Futures: Of Jacques Derrida

Seven 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 RabatZ, Elisabeth Weber, and Jacques Derrida himself study a range of authors, including Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Marx, Benjamin, KoyrZ, 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.