Futures: Of Jacques DerridaSeven eminent authors, all known for their work in deconstruction, address the millennial issue of our futures, promises, prophecies, projects, and possibilities including the possibility that there may be no future at all. Speculative in every sense, these essays are marked by a common concern for the act of reading as it is practiced in the work of Jacques Derrida. The contributors Geoffrey Bennington, Paul Davies, Peter Fenves, Werner Hamacher, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Elisabeth Weber, and Jacques Derrida himself study a range of authors, including Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Marx, Benjamin, Koyré, Arendt, and Lacan. These readings are neither prescriptive, definitive, nor definitional. Each essay seeks out, in the work it studies, those moments that pronounce or propose futures that enable speculation, moments in which the speculator has to make promises. As Derrida says in his essay, Between lying and acting, acting in politics, manifesting one's own freedom through action, transforming facts, anticipating the future, there is something like an essential affinity. . . . The lie is the future. Or, in the words of Werner Hamacher, The futurity of language, its inherent promising capacity, is the ground but a ground with no solidity whatever for all present and past experiences, meanings, and figures which could communicate themselves in it. These essays, though arising from deconstruction, point out the ways in which deconstruction has yet to occur, and they do so by scanning the unattainable horizons marked off by thinkers at the forefront of our modern era. |
Contents
THIS CONTRADICTION | 18 |
PROLEGOMENA | 65 |
THE MESSIANISM | 130 |
future ancient fugitive | 179 |
ELIJAHS FUTURES | 201 |
Notes | 219 |
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absolute according action aporetical appear Arendt attempt calls childbirth cloth cognitive power commodity commodity-language concepts contingent death deconstruction desire determined dialectical dialethic différance discourse domain of philosophy essay essentially teleological fact figure French future Hannah Arendt Hegel Hegelian Heidegger Heidegger's human Immanuel Kant impossible insofar interpretation Jacques Derrida Jacques Lacan judgment Kant Kant's thought Koyré labor Lacan language least Leibniz limits logic Mallarmé Martin Heidegger Marx means ment messianic metaphysics moral nature never notion noumenon object oneself opening paradox Paris Pascal performative perhaps Phaedo philosophy political possible principle of contradiction principle of identity principle of reason promise pure reason question radical evil rational reference relation Religion remains secret sense speaks specter Specters of Marx spectral structure teleological telos thesis of radical thing thinking third Critique tion trans transcendental translation truth University Press word writes