In this way, even if a thinker tries to be extremely neutral, extremely holistic, extremely factual. Tries not to have his radical parts, his edgy parts. Tries to pay his dues to every single party. Tries to represent his thought in the most holistic way, the way with the least possibility of being construed in the wrong way. Still then — by trying to sit at that precarious balance, he ends up covering the sharp edges with a piece of cloth that feigns (well-)roundedness. Nevertheless, whether conscious or unconscious, the thought when wielded is sharp as a dagger. It is impossible to create innocently; one only feigns innocence, a sleight of hand of rhetoric in order to lower the reader's guard and focus the dagger — either by opening up the space to make the thought more widely accessible, or by sharpening the edges to make it more technically pointed. Whereafter it is pointed out into a certain void in the space of thought, threatening the pre-existing order of the moment.

That void in the space of thought — that’s the dimension that is the life of all politics. It is the eternal threat of thought’s expression, which implicates the daggeredness of every thought. “Create dangerously”, Camus says, because there is no such thing as undangerous creation, or safe creation. Thought is a dagger. Ideas are forces. All ‘plausibly neutral’ thought merely masks its dagger-ness and renders a covert operation. And the dagger always cuts and births a new configuration — like God performing Ent-scheidung [a cut] upon the void before the universe explodes into being with all its force, in an operation equally energetic and destructive.

What this means is — all forcible, rhetorical, or provocative thoughts are simply thoughts that have embraced its daggeredness. But the implication, then — every thinker sharpens into every wrong reading ever made of them. Because that is the nature of a dagger when confronted in a world of daggeredly activity. It can always be said to be pointed in the wrong way. Sharpened in the wrong way. Made too sharp, too edgy, or exposed for its covertness. This is how everyone disagrees with everyone; and will continue to disagree, for all time to come.

What is the alternative? The dagger does not pierce. And if the dagger does not pierce, it simply does not exist. I mean, it might exist in a physical sort of sense — like a neighbour that wields many daggers but bears no threat — it is as if the bluntness renders the dagger far removed, residing in the far corners of the universe. Like ghosts that reside in the piping of the house or underneath the tiles, it does not quite affect us. It exists, but it does not insist upon its existence. Which essentially means that it, practically speaking, does not exist to us. This also means — to exist is to pierce. To exist is to cut through. To exist intensely is to torture, to brutalise. Those who live poetically are, whether they like it or not, crusaders. Gandhi is a crusader.

“Is this a dagger I see before me?” It is now at this same void that I stand, one among many, with the same dagger in hand — swinging into the space of thought, slicing across every idea that takes itself to be pure and wholesome, twisting it into the sides of “plausible neutrality,” pruning every thought into what it is nakedly.

Daggers.

Caputo, in The Insistence of God, calls for a new species of theologians — “theologians of the ‘perhaps,’ a new society of friends of a dangerous ‘perhaps.’” Not the old theologian — the one who stands behind the pulpit and points upward, who reads the Bible as if God wrote it in stone and handed it down from the sky. Not the theologian who tells you what to believe and guards the doctrine. The new species is something else entirely. A Christian Übermensch, so to speak. Someone who inherits everything that came before — the whole crisis of faith, the death of God, the collapse of certainty — and doesn’t flinch. Someone who reads the wreckage and still finds something worth saying. We don’t know who this person is going to be yet. We don’t know what they’ll look like or where they’ll come from.

And to be clear: this is not a call for a return to the old, or a resurrection of the dead. If Nietzsche says “God is dead”, then so be it. We are not concerned with plugging the tomb or protecting or saving the dead. The buried deity does not need our protection. As Kierkegaard put it, to defend Christianity is always to discredit it. “He who defends it has never believed in it. If he believes, then the enthusiasm of faith is not defense, no, it is attack and victory.” We are not here to defend. We call for a renewal in the terms of the new — what comes to us where we are, what meets us in the present. What follows is attack, not defense. And so, inspired by this charge and Caputo’s call for the new theologian, what follows is a radical re-read of the Bible in the new terms, written in conversation with Kierkegaard, Tillich, Caputo, Derrida, and others.

Genesis to Revelation is not the Word of God. It might be perfectly heretical to say. It is the Word of every single human being. The Reformation gave us sola scriptura — Scripture alone. Kierkegaard already pushed this further: the Bible, the Word, is not something you read at a distance, as if about somebody else, or the world at large. The Bible is addressed to you. You read every single scripture as if it addresses you. He makes this vivid in For Self-Examination through the prophet Nathan. King David — the greatest king of Israel, the one who slew Goliath, the man after God’s own heart — sees Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop and wants her. She is married to Uriah, one of David’s most loyal soldiers, fighting on the front lines of David’s own war. David takes her anyway. And when Bathsheba falls pregnant, David tries to cover it up — he calls Uriah home from battle, hoping he’ll sleep with his wife and assume the child is his. But Uriah refuses to go home. He sleeps at the palace gate instead, out of loyalty to his fellow soldiers still fighting. So David sends him back to the front and orders his commander to place Uriah at the point where the fighting is fiercest, and then withdraw from him. Uriah dies. David takes Bathsheba as his wife.

And then Nathan comes to David and tells him a story: a rich man with many flocks steals the only lamb of a poor man — a lamb the poor man had raised like a daughter. David is furious. “That man deserves to die!” And Nathan says: “Thou art the man.” Thou art the man. Not someone else. Not the rich man in the story. Thou art the man. That’s the point Kierkegaard makes about the reading of the Bible. You are always tempted to read it as a scholar, as an observer, learning about someone else’s life, extracting wisdom at a safe distance. You read the story of the rich man and the lamb and you’re outraged, just like David was. But you’re not reading about someone else. Thou art the man. The Bible is not some external wisdom, it’s a mirror. And this is how, as Kierkegaard says, all of Scripture is to be read. But to radicalise it further: it’s not just that the Bible addresses you, the way Nathan addressed David. It’s that it is you. The Word becomes a life, your life. Not sola scriptura, but scriptura viva — Scripture alive. Every character — every protagonist and antagonist — is literally an element of you, a page of you. David is you. Uriah is you. Nathan is you. The lamb is you. Every chapter in the Book of Life is a series of events of life itself playing out. The beginning to the end of the Word, the beginning to the end of life itself.

Lineage of interpretation

There have been innovations through history in the way we see the Bible that have led it to here. Pre-Christian philosophy began with substance — what is the stuff of reality? The pre-Socratics asked: is it water, fire, atoms? Everything was about what’s out there. And fair enough, that’s where you start. Then when Christianity began spreading like wildfire, the crown of that thinking was, naturally, transcendental: God as the ultimate substance beyond everything, the unmoved mover. Aquinas and the scholastics built the whole medieval world on this — the great chain of being, everything referring back to a God who sits above and outside of it all. Then Descartes — the great doubter — turned the starting point inward: I think, therefore I am. Suddenly the subject, not the cosmos, is where we begin. And once you open that door, you can’t close it. Kant brought it to a head with his ‘Copernican revolution’: instead of assuming that our knowledge must conform to objects, he asked whether objects, as they appear to us, conform to the structures of our knowing. And that humbling opened up a new question — not what is the substance of reality, but how does reality appear to us from within our finitude? Hegel took it further: spirit realises itself through the march of history, not from above it. And then Deleuze — the philosopher of pure immanence — who flatly rejects transcendence altogether. There is no outside. Everything is surface, fold, becoming. No hidden God behind the curtain. Whether you agree with him or not, the trajectory is clear.

And this is exactly where Caputo’s call for the new species of theologians comes to the fore. We do not read the Bible as a pre-Socratic figure would, looking for the divine substance out there. Not as Aquinas would, pointing to the God above. We read the Bible as read through Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Derrida, and everything that followed. So we’ve gone from looking at God and the Bible as claims of beings beyond history, outside of time, on the eternal plane — to looking at it as something active within time, just as how we are. From outside time to inside time. God is not the sovereign patriarch in the sky anymore. Gone are the days where he revealed himself by striking lightning from heaven. He becomes the Spectre. He’s that which haunts everything about being and all the events of life itself. A kind of Christian ghost story, after all — God is also named as the Holy Ghost. This is what Caputo describes in The Weakness of God as going from “strong theology” to “weak theology”, wherein, power is not privileged, as much as the latent possibility of the unforeseeable event — wherein God reckons as the Spectre behind all the activity of history.

