The Messianic as Ha Ha

by

Eli S. Evans

 

We can easily formulate this problem of the Edenic and the Messianic, as opposed to the simple past and future, in terms of the joke which, it has been stated many times before, might in fact be nothing more than the purest distillation of the narrative phenomenon in general. For example, this is a joke, or at the very least the beginning of a joke: What's black and white and red all over?

    Most people have heard this joke already. If you do not know the joke then, as in any narrative, it will begin for you with an unresolved situation, in this case a question that needs answering, that opens onto a series of possible resolutions. Eventually—and in the case of the joke there is a minimum of narrative mediation between one and the other—the situation of possibility onto which the joke opens, or which opens onto the joke, will resolve itself into something like a final state of affairs. At the moment of its resolution, as it turns out, we will, in the case of a joke, either laugh or groan. I would argue that the two responses are in fact two different manifestations of the same sensation.

    Thinking of it this way, it becomes evident that, right where we are, pinned between the unresolved situation that opens onto the joke and the potential for a resolution to the aforementioned condition of possibility in, finally, a state of affairs, we can easily identify a past and a future. The past, in this case, is the question that has already been asked. This question, because it was not answered in the moment of its asking, as I have suggested already, opened onto a condition of possibility: there is a series of possible answers, and if narrative transpires in this short joke it is in the invisible space between that condition of open possibility and what will finally present itself as the answer. On the other hand, we have our future, which is the answer that will resolve the question which initiated the joke’s trajectory. We do not know that answer yet, but, the joke promises by its very structure, we will.

    By way of this simple joke, we have arrived at the simple past and the simple future. We can oppose this simple past and simple future what in each transcends its temporality: the Edenic, which has already been named here, and the Messianic.

    The Edenic isn't particularly complex. If we imagine that the past of this joke, as an example, is the question that has already been asked—a question that, not yet answered, once opened onto a condition of possibility that, ultimately, was this or that set of concrete, circumstantial possibilities – then the Edenic might refer, within the context of the world of only this joke, to a time before the question had been asked, before possibility meant this or that possibility, but possibility itself. The Messianic, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the answer, still waiting for us in the future, to that question, what we might also call the state of affairs into which our condition of possibility will resolve. Or, I should say, it has everything to do with it. In the case of this old joke, this is the answer: A newspaper.

    In this moment, we laugh or groan—or perhaps, because we know the joke too well already, we do neither, but this is not of any consequence. We also discover that all along we have been asking ourselves the wrong question: It was not what's black and white and red all over? but, rather, what's black and white and read all over? That is to say, not the noun but the verb. This is a special moment, for this moment, inaugurating that state of affairs which resolves the condition of possibility onto which the joke had opened, becomes possible only the very moment that it becomes actual. But, of course, this is impossible: a state of affairs that was not possible already cannot realize itself as actual. As a result, in this moment the past is recuperated, like a performer who has finished his turn on stage already called back for an encore, and opened again so that we can insert the very possibility that could not even be imagined as possibility until it realized itself as a state of affairs. This is the Messianic: That which has happened already must momentarily become that which has not quite happened yet in order to retroactively admit into the past the possibility of a future not initially contained there. In this past-future, time itself is transformed.

    It is no coincidence that, in the case of this old joke, the source of this temporal transformation is the very ambiguity of language itself.