![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1 Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 29–30. About modern time, see also Latour, We Have Never Been, section 3.7: “The End of the Passing Past”.
2 Just a note on the terms ethics and politics, which I have been using loosely so far. If we understand ethics as having to do with the singular Other and with unconditional demands, and politics as having to do with a plurality of others and hence with general rules, conditional duties and the necessity of institutions, part of the point of Derrida's ‘ethics’ is to show the impossibility of such a distinction. There is no ‘pure’ ethics. At the same time, and to anticipate on my conclusion, Derrida will show how there is also no ‘pure’ politics, no concern for cohabitation, community and institutions, that is not always already exposed to an excess or surplus that is the Other.
3 Although à-venir is often translated as future-to-come, I prefer, for reasons that will become clear in what follows, to use the expression to-come.
4 Derrida, “Not Utopia, the Im-possible,” 131. This is true also of Derrida's messianicity, which is not a utopianism, but names ‘an eminently real, concrete event.’ Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 248–9.
5 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 105. See also Rogues, 85 and 90.
6 Derrida, Rogues, 29.
7 There is a tendency in the secondary literature to emphasize the futural (albeit absolute) aspect of the to-come and downplay its ‘presence’. In her book Derrida on Time, Joanna Hodge identifies the to-come as Derrida's distinctive mode of thinking futurity (37) and links it to the emancipation promised to the nameless, who are not yet born (135). See also chapter 4.1. Neal Deroo emphasizes the link between the to-come and the futurity of the promise, but this is not surprising given the specific project undertaken in his book, namely to analyze the role of futurity – protentional and eschatological – in phenomenology. See Neal Deroo, Futurity in Phenomenology, Part III, especially chapter 9. In his book Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, Samir Haddad also argues against ‘the dominant tendency to privilege the future’ in Derrida scholarship which reduces democracy-to-come ‘very quickly […] to a simple passivity or utopianism in the face of what happens’ (4). To remedy this tendency, Haddad emphasizes the ‘injunction to inherit from the past’ (3) that is involved in democracy-to-come. Inheritance intertwines the past and the future: insofar as inheritance is a task, it is always behind and before us at once, but never fully either. Hence inheritance cannot be accounted for if we stick to a linear understanding of time. While I agree in principle with Haddad's emphasis on inheritance, I still think it is necessary in the context of a discussion of the to-come, and given the privilege of the future in Derrida scholarship, to explain what kind of ‘here and now’ is associated with the to-come.
8 See Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 56.
9 Derrida, “Différance,” 10. See also ibid., 13: ‘[differance] (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization.’ Of course, Derrida puts ‘simultaneously’ in parentheses since simultaneity, as what happens within one time, is only possible on the basis of differance.
10 See, “Différance,” 13.
11 “Ousia and Grammē,” 42–3 (original emphasis).
12 See ibid., 55.
13 Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 73.
14 See Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin, 86 and “Ousia and Grammē,” 55.
15 It is because of this inscription that time is finite, that the trace is always subject to erasure, loss, death. In his explanation of the becoming-space of time, Hägglund emphasizes space as the persistence of time, as the necessary inscription of any mark that entrusts it to the outside. See Radical Atheism, 27. As a result, he reads the to-come as the unpredictable future that forms both the chance of survival and the possibility of erasure and death. See among others, 132–7. While I do not want to deny this unpredictability, or the fact that the to-come always remains to-come, I want to emphasize the relation of the to-come to the spacing or blind spot that is a function of the splitting (or spacing) of any now.
16 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 37 (original emphasis).
17 ‘[N]on-presence and non-evidentness [are admitted] into the blink of an eye of the instant. There is a duration to the blink of an eye, and this duration closes the eye’ (Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 56).
18 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45 (original emphases, translation modified).
19 The same relation obtains between the gift and economy. If the gift has to remain heterogeneous to economy, to exchange, to the circulation of goods, then it can only happen in an “instant” that remains heterogeneous to time, that ‘tears time apart’. See Derrida, Given Time, 9. At the same time, it is the heterogeneity of the gift that provides the circle of economy with its respiration and prevents its paralysis. See ibid., 30.
20 See, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 117.
21 See “Force of Law,” 256–7.
22 Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism,” 16–7.
23 Derrida, “Politics of Friendship,”182. The elided sentence reads in English: ‘“To come” means “future”, not the present future, which would be present and presentable tomorrow’. The French version, however, says the opposite: ‘“À venir” does not mean future, the future present, etc. [« À venir », cela ne veut pas dire « futur », le présent futur, etc.]’. The interview with Michael Sprinker was conducted in 1989 and first published in The Althusserian Legacy. The French version appeared as Politique et Amitié in 2011. As Pierre Alféri mentions at the end of his introduction, for the French edition, Derrida's manuscripts were collated, his English expressions as well as Sprinker's questions translated into French, and a few typos corrected (11). This means that Derrida wrote his answers in French, using English expressions from time to time.