And biblical hermeneutics — the way we interpret and read Scripture — went through the same journey. In the dominant premodern imagination, Scripture was treated as revelation from above. The Word was God and God was the Word. Everything with reference to the Word as transcendent power. Creation ex nihilo and all those glorious manifestations of awesome power that theologians have been addicted to for centuries. The Bible was read as if dictated from above — a transcendent document pointing to a transcendent God. But that’s suspicious today. It’s not something we quite trust anymore, especially with the advent of science, historical criticism, modern technics, and the ability for humans to create on a god-like scale. And so the Bible becomes not the seat of transcendent power but a spectral series of unforeseeable events playing out in an almost Hegelian complete swing of history — the Geist, the spirit, pervading the whole progression from beginning to end. So, if Genesis to Revelation is the Book of Life, literally speaking — the Word of every single human being — then let’s start at the beginning.

Adam

From darkness, the first words bring about the birth of light. Then, the world in parts — until Adam, Eve, up to the inevitable fall. Traditional theology — the Augustinian line that runs through most of Catholic and Reformed thought — treats Adam as categorically different from us. Adam’s sin was a unique event, a singular rupture, and we merely inherit the bad fortune of guilt. But Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, says no. Adam is not absolutely different to us. He is the first instantiation of being — the first, but not different in kind. He sinned in the same way every human being sins. We can’t think of Adam as different, and if we do, we risk misinterpreting the point of Genesis entirely — because then the fall becomes someone else’s problem, and we are back to reading the Bible as if it’s about someone else.

But here is where I would radicalise it further: Adam is not only one of us. We are literally Adams. The Genesis of the Book of Life is the genesis of our lives. When we are born, that is Genesis. We are Adams. Every newborn enters the world the way Adam entered Eden — in a state of original unity — where there is no boundary between self and world, no “I” and “not-I,” just undifferentiated wholeness. Lacan showed where it breaks — the mirror stage, where the child first recognises itself as a separate being, and the entrance into language seals the split. You become a subject, which means you become divided. And Kristeva named what was there before it broke: the semiotic khora — the pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic space of drives, rhythms, and tones. The maternal space before language fragments you. That’s the Adamic space. That’s Genesis.

The Fall

Indeed, the fall happens. But the fall is not a one-time historical event. Adam and Eve are not the villains of history to be blamed for all eternity. Everyone repeats the same original sin. Kierkegaard, again in The Concept of Anxiety, shows us how. In innocence — in Eden — Adam is given the task of naming every animal. Every name is a choice. The whole world is open, unnamed, and God says: you name it. That is the exercise of freedom within innocence. But innocence already contains within it the possibility of freedom, and that possibility generates anxiety — what Kierkegaard calls the “dizziness of freedom”. It’s like standing at the edge of a cliff: no one is pushing you, but you feel the vertigo of realising you could jump. And the serpent’s temptation is essentially: there is even more freedom than you think. “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The fruit is the dizziness reaching its tipping point. And being slides into it — almost innocently.

The serpent speaks to Eve conversationally, as if he belongs. Eve sees the fruit is good for food, pleasing to the eye, desirable for gaining wisdom. She takes it. She gives some to Adam, who is with her. He eats. It’s quiet, mundane, and almost completely innocent. Not the dramatic ‘crime scene’ Christians tend to make of it. The fall is something being slides into almost superficially. The fruit, the eyes opened — “and they knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed.” The traumatic beginning of self-consciousness. The traumatic beginning of shame. Kicked out from Eden — kicked out from the semiotic khora, from the Adamic unity — and into the world as it is. And the fall is not behind us. Every person reproduces their own fall — their own awakening to self-consciousness, their own exile from the unity they started in. The past protracts forward into the life of every individual, repeating as a kind of origin story that never stops originating. It all happens in the past-present — the fall is always happening now.

What happens after the fall? Death gains ground. The first thing that happens outside Eden is the first murder — Cain kills Abel. Brother kills brother. Then it escalates: Lamech boasts of killing a man for merely wounding him. The Nephilim appear, corruption spreads, until every inclination of the human heart is only evil continually. Fast forward many generations — the Flood comes. Noah represents the remnants of innocence after the Flood. Noah walks out into a world where the covenant comes with a rainbow, which is a promise, but a promise after total destruction. Innocence is dead. And after the great reset, the remnants look outward at the world as it is given. (In parallel, the earliest instantiations had the richest treasure trove of life ahead of them — Methuselah lived to over nine hundred years, and most others lived up to around the same lifespan, but gradually there was a sharp decrease to 120 years. Sure, one could owe the sharp decrease in lifespan to environmental degeneration or bad genetics. I take it as phenomenological — death taking ground is what comes naturally with the death of innocence.)

The Search

After the death of innocence, what comes is bondage. The Israelites end up in Egypt, enslaved — the condition of being in the world after the fall. You’re alive, but you’re not free, and you don’t know who you are. Exodus is the first great act of the search: liberation, then forty years wandering in the wilderness looking for the promised land. Manna from heaven, day to day, no permanence. The golden calf. Complaints. Wanting to go back to Egypt. Pure immediacy — living hand to mouth, moment to moment, with no horizon beyond the next meal and the next complaint. This is the aesthetic stage, and this is where Kierkegaard’s stages of life’s way come into the picture: the world of being in the moment, seeking pleasure, the world of The Seducer’s Diary. The aesthetic is erotic — in the sense of pure, unmediated desire for what is right in front of you. And Song of Songs is the obvious biblical reservoir for this — desire that exceeds sexuality and becomes metaphysical longing: ‘I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not.’ That’s Israel. That’s the aesthetic stage. The conquest of Canaan. The spectacle of judges and kings — chosen and fallen, one after another. Solomon at the apex: seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines, legendary wealth, the temple built and overlaid in gold. The longing is real but the object keeps receding. One journeys from one kingdom to another, always serving something or someone, always seeking but not finding. (Per Bob Dylan, “it may be the Devil, it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.”)

But what am I, per the Book of Life, really searching for? I’m in the process of finding the true self that I lost in the fall, the Adamic unity, the semiotic khora. What Tillich calls the “ground of being”. Not a God up there, not a figure or a person in the sky — but the “depth” dimension of reality itself, the ground underneath everything. You think you’re searching for pleasure or power or wisdom, but what you’re really searching for is what you’ve lost of yourself. Your “ultimate concern”, as Tillich puts it. And the Old Testament mirrors this exactly: amidst the arc of heroics, villainy, and anti-heroics — there emerges moments of profound introspectiveness. Psalms. Lamentations. Ecclesiastes. Always trying to find something that can ground us. Always trying to ground ourselves in our being. As in Ecclesiastes: ‘He has put eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end.’ The stretch toward wholeness is there — eternity is in us — but we cannot master it. We feel the pull of gravity but can’t name the origin or destination. This realisation is how the aesthetic stage of immediacy starts failing. The motor starts sputtering, short-circuiting. After Solomon, the kingdom splits — Israel and Judah. Two kingdoms where there was one, and neither holds. One king to another, one war to another. A lot of destruction ensues. Impermanence gains ground. Anxiety turns into pessimism, which is what Nietzsche might describe (in my words), as an ‘early onset nihilism’.

The Crisis

And then the age of kings and judges turns to the age of prophets. When the throne fails — when anointed rulers and military victories and territorial expansion all sputter out — there is no longer the spectacle of conquest and riches. The prophet no longer rules by spectacle or office, they speak from an alien place irreducible to institutional power. And what they speak is judgment and promise simultaneously: this is how bad it is, and here is what’s coming. And it is bad. Ezekiel is shown a valley of dry bones — “Son of man, can these bones live?” The temple, symbol of divine providence, is destroyed. Nehemiah comes to rebuild it, before it is destroyed again. Everything becomes more impermanent, more despairing. The Babylonian exile — the people uprooted, displaced, identity shattered.

