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.