This Pathless Hour | 251the fact that the secularization thesis was being discredited in academia, and this
led to the reconsideration of the very category of the secular.^4 This reconsidera-
tion explains why irreligious philosophers and theorists have taken a renewed
interest in religion, speaking of a “return of religion” and a “post-secular” turn
in the humanities. Postcolonial studies have also contributed to this shift, high-
lighting the meaning and effect of concepts like secularism when forcibly applied
to colonized peoples.
A long historiographical tradition treats modern ideologies as secular ver-
sions of religious and messianic ideas.^5 For example, the absolute sovereignty of
the modern state may be seen as a secularization of the sovereignty of God (as in
Schmitt), or the revolution sought by the radical left as a secularized version of
the messianic redemption (as in Löwith). Some in this tradition view seculariza-
tion as having successfully detached itself from its religious origins. Others view
secularization as moving beyond religion, even if it must still question its origins
to better separate from them.^6 Still others see secularization as thoroughly “re-
ligious,” despite its own claims to the contrary. The contemporary turn to the
postsecular draws on these traditions while also modifying them in important
respects. I focus here on the secularization of one particular theological theme:
messianism. Buber himself, in Paths in Utopia, compared Marxist and utopian
socialism according to the type of eschatological stance embodied in each. His
view provides a position from which to engage contemporary postsecular theory
that seeks to deploy the messianism of Saint Paul in the service of revolution.^7
These works occasionally reference Buber’s own work on Paul, Two Types of Faith
(which contains the last fragment of the unfinished work on Das Kommende).
The argument will begin, perhaps counterintuitively, by recontextualizing the
Buber-Scholem debate over Hasidism, revealing theopolitical implications of
Scholem’s apparently objective and scholarly application of methodological rigor
to Buber’s alleged deployment of Hasidism for neo-romantic ends.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to proclamations
of the end of history and the beginning of a postideological age. Since then, a
variety of poststructuralist micropolitics have prevailed over efforts to assert a
single dominant leftist paradigm. While some have attempted to revive a kind of
academic Leninism, these efforts have been sclerotic and superficial, as they lack
connection to actual social movements.^8 Anarchism, however, has been observed
in several recent social movements: in 1994, the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas,
Mexico; in 1999, the so-called battle in Seattle and the subsequent global justice
movement; in 2011, the indignados in Spain and Occupy Wall Street in the United
States, and in 2016, in the autonomous canton of Rojava in northern Syria. The
evolution of anarchism from its “classical” form in the 1930s to today’s range of
“postanarchist,” “postleftist,” and other movements owes much to the intellectual
legacy of Gustav Landauer. The relationship between the academic postsecular