This is what Kierkegaard writes of in The Sickness Unto Death. Despair, for Kierkegaard, is a structural condition: the self is a “relation that relates itself to itself”, and when that relation goes wrong — when the self can’t align with itself — that’s despair. And the worst form of despair is not knowing you’re in despair. The self has lost itself and doesn’t even know it’s lost. Israel at this point is going through the motions of temple worship, but the temple is empty. The form is there but the ground is gone. Dante, at the midpoint of his life, finds himself in the same place: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Virgil takes him downward through the circles of Inferno — past the gate that reads “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The ground of being is nowhere to be seen. One could even risk the claim: Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the Last Man, has already come. Not someone prophesied for the future. He is in the Old Testament, recorded thousands of years ago — and yet it was not a historical event — for thou art the man. The Last Man repeats in every one of us.

But the crisis is always absolved by the promise. Isaiah comes and prophesies: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” The Messiah is prophesied — not yet here, always to come. This is Derrida’s à-venir — the to-come that is never present, never guaranteed, and yet insists with enough force to keep hope alive amid the ruins. Caputo’s dangerous perhaps is already at work here: the event that has not yet arrived, whose possibility keeps the whole movement from collapsing into nothing. The promise does not resolve the crisis. It is not mere fantasy. It is what Deleuze would call the “virtual” — something real but not yet actual. The Messiah is not yet here in actuality, but the promise is already real in virtuality. Israel lives inside a virtual future.

And then, the intertestamental silence: roughly four hundred years where God goes quiet. The Spectre stops haunting. Nothing.

…

The Messiah

And then — after four hundred years of nothing — the dangerous perhaps, what Caputo calls the perhaps, suddenly makes itself known. The promise ceases to be only promised and becomes flesh. And the scene is so unforeseeable that it is comical. The Messiah arrives not in kingly robes, but as a baby in a feeding trough in Bethlehem — a poor peasant town. This is how the absolute event shows up, defying all our expectations. Israel had been trying to save itself — through judges, kings, prophets — and every spectacular attempt at self-rescue had sputtered out. Everything from the outside, everything from the world of the immediate, had failed. And then God doesn’t send another judge or king. God comes himself. From the bottom. Not a revolution from above, but an insurrection from below — the ground of being exploding onto the scene from the inside out. This is Tillich’s “ground of being” and Caputo’s “event” merging into one: the separation between man and God, or being and its ground, is reckoned with through the unforeseeable event.

And the reckoning is not something abstract — it works itself out in every sphere of life. The Sermon on the Mount overturns every assumption about power, blessing, and righteousness. The miracles address bodily disease, but always reveal that it is the spiritual disease that stirs at the root. The blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised — but the real work is deeper. The event is working itself out from the inside. As Jesus said, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.’ This is what the psalmist had been longing for all along: ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.’ The whole search — from the fall through the judges through the exile — was this panting, this thirst. And the ground of being, the water — or, if I may, the fount of being — which had gone missing through the whole arc, is suddenly present. (This is what Kierkegaard was writing toward all along in The Sickness Unto Death. The despair — the structural condition of the self that could not align with itself — is a necessary precondition for salvation. There is no Easter without Good Friday. Christ is the salvation event that simultaneously reckons with despair when it is complete.)

The key term for this reckoning is what Christ says to Nicodemus. “You must be born again.” And Nicodemus — a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, a man of the law — is bewildered. “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” He does not understand. What Christ is saying is that the beginning of the New Testament — the realisation of the perhaps, and the arrival of the event — is the beginning of the second part of life. You do not go back to the womb. You do not return to Eden, to the semiotic khora, to the Adamic unity. You are born again — from above, from within, from the ground of being itself. And Nicodemus, in his disbelief — thou art the man. We are all Nicodemus. We cannot fathom how the self can be remade. And yet the salvation event always completes itself and becomes true — regardless of whether Nicodemus understands it now, he will understand it in time, and then retroactively realise he is reborn. This is how the person is fundamentally transformed — one is reborn as if by an insurrection from within and without, and the rebirth is only realised when it is complete.

The cost of the insurrection is as radical as its impact — it is total. The Messiah is nailed on the cross. And here René Girard becomes indispensable. Girard’s thesis, across Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, is that every human community resolves its internal violence by projecting it onto a single victim — the scapegoat. The victim bears the collective guilt and is sacrificed so the community can be at peace with itself. And this is not merely sociological — it is existential: every part of ourselves that we had lost, every fragment of the split subject, every sin, every piece of the self that was lost in the fall — we need someone to place our burdens upon. If we were to bear our own guilt, it would be unbearable. “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you” — and that is meant literally, not metaphorically. Christ is the lamb — the ultimate scapegoat for every part of ourselves that we do not have reconciled to ourselves. We nail him to the cross. Every single moment we are placing our burdens on him (which is why the Messiah comes not only for the Jews, but does the work for us all, in a sweeping reckoning of all past and all future). The cross absorbs it all — our iniquities transposed onto that single image. ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’ The whole creation had been groaning — ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now’ — and the cross is where the groaning is finally heard.

Now, Christ dies, like all humankind — but as the Romans began to think Christ was another martyr, another impermanent figure in the long line of Jewish judges and kings and prophets who came and fell, just as nihilism closes its grip and the promise seems to die on the cross along with him — Christ resurrects. And even then, doubting Thomas, who saw the risen Christ with his own eyes, could not believe it. He needed to touch the wounds. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, I will not believe.” This is spoken of Thomas — but thou art the man. We are all Thomas. We see the ground of being standing in front of us and we still doubt. And yet Christ doesn’t condemn the doubt. He says: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Stop doubting and believe.” The resurrection is the refusal of nihilism. Not an argument against it — Kierkegaard would remind us that God does not need our arguments — but a sheer event that overturns it. The sin of man was nailed upon the cross, but the promise of his salvation did not die there and then. It came back with a new body, a new being. Christ does not return as a ghost, or a memory, or a martyred ideal. He eats fish on the beach with his disciples. He is bodily, material, present. And in doing so he proves the promise is still in play — that the ground of being is not subject to the same impermanence that swallowed the judges and kings before him. Every prior figure came with a promise and the promise died with them. Christ came with a promise and the promise resurrects with him.

The Commission

And then he ascends. The embodied salvation — the physical event — departs. And here is the key difference: unlike all the judges and kings of the past, Christ does not leave us alone to languish in impermanence. The embodied event departs, but we are left not so much metabolising the interaction as perpetually wrestling with it — wrestling with it still today. And the Holy Spirit arrives as the spectre of that insurrection — the Hegelian movement of spirit, which brings everything true within the gears — always continuing, always preparing the way for Christ’s return: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever — the Spirit of truth.” Here, the structure of à-venir becomes conscious of itself. Salvation makes known to us the possibility of possibility — that Christ will come back, as long as we hold on to it.

And from here — the Apostles, St. Paul, and the expansion of the kingdom. They remain in sin, separated from their ground (which has now departed), but their activity became inspired by the à-venir. Grounded in hope and the possibility of reconciliation with the ground of being, the apostles take hold of the promise and go out into the world. This is how they endured all manner of suffering — torture, imprisonment, mutilation, martyrdom — not as masochists, but as those grounded by a resurrecting ground that does not give way. The Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” In secular terms, we confuse the Commission with divine purpose, mission, meaning — but it’s basically what Kierkegaard describes as “the truth that is the truth for me”. Our subjective truth, as inspired by the salvation event which has taken place within and without. What Kierkegaard calls, in Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, the one thing — the single orientation of the self toward the good, the refusal to be double-minded, to serve two masters. The calling, the mission, the meaning — it’s all the one thing. And for Nietzsche, of a different spirit, it is the will to bring about the Übermensch — as confused as it is powerful. But here is something worth noting: if Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the Last Man, was already fulfilled in the Old Testament — recorded thousands of years before Nietzsche wrote a word — then his Übermensch was already fulfilled in the New. The becoming, the overcoming, the new dawn of man — it is already here, in the coming of the Messiah whose commission he has left behind, and whose work of “revaluation” has been conducted and is continually being conducted.

And so the whole bow of being is trying to reconcile with itself: the first Adam being reconciled with the second Adam, who has left and is to come again to receive us in a new form. We’ve had salvation. But the physicality of salvation has departed. We are left with a promise. We are left with Derrida. The à-venir continues and inspires all our activity. God remains as the Spectre — the Holy Spirit — pervading and permeating every single one of our desires and actions. And this is the only ethic that remains post-salvation, the only mode of ethical being after the transformation: not our own aimless striving, not the revolting against the absurd, but “the purity of heart to will one thing” — to will what the spectral “ground of being” wills through us. This is what the Bible crowns as the Great Commission. And at risk of sounding like a broken record, it is not a Great Commission for the Apostles. Thou art the man. It is yours and my Great Commission. And yet the Commission is not a clean march forward. The insurrection is transformative, but not final. The search doesn’t end — it is reinvented post-salvation, given new life, but the failure is still of the essence. As Paul himself confesses: ‘I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.’ Even after the resurrection, even after the Spirit comes, the being does not perfectly reconcile or coincide with itself. The old pattern repeats — the fall is still protracting forward. But now it repeats within the promise, not outside it.

