Abstract
Just like it seems impossible for the eschatological world to come to materialize without the arrival of the Messiah, so it seems impossible to escape from Limbo or our world of perennial crisis without a similar intervention from above. But is it? An active attempt of toppling over of the hegemonic orthodoxies might just demonstrate that the impossibility of the realization of the world to come lies in its effortlessness.
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Notes
- 1.
The refuse collectors, stirred up by the former interior minister, did refuse to take up their tasks the first days. On the third day they, however, returned to their duties with one small difference than before: ‘[T]hey were not in uniform, they were wearing their own clothes. It was the uniforms that were on strike, they said, not them’ (Saramago 2006, 93).
- 2.
For those interested, we have written elsewhere on the specifically political impacts of these actions as described by Saramago (cf. Vanhoutte 2014).
- 3.
‘Intensification and confirmation of indecision’, Buber writes when interpreting Kain’s refusal to reply to God, ‘is decision to evil’ (Buber 1953, 88). In fact, Kain murdered his brother.
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Vanhoutte, K.K.P. (2018). Extraduction: Ascent Out of Limbo. In: Limbo Reapplied. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_6
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