On the "to-come"

If the to-come of democracy or justice is not a regulative idea, then it is a promise. Derrida, in Rogues, quotes himself from The Other Heading (1991): “[the to-come is] not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international, state or tans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise – and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now” (p.86). The fundamental difference here, between the promise and the regulative idea, concerns the certainty of its arrival – and the form of its arrival. For Kant, as it was mentioned, the supersensible idea serves to regulate action in the sensible realm by holding out for it the hope of its full arrival. In this way the regulative idea is close to a promise in the common sense of the word: a word that can be counted on. We demand such an economical accounting of the promise in everyday use, I think. If a word is not kept – if we were cynical we could say, if there is no return on the investment – then it will not have been a promise, only empty words. This is precisely the everyday understanding of the promise at work in the line from the Fugazi song that I cited in an earlier post.

For Derrida, on the other hand, the promise, in order to be a promise, must retain the undecidability with respect to its arrival and the form of its arrival. He says that it “is thus indeed already a question of autoimmunity, of a double bind of threat and chance, not alternatively or by turns promise and/or threat but threat in the promise itself” (p.82). The promise of a classless society, or in Derrida’s terms, a justice to-come cannot be counted on or accounted for ahead of time. This would not be a promise, but a calculable, albeit deferred, fact – this was precisely Marx’s mistake in reading history teleologically. This is the structure of the a-venir the to-come of democracy.