The End

And then comes Revelation. Revelation is always apocalypting. It has always been polarising because of its mystical tone — difficult, almost impossible to deal with. It never ceases to puzzle religious leaders and theologians of every single age. But why? Because it is spoken in a future-past tense, and the content fits the tense: the unforeseeability of the future, the à-venir, the event to come, can only possibly be rendered in mystical symbolism — the four living creatures, each with six wings, covered with eyes all around, even under their wings, crying “Holy, holy, holy.” It is utterly inconceivable to us in the present day. It only appears as such to us because it is the speech of the future-past — a retroactive prophecy, so to speak. This is to say that the Book of Life is not something that works sequentially — Genesis to Revelation, stage by stage. If Revelation is spoken in the future-past, then it follows that death has been present throughout the whole arc — and in the same way, in a life, death is not a future event but a possibility of possibility that is present throughout (Freud names this the ‘death drive’.) The Book of Life encompasses all the time of our life, and this is where Kierkegaard’s sub specie aeternitatis — the eternal mode — comes into play. The Bible writes from the mode of eternity, where God occupies the whole movement and bends the bow of time from that seat of eternity in which he is absconded. Revelation is the last book but not the last stage; it is the last book only because it speaks from the most distant future (past), it is the prophecy of the unforeseeable cranked up in intensity.

This is also where the death-of-God theologians were right in their own way — when we refuse to acknowledge the dizzying to-come of the afterlife, we say that it’s just the humbling to-come of death. That’s where radical theologians like Peter Rollins move. And Nick Land — who I like to think of as a radical techno-theologian — takes it further still, privileging the event unmistakably in the tone of Revelation. Except Land’s event, the accelerationist’s event, is not one of the afterlife but one of death. The nihil spirit working through us and winning. Not even a humble mortal’s death — that’s Cioran — but a capitalist-cybernetic death, the dissolution of the human into the machine. Same postmodern lineage. Same manic form of the unforeseeable. On the other side stands the afterlife theologian — certain that glory is coming, that the chariots of fire are literal, that the symbols can be decoded into a timetable. The first may safely be called a ‘realist’ (in the true philosophical sense) — he works within the motor and is certain about the motor, but does not inhabit the Kierkegaardian sub specie aeternitatis. The second may safely be called an ‘idealist’ — he tries to match form to content and content to form, but in doing so becomes too certain about the unforeseeable. Both are wrong from the mode of eternity. Revelation is not just an apocalypse that brings about death, nor a rapture that brings about some utopian afterlife. It is the reception of the Second Coming that has been promised — revealing itself from the very end of time as unforeseeable to those of us who are living.

This then is the faultline par excellence: whether what comes after is life or nothing. And here we must be precise about where we stand. If we take Caputo’s perhaps on its own — the openness to the event, the dangerous maybe, without the eternal view — and follow it through, what do we get? If it’s perhaps after perhaps after perhaps after perhaps, arbitrarily — it’s a loop. Caputo without Tillich is the perhaps unmoored from the ground of being, and the perhaps without ground becomes indistinguishable from nihilism. For Caputo, the posture is always yes, perhaps — yes to the openness, yes to the maybe, yes to the event that may or may not come. But eschatology reverses the order. It is not yes, perhaps. It is perhaps, yes. The perhaps trembles — but it trembles toward a yes. A yes that is already prophesied in the future-past: the yes of reconciliation, the yes of the ground of being. This doesn’t mean that the answer is to abandon the risky perhaps for the idealist’s certainty. But what we do need is the eschatological perhaps: the dangerous ‘perhaps, yes’ held within the arc of the eternal view.

This is where I usher in Heidegger from the back door: there is still this overarching metaphysic of Being seeking to realise itself — of “being-toward-death”, which is being-toward-the-faultline. In Tillich’s words, our telos toward the “ground of being”, toward ultimate reconciliation. The movement wants to rest, to reconcile being with its ground — even the Eastern traditions, in their own way, converge on this same point: stillness as the ultimate horizon. We cannot see the destination. We cannot deduce it. But the Book of Life, read sub specie aeternitatis, shows us that the arc bends. And the true power of Revelation is that it does not prophesy like Nietzsche. In this light, Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not an unforeseeable being to-come, but an unforeseeable future-present that has come — a retroactive prophecy from the future. If the Last Man [Letzter Mensch] was already fulfilled in the Old Testament, by Revelation the Übermensch has already come to pass, and all we have to say is perhaps to the accomplished work.

And when we read the Book of Life as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis, the ghost of Wittgenstein returns: “telos“, “teleology”, “purpose”, “meaning”, “movement”, “direction”, “orientation” — it’s all linguistic moot, trembling around the question of where a movement is going, and whether it goes anywhere at all. What all these words are groping toward is this: dialectic cannot be movement for movement’s sake. Even the groping itself implies a direction. That’s what Hegel decisively meant by the “end of history” — and I don’t think his end of history is something to come forever, à-venir forever. Žižek reads Hegel as this perpetual negation without arrival — a dialectic where the end of history is always deferred. But perpetual negation without arrival is indistinguishable from the nihilist loop we’ve already refused. Perhaps Žižek has not read Revelation — or is pre-Revelation. The eschatological perhaps is not perpetual negation. It is not perhaps after perhaps after perhaps with no ground beneath it. It is ‘perhaps to the yes’ — a perhaps that trembles toward the bend and bow from the end. We cannot name the destination. We cannot describe it from this side of the faultline.

And this is where Kafka’s parable of the Messiah becomes indispensable: the Messiah will come not on the last day, but on the day after the last day. Because every time Žižek’s dialectical motor turns, it is not yet the last day. But when the Messiah comes — and you have noticed that he has come, and Žižek himself has noticed that he has come — that is when the Messiah has most truly come. The realisation is always retroactive. What is to come will have always been meant to come. And the Bible already shows us this structure at the first salvation event: on the road to Emmaus, two disciples walk alongside the risen Christ without recognising him. They talk with him, they listen to him, they share the road — and it is only later, in the breaking of the bread, that their eyes are opened and they know who he was. The event was present before it was recognised. Meaning becomes legible retroactively. Revelation becomes embodied after the fact.

And that’s the end of the Book of Life. The whole movement is the swing of an existence through life’s stages to reconcile with itself. The structure of a human life recapitulates the structure of salvation history and salvation future. Caputo’s events live as the unforeseeable moments, but in the scheme of an entire life, they rest as intervals. And here is where I will add to Caputo’s charge: the new breed of theologians must not shy away from eschatology and from the ethic of Revelation, that is, to live the eschatological perhaps. We do not know what comes after the faultline. But we know the movement bends toward reconciliation. This is what the ending of the Book of Life shows us in future-past tense. What, where, why, when, how? — we do not know; this is the truly unforeseeable event — the death that comes that brings about the afterlife, the new day, the new dawn. This is the true reckoning of the unforeseeable. Everything else sits within the dialectic: being trying to reconcile with its ground.

And so we circle back to where we began. The Bible is not merely addressed to you. The Bible is the whole arc of your being, from the first Adamic unity through the fall through to salvation, and then every reconfiguration and back again, going past the stroke of death, just like Christ himself did. Yes! The Bible is not something you read. It is not a historical document. It is not your prophecy, nor is it your biography. It is your Book of Life. The Bible is you — here and now.

Coda

The Bible is an impossibly rich document. If you try and read into everything I’m writing here to figure out how I’m wrong in this or that way or are doing scripture in bad faith, you will most definitely find it. But if you try and read it for what I’m trying to do — as inspired by Caputo’s call for a new species of theologians, giving us a new reading of what has been dormant for hundreds of years — then you would see what it is I’m doing here, and you would most likely have either something to chew on or something to change about it. After all, as Paul writes: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Sola scriptura is the letter. Scriptura viva is the spirit. Perhaps this is exactly why Caputo calls for a new species of theologians — our great commission has never been to clean the dust off old parchments, but to spread the living Word. This is the task that I have undertaken — to spread the living Word in a manner true for me and, I hope, true for others too. If you look for bad faith in what I am writing, you will find it. If you look for heresy, something to spit out, you will find it. But if you look for aliveness and good faith, I sure hope to — and pray — you will find it too.

