Pressing On

Abstract

Hope is divided. It is never itself. Or, it may be that when I hope time is not quite itself. Already, the logic of hope demands that this too must be questioned because of its tense: because of a presence and an identity in the ‘is’, beyond which hope has already progressed. To speak of a time ‘when I hope’ is also to compromise its strange temporality. In its refusal to be confined to any temporal dimension, hope puts the time-handling linguistic device of ‘tense’ under pressure. It is not possible to hope without a history and a futurity, so hope cannot be grasped by a purported present. It has to be traced as a trajectory through time.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen, is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

(Romans 8:24)

... [H]ope which does not want to be just as far at any end as it was at the beginning, does away with the sharp cycle.¹