Futures

Seven eminent authors, all known for their work in deconstruction, address the millennial issue of our futures, promises, prophecies, projects, and possibilitiesincluding 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 contributorsGeoffrey Bennington, Paul Davies, Peter Fenves, Werner Hamacher, Jean-Michel Rabat, Elisabeth Weber, and Jacques Derrida himselfstudy a range of authors, including Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Marx, Benjamin, Koyr, 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 ones 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 groundbut a ground with no solidity whateverfor 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.