And here maybe we need a caveat — I am not discounting medical cases, not saying everything reduces to a tic. But a tic is the smallest absolute unit of the psychological loop — and in that sense, all differences between people are only quantitative, so to speak. The morally insane, the crazy, the suicidal person — they are only tuned to different degrees than the monk at a church. They aren’t qualitatively different, even if everything in us wants to believe so. You believe you’re different to the suicidal person you saw on the news. You believe you are different to Hitler, Mao, Stalin — at risk of sounding cliché — none of us are different, we’re all only tuned differently, in terms of quantity, never quality, right? You are the same as every traumatised patient who has ever been on Freud’s couch, on Lacan’s couch. Every single one of them. No one is ever qualitatively different — only quantitatively tuned differently. And what we call qualitative difference is just a symptom of quantitative hierarchy. If it were possible — and maybe it is — one could quantify all the elements of the human mind, body, and psyche, and render a bell curve. Wherever there is a peak, the tics should naturally follow.

So everything is a habit. But not all habits are destructive like depression or Tourette’s — what is the opposite of destructive here, is it not instructive? In the sense that the habit is an affirmative loop that compounds and works to the benefit of the subject. Loops have given rise to all the good, beauty, and truth of humanity. But all loops have a dark side. A shadow, so to speak. There are no perfect loops in nature. Perhaps this is the one-liner that can be the grounds of everything I’m saying here. There are no perfect loops in nature. And so when I’m always seeing myself as needing to relax, I’m affirming myself as fundamentally unrelaxed and unsettled, right? ‘Impact’ and ‘hustle culture’ are two sides of the same coin. What destroys me is what allows me to achieve, to accomplish, to go out there and get shit done. But for the need to relax, anxiety becomes the shadow. And this is what’s been happening in my — let’s say the past year or so — where certain things have led me to be slightly more psychosomatically self-aware in a negative way. I don’t want to go into too much detail. But this is where transformation or ‘healing’ looks like a critical reframe.

The first bait I can dangle for myself and see if something in me picks it up is this: what if the trauma is not that I’m fundamentally tense, wound up, anxious, and need to relax? What if the trauma is that fundamentally I am not doing enough, or not doing what I need to be doing with my life, or feeling what I need to be feeling deep within? You sense I’m going down a questionable track, perhaps reinforcing the wrong kinds of behaviour. But loops do not expire — they only get sublated into superior loops. So the question becomes, what loop is superior to the one of mindfulness or presence-seeking? And here the question turns the loop from presence-seeking into a kind of psychological excavation — with the implicit understanding that whatever the superior loop is, it will come with its own dynamic of instruction/destruction. Because self-awareness is, after all, itself an imperfect loop bearing its own instruction/destruction, right? Self-awareness breeds self-consciousness. Self-consciousness breeds infinite regression — because a lot is happening unconsciously, and becoming conscious is not so much awareness as it is a kind of motor interruption — and one eventually slips and loses oneself, continually. The loop of self-consciousness shows its face as being destructive as much as it is instructive. Like a philosopher who tries to understand not only everything, but his own terrible need to understand, and in doing so falls into a kind of intellectual cancer. Like a poet who continually searches for something higher and more profound but continually hits his head on an invisible wall. Perhaps he discovers God, but as he does, he also discovers the devil.

Heidegger posits the clearing — where we dwell in the silence, in almost an eastern religious sort of way. Buddhism, meditation, all that jazz. But when you are dwelling in the silence, are you really just being mindful, or is it yet another imperfect loop? Because there are no perfect loops, right? There is peace and rest, and I just ought to dwell in it. But then this becomes monstrous — I need to dwell, I need to dwell, I need to dwell. Back to square one. Within the loop sits something destructive as much as something instructive. So the answer isn’t more awareness, more mindfulness, more inwardness. It’s always in a certain kind of redirection, which the behaviorists understood very well. A ‘reframe’ in common terms, or a ‘transformation’ in spiritual terms. And something of it always leads back to our plasticity — the fact that we are eternally changeable, no matter what happens, no matter how sick we are, morally, psychosomatically, mentally, spiritually. Something can change. And it’s always this breath of fresh air — the aeration of possibility, so to speak — that causes the imperfect loops to loop up on themselves and short-circuit, potentially leading to a wider, bigger one that encompasses and sublates the prior. But the sublation is never without contradiction in Hegelian terms, which is to say the sublation is never without the same dynamics of instruction/destruction. This is what Freud calls the duality of the pleasure principle and the death drive, the life drive and death drive, right? Every loop that affirms life is never without its shadow, the loop that affirms death. No loop is free of the other.

Take cancer. Cancer is this drive rendered in purely destructive terms, right? But if we think about it agnostically — cancer is not only destructive, it’s also instructive. Cancer is its own form of life. And this is where the new film Project Hail Mary (no spoilers) does something interesting — the astrophage is exactly like cancer in that it spreads, but the movie renders it at a cosmic level, which makes it a bit less personal and a bit more cosmic. So it isn’t so touchy in terms of ethical feeling and all that. It renders the cancerous as almost completely indifferent. It doesn’t care about us. It just happens. It’s got its own life. We don’t know what its interests are, but we can kind of surmise that it has interests — though that might just be our own projection. Maybe it’s just spreading for the sake of spreading, like a Darwinian gene. In any case — a tic is a tic. It’s a life of its own, in the absolute smallest unit, within the psychological universe. And so a cancer is basically a tic that spreads, that affirms itself, indifferently, multiplying until it becomes a core loop — which carries its own instruction and destruction per se.

And this also means something even for something as innocent and upright like creativity, right? Creation is its own kind of loop, just seen in a positive light, and this is what Deleuze saw so well. When we have a sense of a certain idea or feeling or thought as something that can be transmuted or transfigured into creation, then the loop arrives that turns the battleground — God and hell, the world that comes to us as a tic, or as a multiplicity of tics — into a matrix of profound generativeness, which Deleuze calls the ‘virtual’. As if reality shapeshifts from a Lovecraftian monster into a set of piano keys. It retains the horror, but what is new is the infinite playability. This is why the artist always has something that everyone else does not. The artist has something that the moralist does not — because even if the world is unplayable, it ultimately communicates itself to him as infinite playable. The unbearableness becomes a fragment of its own playability. Now, it does not mean that everything would suddenly become bearable in that very instant. It does mean that creativity, the attitude of the artist, is the embodied posture of one who sees the possibility of possibility in all things. Hence the genius of the artist — not in fact his own genius — but a genius of his fidelity to chaos, and chaos in fidelity to him.

And so I suppose where that leads us is not just to be open to what might be — to the dangerous maybe, or what Caputo calls the ‘perhaps’ — and to be self-conscious in a minimally destructive sort of way. But still, one cannot minimize self-consciousness in the same way one cannot not hear things, right? It’s possible to look away from something to negate it, as Nietzsche says, but it’s not possible to unhear something. Once something is heard, it is known. When something is known, or heard by knowledge, it is thereby rooted in the ground of knowledge — as an opinion, a feeling, a sense, a vibe, right? A ghostly set of immanent tics! When it instructs, it immediately destroys. And so where that leads us — I don’t know, shockingly — but that’s where God comes into the picture. We are never ourselves, on our own. The loops are not ours to create nor ours to remedy — they are the battleground of God and the devil, which is awake and active at all times, instructing and destroying even when we are asleep. Prayer is simply the insistence to opening up to the possibility of possibility — of being saved from ourselves — even if being saved means we are still caught within the same loops and their instruction/destruction. But post-salvation, those loops are never final in their instruction/destruction. Something always comes and changes it. And that is where God alights from the seat in which he is absconded, to arrive on the scene and perform an insurrection, from within as much as from without.

