Western faiths are redemption narratives. But the messianic is no less instrumental in secular programmes. For anarchist and Marxist imaginings of futurity, it will be represented by the 'withering away of the state'. Behind this figure lie Kant's argument on universal peace and the Hegelian thesis of an end to history. Inevitably, this eclipse of the messianic presses on the future tense.
Future tenses are an idiom of the messianic.
Life expectancy' is, then, no longer a messianic-utopian projection, but an actuarial statistic. Such pressures on the incipience of meaning and communication in the individual and collective subconscious, on the means of articulate speech, are gradual. But just as the almost imperceptible tectonic movements in the deeps of the earth sever and re-shape continents, so the forces emanating from the eclipse of the messianic will find manifest expression. Grammars of nihilism flicker, as it were, on the horizon. Poets put it succinctly.