Radical Hope, Despair and Time: Responses to Nietzsche

Abstract

Taking its cue from the critique of hope elaborated by Jonathan Lear’s book entitled Radical Hope, this paper explores the stakes of such a critique in the work of four thinkers in the so-called continental or European philosophical tradition: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. The critique of hope informed by these thinkers revolves around the various ways in which radical hope seems to converge with its opposite, namely despair. The essay identifies three levels in which the “absurdity” of hope plays out in Nietzsche’s thought, before examining its legacy in Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. It concludes that the stakes of a critique of hope have less to do with justifying or legitimating hope as virtue, theological or otherwise, than they have to do with identifying the ways in which hope inevitably overflows the ethical and moral categories in which we often try to capture it.