Indeed, there are no perfect loops in nature, and this is something Nick Land got right. Because while all philosophers since Kant have been theorizing about what we know, what we can know, and what we can’t know — as if we are the origin of all things — what Land chanced upon, or nailed upon vehemently, as if a heretic prophet, was that everything comes from outside, even if outside is inside and inside is outside, and not from us. That means everything is, as he says, ‘providential’. And acceleration is — to me, in my interpretation — the speed of receptivity at which we receive, accept, and embrace that which is hurled toward us. And obviously, where we are caught in the battleground between God and Satan, heaven and hell, we are always subject — subject to instruction/destruction — and there and then we find cover, we find protection, we find grace, we find mercy, however we do, as much as we find ourselves in the crossfire. And to say that God always wins, to say that God is victorious, is to say that no matter what happens, possibility always wins in the end. And the insurrection that comes from outside, that enters through the inside — it’s always the best that it could have been for us. This is what it means to say this world is the best of all possible worlds like Leibniz, which is to say this reality is the best of all possible realities, which is the same thing as saying my being who I am as of today is the best of all possible beings. Not because I am perfect, but because I am where I need to be.

And here is where all those clichés come into the picture as something absolutely correct, even if not actually deeply thought through. All coping mechanisms, in this sense, are the coping mechanisms of the one caught in the crossfire and absolved by one “learning to see what is necessary in things”, as in Nietzsche’s amor fati — which is only intensified in the amor fati to oneself. Or, if you were to transfigure the coping mechanisms from death-talk to life-talk — there and then the coping mechanisms appear as affirmations. Affirmations of grace. Affirmations of one in radical receptivity. Affirmations of the one who lives at the absolute speed of receiving everything that throttles towards him, and who is graced by the insurrection of providence at the end of the day. In other words, there are no perfect loops in nature, but grace is the absolution of knowing that the loops can always change for the better, right? Old traumas can be replaced with newer, better ones. And even if it is absolutely incredulous to say — tomorrow there will be a new dawn. But it should be clear by now, with this hope, all this life-talk or yes-talk — yet another millenia-old psychological habit — comes the inevitable malady of instruction/destruction. With God comes the abyss. With hope comes hopelessness. With meaning comes meaninglessness. With relaxation comes anxiety. And this whole monologue, well — it’s not spared from it either. Is there however the possibility of an insurrection within this loop of loops? Perhaps — and this is the point at which I should just stop talking.

But then I think about badminton. Unlike football, I’m actually much better with badminton. I’ve always been up there in terms of skill and technique. When I was maybe five years old, my dad and my brother — who’s nine years older than me — they used to play badminton at the front gate. We’re in Malaysia, so you know, there are gates in front of all the terrace houses, and I used to sit on the couch inside looking out the window, watching them play. Over time I got a bit older. I tried hitting the shuttlecock. Obviously I was dogshit. But then I played once, I played twice, and apparently — so my dad says, I don’t know if he’s lying or not — he said I was pretty good considering how new I was. Maybe I had some good ball sense, yada yada whatever. So he took me to training, and I never said no. What happened was I ended up learning and learning and training and training and over time I kind of slid into the aspiration of becoming the next Lee Chong Wei. Lee Chong Wei was the biggest thing in Malaysia at the time, the biggest sports figure, and I was like, hey, I’m gonna be the next one. I trained from eight to maybe fourteen — maybe three times a week — under Han Jian, who was like a former world number one from China. And the first six months, twelve months even, was just technique. I didn’t even really hit the ball. I was just swinging my arms back and forth to make sure I got the right technique. I guess it’s characteristic of learning under a Chinese trainer — you get it right, or you don’t. If you don’t, you get punished. If you do, you just keep doing it —

And then I got a small injury. Bottom left of my back, pulled a small muscle. It wasn’t actually bad, I don’t have it anymore. But I told my dad: I think I like football more. Maybe because of the influence of my friends, or the feeling that football was cooler, more youthful, more tasteful. So I stopped. I don’t know what my dad felt. I don’t know if he was sad, disappointed, or relieved. He did say once, much later, that he was kind of happy I didn’t end up becoming a badminton player — too much stress watching the tournaments, the blood pressure, you know. But even if I did keep going — and this is the thing — the fact that I like taste more than power, which also means wit and subversion more than stamina and sheer endurance, it meant I kept losing tournaments. Not always, but sometimes. Because when people were watching, when the gaze was on me and I had to perform, sometimes my own feeling would get the best of me and I just wouldn’t. My brother, my dad, whoever brought me to the tournament that day — they would always come back a little more sad or let down than I was. And that became a theme for the rest of my life. (Even years later, when I got fired after three months at an accounting internship in Melbourne — one of my dream workplaces, suddenly, one day in a random meeting — and my dad ended up crying more than I did. So yeah.)

Anyway. Just like in football, power has never been my strong suit in badminton, but I’ve never really leaned into it or even desired to. I think about Tan Boon Heong and his most powerful smash. Power kind of gets you there a lot of the time, but it’s the same thing with shooting a gun really powerfully, or being an archer shooting an arrow with everything you’ve got, right? Because you don’t need that much power to kill somebody. What you need is sheer accuracy. Pinpoint accuracy. You know exactly where it should land and you’re able to make it land there even when you’re hindered by obstacles. To be very tasteful, almost subversive about the situation. Nimble. A you-can’t-catch-me sort of thing. Taste is full of this sort of restraint. It’s just the same with football, I really like to playmake. I like to pass the ball and play with wit. And in badminton I’m always that person where I can move the shuttle around wherever I want to, and I hardly smash. If I don’t have to smash, I don’t smash. I get more enjoyment out of placing the ball where I want to. And it’s funny — I find it the most fun when someone really tries to smash hard and that’s their only strong suit. As if they keep shooting an arrow at max power and keep missing the mark. Especially when they put real pride in their power. I love seeing them go all frustrated about it. People who take pride in their power — there’s an egotistical equivalent there, right? If they don’t place it well, they make mistakes, the more they fail the more angry they get. And I’m like, look, honestly, you wanna win the game, you don’t even need much power. You just need to dance around and prance around and be like Ronaldinho, dance with the ball into the right place. (Maybe someone could say it’s how I dealt with my lack of power, like a coping mechanism. But I say it’s a damn effective one. It’s a damn fun one too.)

And then I thought — that’s also why I love Federer. Roger Federer. I know David Foster Wallace wrote a piece on him that was so nice. I’d tear up if someone writes that of me someday. That I played life itself, brushing the ball and dancing on the court. As if I’m — I don’t know — loving or fucking the ball. In fact, I’m actually starting to pick up tennis now, with my girlfriend, maybe because of Federer. And I know Nadal hits the ball hard, runs around, plays like a very strong and energetic monkey (I mean that affectionately). And Djokovic just seems more stoic, more upstanding about it. But something about Federer stands out as the most artful. He plays the way a painter approaches a nude woman — attentive, unhurried, like the point isn’t to finish but to keep finding the right place to put it. The erotics of Federer hitting the ball is kind of what’s going on there. The others feel more like sheer penetration, sheer endurance in penetration. Which doesn’t really impress me as much. There’s a lot of eros and eroticism going on here. Maybe I’m over-romanticising it. Maybe not, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. Subjectively. And based on everything I’ve said, I think you can extrapolate why I don’t really care about how others see me, as much as how I place the ball, right?

Same thing with work. I started in accounting. My dad pushed me toward it, and I didn’t say no (mirroring what happened with badminton). And look, I liked business. I’d read a couple of business books when I was young, my brother had bought me a few books, prompted me to start a couple of Facebook pages and Facebook shops that sold absolutely zero units of anything, and he also prompted me to learn graphic design (I ended up freelancing as a brand designer for a few years, and I did unexpectedly rake a few bucks in). So I studied accounting and finance, ended up in Melbourne, and fulfilled the minimum I needed for my working visa before I moved to a co-working space. Because I love startups. Startups, to me, are kind of the ultimate subversion — you build what people want, but don’t have, and can’t even think to ask for yet, right? That’s the perfect trifecta. You could slog it off as an accountant for ten, twenty, thirty years, or grind as an investment banker, but that isn’t it for me. That’s power over taste. I’m all about taste, and the trifecta of desire, lack, and unimaginability. So I moved to startups and technology, where taste gets you a hundred percent of the way there.

