NON-REDEMPTIVE HOPE AND THE FRAGILITY OF MEANING DESPAIR, INJURY, AND THE ETHICS OF FUTURITY

Proceeding through a series of scenes of injury, violence, and the collapse of the meaningful, the article offers an account of the post-redemptive nature of hope, despair, and futurity. Where redemption and moral improvement are proffered, hope instead becomes an ontological rift in the self, the world, and temporality (Kierkegaard; Nietzsche; Ricœur; Merleau-Ponty). In line with Veena Das, Elaine Scarry, and Judith Butler, the article then reconsiders despair in the ordinary life of an injured and precarious world, in which meaning gradually thins rather than breaks down. Drawing on Nietzsche, Weber, Camus, Matuštík and Tracy B. Strong, the article accounts for despair as an instance of the modern "scarcity of hope", where redemptive narratives are both ethically indecent and philosophically untenable. Adopting the position of responsibility, relational permanence and fragile world-binding (Levinas; Arendt; Nancy), the article shows how non-redemptive hope can align with despair against nihilism and consolation. The final sections develop an ethics of fragile futurity and a conception of political judgment that remain reflective and plural without metaphysical assurances, and ethical without political guarantees. It argues that this meaning and responsibility can remain after the collapse of redemption, but only if understood not as a question of triumph or restoration but of the fragility of continuing life in wounded worlds.