“il aura obligé”

I'd like to draw back a little bit from the line that I have been pursuing with respect to the future anterior. In an earlier post I spoke of Derrida's "suspicion" of that verbal mode. I think it is better to speak of his ambivalence towards it. Consequently, the opposition that I was attempting to identify between Derrida and Badiou on the temporal basis of politics will not be as simple as I had imagined. This is not to say that there is no disagreement, only that this is not the precise plane upon which the disagreement lies.

I was brought to this realization in re-reading the "gift" that Derrida composed for Emmanuel Levinas -- his contribution to a feschrift for the latter (The English translation is included in Re-reading Levinas). This is a dense text with much going on. Derrida is a consistently careful reader of texts, but he seems to be all the more attentive when reading Levinas -- at the end of this essay he speaks of a certain "incest" between them.

The thematization of the future anterior in this text stems from the obscure epigraph (or "exergue" -- for some reason Derrida maintains the proximity between the exergue and the future anterior) that Derrida places at the beginning of the essay: “il aura obligé," "he will have obligated." This line, along with a series of quotations from Levinas' Otherwise Than Being ("At this very moment in this work here I am" -- the title of the essay), constitute the source of Derrida's reflections. I'll leave aside the questions related to the "he" (who is the il? is it E.L.? why not el?, etc.) and concentrate on the form of the verb.

"The future anterior could turn out to be -- and this resemblance is irreducible -- the time of the Hegelian teleology (p.36)." This is the ambivalence I spoke of. Derrida's reservations about this temporal mode are clear, but what is the other side of this ambivalence? In the Levinasian lexicon there is another possibility:

the future anterior...will have designated "within" language that which remains most irreducible to the economy of Hegelian teleology and to the dominant interpretation of language. From the moment when it is in accord with the "he" as Pro-noun of the wholly-other "always already past," it will have drawn us toward an eschatology without philosophical teleology, beyond it in any case, otherwise than it. It will have engulfed the future anterior [my emphasis] in the bottomless bottom of a past anterior to any past, to all present past, toward that past of the trace that has never been present. Its future anteriority will have been irreducible to ontology....

That future anteriority there would no longer decline a verb saying the action of a subject in an operation that would have been present. To say "il aura obligé"... is not to designate, describe, define, show etc., but, let us say, to entrace (entracer)
(p.37).

It seems, then, that the "otherwise" of the future anterior lies in its irreducibility to ontology, certainly, but also, as far as I can tell, a reducibility to the temporality of the "trace," what is referred to as the absolute past, the past anterior to any present, the immemorial past, etc.. (In this case, Simon Critchely's commentary on Derrida's essay in the same volume would be incorrect. Critchely claims that Derrida favours the future anterior as such. He claims that for Derrida "it is a tense that escapes the time of the present; it simultaneously points toward a future -- aura -- and a past -- obligé -- but never toward a present" (p.168). This assessment of the tense may be correct, but this does not seem to be Derrida's own assessment.) Levinas understands this strange temporality in terms of a kind of "anachronism" which "takes apart the recuperable time of history and memory" (OTB, p.88). The obligation that I bear towards my neighbour is not of the order of a contract or a recognition and my response does not derive from a free choice; all of which would assume a coincidence of oneself to another in the present. For Levinas,

[m]y reaction misses a present which is already the past of itself. This past is not in the present, but is a phase retained, the past of this present, a lapse already lost which marks ageing, escaping all retention, altering my contemporaneousness with the other. It reclaimed me before I came. The delay is irrecuperable. "I opened....he had disappeared." My presence does not respond to the extreme urgency of the assignation. I am accused of having delayed. The common hour marked by the clock is the hour in which the neighbor reveals himself and delivers himself in his image, but it is precisely in his image that he is no longer near...[This kind of] proximity does not enter into the common time of clocks, which makes meetings possible. It is a disturbance.

Proximity as a suppression of distance suppresses the distance of consciousness of... The neighbor excludes himself from the thought that seeks him, and this exclusion has a positive side to it: my exposure to him, antecedent to his appearing, my delay behind him, my undergoing, undo the core of what is identity to me...

One can call that apocalyptically the break-up of time. But it is a matter of an effaced but untameable diachrony of non-historical, non-said time, which cannot be synchronized in a present by memory and historiography, where the present is but the trace of an immemorial past...(ibid, p.89).

This temporality of the trace is clearly not the Hegelian or the Lacanian version of the future anterior. It is an altogether different temporality, one that is defined, first of all by a lapse or a missed encounter. Ageing is one metaphor that Levinas uses. Ageing is the fact of a temporality that effects me, effects my body, despite me. I cannot identify my encounter with ageing, I
only know that I am effected by it, I can only respond to it.