At some point in my early career, I ended up curating the Australian startup ecosystem when no one else did. Whenever you searched for the top accelerators in Australia you got a block of five recommendations but never a source of truth, a real library, a curation. So I did that. And my actual goal was to get a job at Startmate, the largest accelerator in Australia. I got it. I was elated. They sponsored my visa. I worked there two years, and then I realized I got disillusioned with being “industry-agnostic” — it was always B2B SaaS, and even what they called “deep tech” felt like the B2B SaaS of deep tech. Everything felt obvious, and there and then it ceased to be interesting. I wanted to be part of something more deliberately subversive. So I left to join Hansa, a family office with a very clear conviction around open societies (as in Karl Popper) and that was full-on subversion for a while. Then some things changed, and I left to join Headquarters, a crypto fintech startup in Singapore, where I led go-to-market operations and customer success. I also moved partly because my girlfriend was here, but also because the work felt like the right intersection of everything — the perfect ikigai overlap, if you want to be that kind of person about it. Much later, we got acquired by Gnosis. (Which is great, honestly, and very useful for pitching myself, but that’s not really what I care about.)

With work, I’m never the guy who pushes for something with a hammer. I work with wit. Per corporate speak, what’s the 80-20? What’s the 20% of effort I can expend to get 80% of value — perceived value, because everything is about perceived value — and what can I do to maintain that level. What’s the 90-10? And what’s the smallest absolute unit of that 10? That’s a frame I find within a lot. The smallest absolute unit of value I want to deliver on, and how do I get there as fast as possible. Once I get that smallest absolute unit, what’s next, see what’s next. Kind of be very nimble — pass the ball, pass the ball, tiki-taka. Corporate elegance. I know people who are pure hustle. They want funding, five mil, hustle day and night, go to all the events, get in front of investors. Same thing in dating, they probably just approach the girl straight up. Maybe they get the money faster. Maybe they get the girl faster. I don’t know. I’m more the dancier and trickier one, that’s for sure. I’m Ronaldinho.

With dating — well, I’ve always been popular with the girls. It’s probably because I had a baby face growing up. And it didn’t help that I was the pastor’s kid who told sex jokes in church at fourteen and got funny reactions out of people. My community also meant I was always a bit older than I was. Most of the church’s youths were older than me, as is my brother who is nine years older than me, and so I got inducted into life nine years ahead of schedule — the music he was into, the games we played, the football club we supported. My dad says sometimes I didn’t have a proper childhood because of it. I don’t think so. I think my childhood was fun precisely because of my brother — we invented games together, played all the computer games together, and he practically inducted me into my psychological being without meaning to.

Anyway, when I was in primary school and high school, there were a lot of crushes that never went anywhere. Because I didn’t know how to bring them anywhere, I guess. Like a dumb teenager. Many could-have-beens. Not much has-beens. Although it wasn’t pitiful — there was good lovely moments, and tension, real tension, it just never got to that orgasmic feeling I find so endearing. I started dating seriously in my early twenties through to my mid-twenties. Did bachata. Asked acquaintances out. Which, in a way, embodied everything I’ve been saying here. I’ve never really been the guy who approaches girls on the street, straight up. (I’ve seen all the YouTube videos, I don’t like it, it strikes me as earnestly distasteful.) I put myself in situations, something comes up, I am full of wit, something comes to me and I pass it back in a very subversive way, and that works perfectly well, right? I have that hidden agenda — same thing with funding, same thing with dating. I have the hidden agenda, I wanna put you to bed and enjoy your being, body and mind. And I try to do it the smart way. Climbing the ladder, piece by piece. You see the diamond, you climb piece by piece. You see what’s next, you do that. If you fail, you adapt. I’ve gotten that feedback since I was a kid — hyper-adaptive. Maybe it’s part of being the youngest, the second kid. My brother is much more gung-ho. He wants to get what he wants, sheer energy, let’s work, let’s get it. But me — I’m “feelings-based”. That’s what my dad always says, and I agree. If I feel great, I play great, I do great. Maybe that’s where wit comes from. But it’s not always so reliable.

This is where I think about my philosophies, and it all starts falling into place. I was most enamored by Kierkegaard, right? Born a Christian — my dad a senior pastor who founded a church I practically grew up in, my mom also a pastor, and now my brother is a worship pastor too. A whole family of pastors. I grew up in that church, went to school, and eventually got kicked out of Malaysia to Melbourne to complete my higher education. And what happened was I started questioning my faith. Doubting my beliefs. My ground was debilitated. I started staring at my hands and questioning reality itself, and eventually went through a kind of existential crisis where I didn’t know who I was, and being didn’t know me, right?

I never really let go of my faith. I always prayed like the Psalmist. I always returned to the abyss and, through the abyss, found God, but through God, also found the abyss. I read a lot, watched a lot, saw a lot, and eventually fell onto Kierkegaard. I learned about him, I read about his journey, his life story. I forced myself to read Either/Or — practically a difficult book to read — and I spent a whole year going through it. I would say nothing has changed my life quite as much as Kierkegaard, or reoriented me, or helped me realize what my faith is. As Kierkegaard would say — and I can’t even quite remember the exact formulation, but it’s in the spirit of him — his books are not the Bible, he’s not the pastor, but he’s kind of a physician who tells people they’re sick and tells people where to look. A Christian Socrates. And then I also loved how his entire corpus, is as I would say — and as Kierkegaard scholars would probably agree — indebted to how he took his “leap of faith”, saw Abraham in himself, and cut off his engagement to Regine. From which all of his writing, all of his philosophy, all his brilliance came as the after-effect. The tragic after-effect. Or the tragic-comic after-effect. But also, ultimately, a figment of ultimate religious faith and fervor. He became the embodiment of existential passion. And that passion is what I so fell for, or rather — was struck by. (I’m now writing a 100,000-word manuscript inspired by this. One whole freaking manuscript! Do I wish that being an author didn’t come with all of its spectacular characteristics? Do I wish that philosophy didn’t feel intellectual? I wish so, yes, because then it would be more poetic — but maybe then I wouldn’t have done it.)

And so I came onto Kierkegaard in this way. Kierkegaard is kind of the ultimate subversive anti-philosophy philosopher. He writes so romantically. Now I don’t like people who are just controversial for the sake of being controversial — I don’t think I’m a jester. I take my wit seriously. I take my jest seriously, so to speak. Kierkegaard does too. Irony is of the essence, but fraught with seriousness. Not irony for the sake of irony like a comedian or a jester, right? I love Kierkegaard. I love Nietzsche to a lesser degree — I read him a couple of times during that same period of crisis, but he always feels a bit teenage to me. Same thing with Camus or Sartre. Almost like a badminton player trying to hit balls where it’s just a bit subversive — always trying to get there but never quite. The great philosopher of power isn’t tasteful enough. Kierkegaard hits that element much more; he himself moves around as much as he moves the ball around. He’s more romantic, more witty, more subversive. But far less efficient, that’s for sure.

Same thing with my relationship to God. My dad’s a pastor — hard-hitting father figure. My mom is very soft. Perhaps I’m embodying more of my mom there. But also, same thing with theology, with philosophy — people come at it with hard-hitting logic. The same thing as smashing hard, right? Mathematics — I’ve never loved it. In my O levels, it was my only C. Everything else was B’s or A’s, but mathematics, just a C. It always arrives to me as a hard-hitting force of rationality that cannot be argued against. Maybe I haven’t discovered the dance in it, perhaps I should read more Gödel. But I love poetry. I loved bachata when I did it. I love dancing with women, because I feel like that’s in a way embodying everything I’ve said. And sex, making love, the whole dance up to the point of an orgasm — that’s kind of like what I try to experience in almost everything I do. So this is almost, at this point, an entire philosophy of my inner being. An erotics of me, maybe. And ethics is downstream of that. Whereas for other people, ethics is a big thing — to me, ethics is also that hard-hitting logic thing. Ethics is never quite the hard rule. It’s all part of the same relation. Part of what I’m trying to become by suspending my being in my wittiness, or something like that.

