It is important, however, to stress that Mabini’s texts do not merely occasion
the return of the imperial specters of political theology. There is another powerful
force which inhabits all of his writings, and that is of course the Revolution
whose eruption points to other possibilities. The Revolution comes across not
simply as the medium for the restoration of absolute sovereignty in a national
body that would lead to rational institutions even as it restores social hierarchy.
It can also appear as a radically new, profoundly unrecognizable and therefore
thoroughly inhuman force. In one essay, Mabini writes of the fear and trembling
that the Philippine Revolution had struck in the hearts of other European
colonizers who saw it as “contagious, very contagious.” For the Revolution
“bears in its volcanic bosom the germ of yellow fever or the bubonic plague,
which is fatal to their colonial interests. In the not so distant future, it could