Epigraphs: The Messianic, Law, Time

"Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim."

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task."

- Walter Benjamin

"Messianic time has the form of a state of exception...Here it is not a matter of a problem of political philosophy in the strict sense but of a crucial issue that involves the very existence of philosophy in its relationship to the entire codified text of tradition, whether it be Islamic shari'a, Jewish Halakha, or Christian dogma. Philsophy is always already constitutively related to the law, and every philosophical work is always, quite literally, a decision on this relationship."

- Giorgio Agamben

"Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction what remains undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice – which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights – and idea of democracy – which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today."

"[The messianic]or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration."

- Jacques Derrida

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.

“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.

The Future Anterior Again

Inspired by a more sophisticated reading of Lacan than I can offer, I'll continue with the thought of the future anterior.

Consider Lacan:

What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming (Ecrits, 247).

In this case, the perspective of the future anterior is not the one which speculates about the world from the point of its completion, the twilight of history. Here the psychoanalytic cure works according to a temporality that betrays the consecutive flow of memory. What transpires is a restructuring of memory such that what was will only have been by route of the talking cure.

I'll get to Badiou's appropriation of this temporality soon.

The Future Anterior

I am interested, above all, in the politics of time, or the temporality of politics. I am interested in understanding the political event as an interruption of the normal order. Order implies not just stability of structure, but sequence or flow (as in ordinal numbers). What flows in the current order, the liberal-democratic hegemony, is both capital and time. There is a connection between the two, I am almost certain, but it is a connection I have not yet explored. For now the idea of a political event interrupting the ordered flow of time -- for instance, clocks and calendars -- is what I am attempting to pursue.

There is much to explore in this regard, for now I want to look at Derrida's suspision of a certain temporal mode: the future anterior. The future anterior, the verbal form that names what "will have been," is a form that betrays the future as such: the absolute future of the a-venir.

The future [the a-venir] can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue.
Of Grammatology, p.5

This lack of an exergue -- named in the exergue of Of Grammatology -- is not a deficency of method, Derrida is not attempting a Hegelian "phenomenology" where the telos is perceptible; as though we stand (or fly) in the dusk of the event which provides us a glimpse of its fullness. The future that Derrida anticipates here -- the arrival of a "science of writing, a grammatology -- would be the anticipation of "a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beond the cloure of knowledge" (ibid, p.4). How can that which is beyond the present, beyond knowledge be present and known? Certainly not in the terms of the present. Not, to be sure, in terms of the Prussian state (Hegel) or of liberal democracy (Fukyama). What is to-come cannot properly be accommodated to what is. This is, according to Derrida, what is at stake in the logic of the future anterior: to say here and now, what will have been the result of a completed temporal flow, a realized eschatology. To anticipate the future in the present is to disrupt it's order, to speak or act against order, to be untimely or seditious.

The question that remains for me, however, is whether the future anterior is, in every case, subordinate to the metaphysics of presence. For Badiou (following Lacan's notion of the apres coup), the role of the "will have been" does not bespeak a subordination of the future to the present, but the undecidability of the event until it has run its course. The aleatory dimension of the political intervention that is underway.