All the same, even if I grew up in a church, and I still go to church, I find my relationship to God different from other Christians — so different it might as well be called something else altogether. And yet I believe in that. That’s almost where I find myself back in the faith, just like everybody else, in a way. Like if I’m Ronaldinho playing football — a different kind of football than everybody else — but then in that kind of football I feel like I’m playing a deeper, crazier kind of football than everyone else, and everyone’s still playing the same kind of football. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a bit overwrought. But it’s something like that. But still, I go to church — and similarly, Kierkegaard likes his eternal enemy. Hegel, and I too like Hegel. So when people say, you like Kierkegaard, you don’t like Hegel — I’m like, look, actually, I really like Hegel. And perhaps you can say the same thing: I love my dad, you know? I think he’s onto something. He just doesn’t quite see as far as I do. Maybe he does see further, but what is for sure, I am absolutely indebted to him — and this is where my witty, subversive part is coming into play, because I refuse to let you put me in a box. I’m not a rebel, nor am I a sheep. I’m like a third thing, or a fourth thing, or a fifth thing, right? If you generate a third thing, I’m probably a fourth thing. You might say I am an ‘aesthete-existentialist’. Honestly, I think that’s what I am, but yet — that only works because the label flips upon itself. Kierkegaard is like, “don’t put me in a box”, thus, Kierkegaard can be put in the box as ‘the one in the out-box’. Sure. Whatever. And so I keep slipping, and there is the threat of what I like to call ‘infinite regress’. I need to anchor myself onto something, but I keep slipping, wherever I see myself, there I am not. And that’s where the Kierkegaardian swerve comes in where Nietzsche keeps hitting the post. And I just say, that where I am not is, honestly, just God. But then what is God, right? Who? Where? Why? How? That’s the second question. And this is where you get into all the rambles and theological issues and linguistic issues per Wittgenstein. I think God is just kind of like your true self — who it is, everything that it is you aspire to be, but you’re not. Approaching God from an apophatic, existentialist sort of angle. Except God is not me. I’m not God. God is that thing within. God is that thing without. God is the absolute within and the absolute without, so to speak. And it is that which I always aspire to, and that ultimately generates all my movements. Maybe “God is dead”, but he sure seems alive even in death.

Look, this is all just rambling again, right? Philosophy, anti-philosophy, theology, heresy, blasphemy, irony. Where do I land? Kind of in the moment, in time. And this is where my chief archetype is a jazz pianist. You feel all of these things, all the polarities, you play them. And, okay, I haven’t spoken about music. Which is funny because music is maybe where all of this started. When I grew up in the church — my brother had learned the organ when he was five, before I was even born — Chopin, Rachmaninoff, yada yada whatever. And eventually the church lacked musicians. I was the youngest pastor’s kid. My brother played practically all the instruments by then. So I was kind of conscripted into the band. I was taught drums. Learnt piano for a bit. But drums stuck and became my main instrument. I played drums in church for something like ten years, maybe more. Later on, I also taught a couple of students in church, made a bit of money from that. But the main thing was I loved the drums. I loved the drums. I listened to a lot of drummers. Larnell Lewis. Nate Smith. I played a lot, and felt a lot. I liked playing in the pocket, playing in-time, but in a manner that was subversively out-of-time. If the song was four-counts, I would try to play in seven, and I wish I could play polyrhythms, wittily, but I haven’t done enough paradiddles to get there. Just like I wish I could play like Roger Federer.

All the same, after a couple of years playing in church, I fell in love with gospel music — because worship music, contemporary Christian music, became a bit boring. You listen to Hillsong, you listen to Planetshakers, all the builds are the same, all the fills are the same, and even when they’re marginally different they occupy the same moment, the same vibe, the same tension. I got tired of it the same way I got tired of B2B SaaS. Gospel felt more alive, like true subversion. Like everything else I’ve described here, it felt more like Ronaldinho in a worship band. The recently-departed pianist Quennel Gaskin was one of my favorites. If Nietzsche listened to Quennel Gaskin instead of Wagner, he might have said “God has resurrected”. And that was around the same time I was really getting into jazz, which is also around the same time I got tired of contemporary Christian music, and yeah, that’s where I landed. Out of everything I’ve said, you probably know — without me having to explain — why my favorite music is jazz. Bill Evans. Keith Jarrett. Errol Garner. I love them. I don’t just love them theoretically. When I listen to them, I feel so much in my head, my heart, and it just somehow encompasses my existence. And I love Jacob Collier — he’s somehow the embodiment of play to me, but Bill Evans feels more Kierkegaardian. He’s more melancholic. Jacob Collier is Kierkegaard in the major key. Someone who has discovered God and just understands the minor key but rambles and rambles all about the goodness of God. I don’t know what the philosophical or poetic equivalent is, but I think you catch my drift.

And even now, quite often, when I dream and I’m at my freest, I’m either flying in the air or playing an impossible solo that I can’t actually play in real life — but that I hear all the time. I can never reproduce it, because every single time I hear it and play it in my dreams, it’s always different. But somehow it is always the best damn solo in the entire universe. And Keith Jarrett — sometimes I don’t even like listening to him, but I love the experience of listening to him. Someone caught in the act of being serious, witty, subversive. I love the experience of being in time, occupying time, having sex with time. And I think jazz is kind of the embodiment of having sex with time. And yeah — every new explanation I can generate from here is just self-diminishing now. It’s too obvious and it doesn’t really mean anything. Am I not still performing that same act — having sex with time — even as I spew all this like an orgasm of words, and get off on my transgression? But now, meaning is at stake here. And if meaning is at stake, what should I just do? I should just stop talking.

In an ocean of books, why should you care about this one? Because:

THIS IS THE LAST PHILOSOPHY BOOK YOU EVER NEED TO READ.

Yes—you heard that right.

For thousands of years, humanity has been asking the same VEXED QUESTION. That 3am moment in the mirror: "Who am I, really?"

It comes in a thousand disguises:

• Why do I want to live a life I won't regret?

• Why does my happiness still feel incomplete?

• What is this restlessness that won't go away?

• Why do I feel fake even when I'm being real?

• Why do I want to be seen so badly—and hide just as badly?

• What if I've built my life on something I never really chose?

• Who am I trying to become?

Every philosophy, every theoretical system, every self-help book, every therapy session—ALL OF IT—has been wrestling with variations of the same fundamental question that refuses to let us go. We've built libraries full of answers. Entire civilizations of thought. Mountains of words upon words upon words.

All futile.

All missing the point…

“THE LAST EXISTENTIAL CRISIS” IS THE FINAL SYNTHESIS.

The culmination of everything that has been written across millennia. The END of philosophy as we know it.

No matter the stances:

• Conservative or revolutionary

• Left-wing or right-wing

• Atheist or religious fundamentalist

• Capitalist or communist

• Antinatalist or natalist

• Realist or idealist

• Optimist or pessimist

• Individualist or collectivist

• Rationalist or spiritualist

• Stoic or hedonist

• Humanist or posthumanist

It doesn't matter. This is where ALL roads lead. This is where all questions converge. This is where philosophy becomes the Ouroboros that eats its own tail and discovers the fumes at its mouth.

In short:

EVERYTHING IS CORRESPONDENCE.

Not answers. Not frameworks. Not a performance. Not a theory of forms. Not an absolute system. Not academic jargon. CORRESPONDENCE.

The end of philosophy is not another philosophy. It's the recognition that we were never solving problems to begin with. We were always in conversation. With ourselves. With each other. With the Vexed Questions. With—most of all—what we cannot name.

What happens at the end of philosophy?

All words fall into silence and implode into glossolalia.

Every exposition and proposition meets its reckoning, as it does in the following:

• The moment when meaning becomes too much for language.

• When jazz pianists grunt and convulse because music exceeds words.

• When mystics babble incoherently because they've touched the infinite.

• When lovers dissolve into wordless moans.

• When "AH!" and "OH!" become more truthful than any argument.

• When all philosophical systems collapse into aphasia.

And there—THERE—something better begins. Something wiser. Something fuller. Something less futile. Not that brittle weapon called ‘philosophy’.

CORRESPONDENCE begins.

In this way, “THE LAST EXISTENTIAL CRISIS” is not just another book to add to your shelf or device.

Rather, it is a book which—I will say this shamelessly and ecstatically—renders all philosophy, all systematic theory, all self-help: UNNECESSARY.

This is the END (OF PHILOSOPHY).
And the BEGINNING (OF SOMETHING FAR MORE ALIVE).

The Last Existential Crisis is coming 2025. This Substack will share exclusive excerpts, behind-the-scenes insights, and ongoing correspondence about what it means to be human in an age of infinite, lossy answers. → HERE IS THE MANIFESTO ^.

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