Transition

The trajectory of these recent posts has not been as fruitful as I had imagined. I would like to move instead to a discussion of the messianic in Derrida (in order to later bring it into discussion with Benjamin and Agamben).This is not an utterly new direction, nonetheless some sort of a transition would be preferable. As luck would have it, I found a passage from Specters of Marx that offers just such a transition.

More than ever the future-to-come [a-venir] can announce itself as such and in its purity only on the basis of a past end: beyond, if that’s possible, the last extremity. If that’s possible, if there is any future, but how can one suspend such a question or deprive oneself of such reserve without concluding in advance, without reducing in advance both the future and its chance? Without totalizing in advance? We must discern here between eschatology and teleology, even if the stakes of such a difference risk constantly being effaced in the most fragile and slight insubstantiality – and will be in a certain way always and necessarily deprived of any insurance against this risk. Is there not a messianic extremity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) can exceed, at each moment, the final term of the phusis, such as work, the production, the telos of any history? (Specters of Marx, p.45)

In order to make use of the future anterior -- the decision to name what "will have been" -- in a Derridian (or, Levinasian-Derridian, to make appropriate use of Zizek's often inappropriate convention of hyphenating-adjectivizing the two names) and not Hegelian sense, it will be necessary to distinguish the teleological from the eschatological. "Concluding in advance" is what is necessary if we are to speak of the future at all -- even if to speak of its unknowability. But how to speak of the future, the a-venir, in a responsible and hospitable way; how to remain open to its coming (which is to say open to its arrival as promise or as threat); this is Derrida's task. It is only an act of messianic faith which welcomes an eschatology that is devoid of content -- and thereby lacking a telos -- that can accomplish this.

There will be much more to say about the messianic.