy in the natural capacities for empathy and foresight.

^[10] There is a long and venerable tradition of a jewish left, even a left Zionism. The current state of Israel has abandoned the jewish diagram in a new holy war. It has turned the promise into a telos and assumed that it can fulfill God’s promise. It has become blind to the obligation that comes with the promise.

^[11] Or more philosophically, as the absence of an interval, the ephemeral instant of experience.

^[12] I had originally experimented with casting my argument in a consistent religious metaphor, so I spoke of Christian—Protestant and Catholic—diagrams. I am grateful to Nic for pointing out the problems with that experiment.