Futures: Of Jacques Derrida

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Edited by Richard Rand

Stanford University Press

Due/Published April 2001, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0804739560

Speculative essays by seven prominent writers and thinkers on the millennial issue of our "futures," "promises," "prophecies," "projects," and "possibilities"--including the possibility that there may be no "future" at all--all 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--examine 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, 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 perspective granted by the concept of 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 contemporary era.

Contributors: Geoffrey Bennington, Paul Davies, Peter Fenves, Werner Hamacher, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Elisabeth Weber, and Jacques Derrida

"This book, which includes a major piece by Derrida, may serve as a switching station, a relay that amplifies the legacy of deconstruction, demonstrating its continuing vitality and even more its necessary relevance for the questions of politics and ethics that face us in the coming century. The collection as a whole, by a distinguished body of leading scholars, brings into focus both the continuities and the innovations of Derrida's most recent publications."--Gregory L. Ulmer

Series Cultural Memory in the Present