In the previous chapter, I examined dominant approaches to thinking about exclusion and otherness: liberal abstract universality and postmodern difference. I argued that both approaches obfuscate the self and Other and that by working against recognition, they fail to negotiate the dilemma of difference in any meaningful sense. Although liberal cosmopolitanism and postmodern alterity are two prominent alternatives embraced by the Left in the wake of the fall of Communism, dissatisfaction with the paucity of the political of the former and the new essentialism of the latter has prompted the revival of two (more radical) alternatives: political realism and messianic utopianism. The former, promulgated by such thinkers as Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau, has traditionally been seen as a conservative politics of the possible, but its annihilating critique of liberalism and its unflinching engagement with the tragic real have prompted its revival on the Left. The latter, promulgated by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, promotes a politics of the impossible that interrupts the given order with a messianism that looks to the past (Benjamin) or future (Derrida) in the hope of redemption. This broadly messianic tradition might be characterised as utopian; however, it rejects any sort of ideal theory or blueprint for action in the tradition of grand utopian narratives, instead embracing ‘hope in a blank utopia’.