The movie’s last act begins with an invocation of hope. Armed with little more than the oral report that her father, a conscience-stricken Imperial architect, has secretly built a hidden weakness into the lately active Death Star battle station, the protagonist Jyn Erso answers critics within the Rebel Alliance council with the iconic declaration, “Rebellions are built on hope.” This comes as Jyn tries (unsuccessfully) to persuade the fledgling band into an all-out attack on the planet Scarif — occupied by the Galactic Empire — in order to steal the Death Star plans. Her plea is denied with the phrase, “There is no hope,” and not without reason. Few trust Jyn’s testimony, and it is clear that the mission would be a longshot. Despite the denial, Jyn and her ragtag comrades decide to attempt it themselves, later drawing in the rest of the Alliance fleet as a result.

Things certainly seem hopeless for the Rogue One team by the end of the film. The uphill struggle to finally transmit the Death Star plans to the Rebel fleet is a longshot to begin with, but as the battle goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that there will be no way out for the team, as one by one each fighter is cornered and killed until only Jyn and her comrade Cassian Andor are left.

Rogue One’s climax and ending force us as readers to ask: is it possible to hope when faced with what we might call a hopeless situation? Can hope exist in tragedy? And not just in sad circumstances but, as in this case, in the face of annihilation, a literal or symbolic “bringing to nothing”?

Eagleton ponders this last question by drawing on the work of Jonathan Lear, whose work focuses on the historical case of Native American Chief Plenty Coups and his reaction to the near extinction of his tribe, the Crow, at the turn of the twentieth century. From this case, Eagleton concludes that the most exemplary hope may emerge in the direst of straits. This is a radical or “fundamental” hope that arises when circumstances transcend the ability to understand them. Such a hope is located in the fact that only after the cataclysm will the concepts be available to speak it and to recover.

Thus, Eagleton writes,

“the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees, from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster” (p. 114).

Sure, he admits, there are cases of tragedy (Eagleton cites the Holocaust as one clear example) that leave nothing left to console or flourish. Even still, he says, there could be no tragedy in the first place without a sense of value, no matter the fruitfulness of the event: “We would not call tragic the destruction of something we did not prize.”

For the Rogue One team, coupled with the threat of personal annihilation is a teleological concern that premature death may also spell a more general defeat or failure. How does hope function under these conditions?

For one thing, Eagleton points out that even though one’s hopes for oneself must necessarily end at death, one can yet hope for what is possible for others. But acting in hope isn’t just about outcomes. Sometimes, hope enables or demands action for its own sake. Thus it is that “hope can acknowledge loss or destruction to be unavoidable, which is where it differs from some currents of optimism, yet still refuse to capitulate.”

What drives the Rogue One team is neither optimism about their chances of success nor pessimism about the odds of their losing (which are really the same thing); rather it’s a hope that begins first and foremost with the worth of the particular action they take: the possibility rather than the probability of its efficacy. Because hope can result in taking action for its own sake in spite of cataclysm and thus transcend it, Rogue One’s annihilation coincides with the narrative pivot point by which hope is able to bring something out of nothing.

But what is that something? What is it to which Rogue One’s hope attaches itself and how does that hope become realized? The answer to both of those questions is speech.

Both in the face of dire challenges and in their wake, you can’t have hope if you can’t speak it. Eagleton observes,

“Hope would stumble to a halt only when we could no longer identify cruelty and injustice for what they were. To speak of hopelessness must logically presuppose the idea of hope. It is when meaning as such collapses that tragedy is no longer possible” (p. 122).

It is precisely in the possibility of naming tragedy and speaking of it — that is, of bearing witness — that Rogue One’s actions find their ultimate hope. Not only do Jyn and the others act based on the hope that transmitting the Death Star plans will prevent untold deaths to come, but also that it is still possible to communicate the injustices of the Empire and to be understood, without which even successfully transmitting the plans would be pointless. After being turned away by the council, the manifest hope of the Rogue One team is that the council can still be convinced because there is still the capacity to signify, to forge understanding, even if it’s the last thing they can do.

If, as Eagleton writes, authentic hope is that which “survives the general ruin,” the “irreducible residue” left over from catastrophe, then yes: there is hope even in Rogue One’s tragic end. Just in time, Jyn transmits the plans for the very weapon that looms overhead and in short order destroys them.

To even speak of a given cataclysm at all, Eagleton says, “there must be something that survives it, even if it is no more than a distraught messenger or a scrap of paper” (p. 123). The irreducible residue of hope is the capacity to speak, and more basically, to signify. Rogue One’s transmission to the ship in orbit contains the Death Star plans, yes, but it is also itself a kind of speech act, a message, a bridge between cataclysm (past) and solution (future), one which the soldiers and finally Princess Leia literally carry in the form of a data tape, bringing a new (or perhaps returning to a more basic) meaning of the phrase “bearing witness.”

The deaths of Jyn and Cassian and the others represent, for them, “the end of narrativity as such,” as Eagleton puts it. Death is the terminus: the non-event which swallows up the possibility of further events. But their last act is by contrast a speech act which, as an event, continues to constitute the past and the future into an ongoing narrative. As long as history moves forward, there is hope, since that means things can change. (Importantly, then, hope is not based in the idea of progress but process.) The message sent underscores and points to this very fact by virtue of its signification qua event: a “new hope” for the fledgling Rebel Alliance’s struggle against a totalitarian power. Thus there are two levels of witness going on in Rogue One’s climax.