“An Alterity That Cannot Be Anticipated”

From the Sketches in Messianism series

Derrida said that messianism is a universal structure. Though the content of various messianisms would often be the stuff of this religion or that movement, messianism is a form of life common to all who live toward images, hopes, promises or ideals of various kinds. Common life is everywhere haunted, to some degree, by this universal form of longing, promise, possibility and imagination.

So, for example:

“The democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated […] welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant. From who or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event which cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality.”

Derrida wrote this in his book Specters of Marx. He reckons with the secular messianism of Marxism, in which the disparities of Capitalism would inevitably lead to its end, and give way to an arighted future. Here is a vision with obvious religious forebears.

Writing in 1993, after the grind of Soviet Communism, and its subsequent collapse with the rest of the Eastern Bloc, Derrida was feeling out how one might re-approach Marx’s legacy. Perhaps it was partly in light of those false dawns of the recent past that he came to this language of the messianic event as “an alterity that cannot be anticipated… The surprise of the arrivant.” Whatever it was, to which one turned one’s gaze, it could not be programmable. It would need to be something entirely other.

This, of course, resonates so deeply with what I mean by messianic apophasis. For Derrida, messianic imagination remains crucial to revolutionary thought. But the steadfast sameness of history bears witness that the event to come cannot be a conjuring of historical force or ingenuity; it must have its origins in some total otherness: “an alterity that cannot be anticipated.” It must be, as he says elsewhere with all the severity words can muster "monstrous."

Why? I find myself obliged to write on the plain of intuition, partly because Derrida writes the way he does, but also because my own feeling for this matter drifts beyond what I find good words for. Perhaps there is the sense of gesturing toward the holy.

The word holy (and indeed the word sacred) means exactly this. It means Otherness. It means apartness. Of course, in the popular imagination it just means something religious, but I’m not appealing to something intrinsically religious here, nor excluding it.

It might be best to describe the issue pragmatically, from this end: from history. Derrida announces that the arrivant, who comes on their own terms and none other, “will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power.” He specifies, neither “family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity”. Otherwise, what? Otherwise there is no newness. Some pseudo-messiah or some progressive eschatology, merely piles into the existing net of warring power-relations: between, families, states, territories; between humans and the animals and the environment itself. Nothing is changed. You think you’ve found the missing piece, but the jigsaw of history just keeps making the same picture. This was never a Messiah. There is no Otherness, no Holiness… the world reproduces itself again and again.

Or, we try to think from the other end. We could try to dream into the Otherness itself. We could wonder, pray, create out of the realm of possibility that we are haunted by: the realm of imagination that cannot be accounted for by simply rearranging again and again the stuff of history. But here we are indeed in the realm of holiness, a cloud of unknowing. It can neither be ignored, nor turned into an object of knowledge.

“One must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope…” says Derrida, alluding to the Jewish tradition of setting an extra space at the table for this Other who is awaited. It’s natural to imagine, with longing, this Other being sat there, but a care-full wisdom leaves room for x quantities. The Other must arrive on their own terms and not those of my imagining, otherwise they are not Other at all. And so the chair remains reverentially empty.