The Madness of Holy Saturday: Bipolar Temporality and the Queerdom of Heaven on Earth

Abstract

This chapter makes queer and feminist interventions in contemporary political theology. It uncovers the temporalities and affects nurtured by the eschatological and counter-eschatological orientations within radical orthodox and radical democratic theologies. It then places such orientations into dialogue with: Shelly Rambo’s Holy Saturday theology; the queer temporalities of Lee Edelman, Heather Love, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman; Ann Cvetkovich’s work on depression; and Robert McRuer’s critical disability theory. From this dialogue the concept of “bipolar time”—a Holy Saturday temporality and a mode of affect-laden resistance to profitable time—is constructed. Bipolar time is birthed from the interpenetrating feelings of depression occasioned by the neoliberal present and those of manic hope for alternative futures. Bipolar time does not seek a final end to its penetrative flows of despair and desire or to become efficiently and sufficiently ordered; instead it seeks out the insights on offer by disorder. It is a dream of a temporally reordered world—a Queerdom of Heaven on Earth—where worth is divorced from work, and purpose is divorced from profitability.