24 See Derrida, Of Hospitality, 61.
25 Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 361–2 (translation modified).
26 Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch,” 351.
27 Hence I would disagree with Caputo's explanation of Derrida's phrase ‘open “quasi”-community’ as championing a more porous kind of border. See Caputo, “Who is Derrida's Zarathustra?,” 187, and Deconstruction in a Nutshell, chapter 4, especially 121–4.
28 See the discussion of immigration, asylum and xenophobia in “The Deconstruction of Actuality,” 102.
29 The second interpretation is more common in the literature, but many interpreters have also insisted on the fact that the unconditional does not function as a moral ideal in Derrida. See Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance, chapter 1. See also Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 103–6. The relation between unconditional hospitality and the rules of hospitality is at the centre of the discussion between Derek Attridge and Martin Hägglund. While Hägglund insists that openness to the other is the ‘nonethical opening of ethics’ so that any unconditional affirmation is always the affirmation of temporal finitude, and hence of the inseparability of good and evil, Attridge thinks that by evacuating all normative power from the unconditional, Hägglund betrays the ‘ethical tone’ of Derrida's writings, simplifies the relation between the unconditional and the conditional, and ends up advocating a distinctly conditional hospitality (‘be circumspect’). See Attridge's Review of Hägglund's Radical Atheism in Derrida Today, which is reprinted in Reading and Responsibility, Chapter 10, and Martin Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics.”
30 See the discussion of Levinas's Other and the impossibility of pure peace in “Violence and Metaphysics”, especially 145–6 and 162–3.
31 In her book, Derrida and Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson speaks of ‘our response to the other “to-come”’ as ‘a response to the unknown that may or may not “appear” or happen’, hence linking the to-come to the possibility of appearance. For her, the to-come seems to be the past or the future beyond present life and ethics requires that we respond beyond what is present in present life to the past and the future that haunts the present. While she emphasizes the spectral nature of the to-come, and the surprising and unanticipated nature of its coming, she still thinks of it exclusively under the form of appearing.
32 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 23.
33Ibid., 25 (original emphasis).
34Ibid., 27–8.
35 Heidrun Friese, in “Spaces of Hospitality”, criticizes this anonymity because it ‘determines the stranger even more’, namely ‘by rendering him an anonymous, nameless subject of an “absolute hospitality”, in which the host unilaterally gives (though without giving)’ (72). Anonymity, it seems, strips the stranger of any agency. But for Derrida, anonymity is first a means to prevent the imposition of foreign categories and names onto the foreigner so that they can be the agent of their own naming and appearing.
36 Derrida, “Psyche,” 46–7.
37Ibid., 39.
38 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 56. On awaiting beyond what is possible, see Derrida, Aporia, 62–81. On this waiting without expectation or waiting without awaiting, see “Marx and Sons,” 248–51.
39 Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?,” 455.
40 See What Have Never Been, section 3.2, “What is a Quasi-Object?”
41 Despite this obvious similarity, Latour is critical of deconstruction, which he sees as engaged with meanings, discourses, language games, i.e. with an inability to take things seriously. While Latour agrees with the deconstruction of the naturalization of nature, he disagrees with what he takes to be the result of such a deconstruction, namely the focus on the social, constructed, linguistic nature of this pseudo-nature. See Latour, We Have Never Been, especially section 1.3, “The Crisis of the Critical Stance”.
42 See Latour, Politics of Nature, Glossary, 239: ‘the term [collective] refers not to an already-established unit but to a procedure for collecting associations of humans and nonhumans’.
43 Latour, Politics of Nature, 126–7.
44 See not only the quotation from “How to Make Things Public” at the beginning of this paper, but also Politics of Nature, 113. Latour speaks exclusively from the position of the one who is already part of the common world (which he calls ‘our Republic’), and deserves to take part into the process of assembling and in the policing the collective's borders. Even though he does not assume that there is one world, but rather insists on the fact that the one world must be composed, it never occurs to him that he might be on the outside of it.
45 Latour never considers that some excluded entities might in fact not be appellants knocking on the door of ‘our Republic’, but might insist on not being included, or that they might even have as their goal to destroy the collective. Shouldn't a politics worthy of the name also be concerned with those?
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marie-Eve Morin
Marie-Eve Morin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her research interests include phenomenology, existentialism and deconstruction. She is the author of Jean-Luc Nancy, an introduction to Nancy's work for Polity Press's Key Contemporary Thinkers series, as well as articles on Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy and Sloterdijk. She is currently working on a comparative study of Nancy's and Merleau-Ponty's ontologies in light of the speculative realist challenge. Email: [email protected]