Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: One of the harder lessons offered by history is that only the first half of the revolution seems worth carrying out. This study examines how, contra Christianity, which spells out the fate of revolution in its entirety, Gnosticism stands as a symbol for revolution arrested and immortalized in its most radical phase. It shows that Gnosticism is a revolution that structurally renounces the prospect of phenomenal victory in exchange for the eternal preservation and constant renewal of its revolutionary energy. I do so by examining how, rejecting worldly victory, the critical spirit of Gnosticism seeks its minimal and sole embodiment in the individual (the individuated, the indivisible, the residue). I argue that, by building the court of radical inwardness as its theater for enacting what I call the “politics of world loss,” Gnosticism invents the noumenal as that impossible space for enacting the quintessentially phenomenal, i.e., the political.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel16081071
Author: Yi Wu
Institution: Fudan University
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
Funder: Fudan University
OpenAlex ID: W4413308236