Future Futures: How to Write I

The question of how to write I, then. This time I will situate this question between two certain senses of the title given here, “Future futures.” First, the sense—and this will interrogate Heideggerian verbalizations of nouns—that future is something that “futures,” meaning that future itself is what gives more future, that future somehow is what gives itself—and present—and past. Its giving itself, and thereby its giving us our lives, is evident in the fact that there are innumerous presents and pasts; it can only further its giving-of-future if it precisely unavoidably must produce so called present and so called past; time has to make space for itself, and so it produces what is called present and past. Heidegger would say, for instance, that the world worlds (die Welt weltet), time times (die Zeit zeitet), language speaks (die Sprache spricht), or that the nothing nothings (das Nichts nichtet).

Here, right here, when I wrote this yesterday, my computerized pen immediately protested, and mark with red and green. My computer will mark, and simply do so till I take notice of it; still, luckily, I have the choice to either a) ignore the suggestion, but this possibility of ignoring which is built into the machine, is repeatedly restricted to ignoring once, or b) I can incorporate into the machine what it spit out, but so only to make of me a part of that machine, and certainly that machine a part of me. We see here a constellation vastly different from that of the singular pen and pencil. The machine machines and this means that the pen has to spit out, from me, and from the “machine,” or the “personal computer.”

Anyway, as for the second sense of the ‘future futures,’ namely, the sense that in our future, or in the future, there will be plural futures, I have written that in the future there will have to be futures in the plural: not the future, nor a future—akin to Deleuze’s “a life” perhaps—but futures, period…no, not period, but period without period, and without without without, as Derrida wrote somewheres. This would transpose supernumerary being to supernumerary future; supernumerary being can only be if there are supernumerary futures. Of course, future is always supernumerary, what is superfluous, extra, what always already is outside any present or presentist calculus, bursting into the calculus machine, always imploding that machine’s built-in possibilities, always already making any presencing machine the very locus of dysfunction. So there is a certain future that will always already implode any being, any life given, any given, any axiomatics.

I said ‘always already,’ and I was talking of future. How is that possible? It is not as difficult and scandalous to let the figure of ‘always’ flee the past, the radical, and the arche, as it is with regard to the figure of ‘already.’ Radicalists—seekers and discoverers of roots, be the preferred ones regular radicles, or wild, schizophrenic rhizomes—will have to write this fleeing as a scandal. Radicalists say that ‘already’ means ‘before, or by this time, or the time mentioned.’ And they will point to the fact that the term is composed of ‘all’ and ‘ready.’ In all ways, imaginable and unimaginable relative this or that human being, there it is, that which is all ready, also imaginable and unimaginable relative this or that empirical and contingent human being. Always already: one of the favorite figures of the root. Even the rhizome connects according to those ‘always already’s’—it just incorporates and supersedes the radicle’s ways of the ‘always already.’ But, for there is certainly a qualification involved here: would we not need to question the common self-assuredness of all those radicalists that all write their I’s as if cloned?

Some questions: what if future is what is always already? And what if what present is, what it appears like, is not to be pragmatically and morally judged upon by recourse to rules of application of past principles? What if such radicalist interpretations of the principles of the always already will be bound to institute an obstruction to the future, namely, according to mystical conceptions of what always already is, conceptions that seems to say that what makes existence, and future, is a past making sure that it is reproduced? I think that today the injunction to future is more palpable than ever, and that this injunction takes a conspicuous political turn. Capitalism—namely what seemingly relates its machine of investment and risk, relates its machine to the future and so discards any present and past needs and desires—is actually blocking our relation to future, and futurity, that is. And blocking more efficient than any other known political machine. But in so doing it also reveals the possibility and necessity of futurity more secure and clear than ever. This efficiency in obstructing futurity is perhaps what precisely gave it its globalization.

Always a tergo, then, always thought that what constitutes the force of existence, existants, is in the past, all ways and all ready, behind us, pushing our backs, pushing us toward the future, a future that is only, and always only, the application, or duplication, of that same root. A force that will have the necessary and sufficient sanctions to make all of us bend back and eventually break our backs. Is not also the conception of causality basically something a tergo? There is, of course, concepts suggesting ‘reversible time,’ but is not this rather a gesture so as to expand the hold of past upon present and future? The ball that gets hit by another ball: is it all past powers that act? How could it be? How could we be sure? Should we not rather be disturbed by the possibility that there is a certain futurity that at all allows what we call causality? Does the effect not, at least, also come from the future? This must be thought without its Aristotelian heritage, the heritage that says that there is a teleological and formal cause, as well, besides of the material and efficient. We must leave it there, unfortunately. But again, the ball that got hit, not to speak of the ball that hits: are these not events from the future?

We do need to put our backs to past and also to a present whose imminence is precisely to right away become past, irrelevant, non-work, inefficiency. Any present is in the imminence of being produced as past, what is left, what is no more, what can never be found anymore, because it is irreducibly lost, left, given up, what doesn’t work anymore. What always works is what is to come; we can be sure of this. It is not the case that a radical past is what pushes us and everything else forward; it is rather the case that we are pulled and offered into what always remains to come. This is no offer of grace handed down to us, as if we always might choose whether we will grant or not; it is inescapable, it is there whether we like it or not, know it or not, wants it or not. So even if you choose to die, to kill yourself, to put an end to this your life, you would always already have chosen to receive a future that at all will allow you to kill your self. All things there are, are of futurity. In this context we need to ask why it is that capitalism wins out, this political system that obstructs futurity more than ever before. What is this will? Why does our will seem to be anachronistic? Why does it seem that we build anachronicity into futurity? Making futurity come to halt.

It is necessary to take Derrida’s motifs surrounding that of iterability serious. The possibility of iterating is what makes the mark, for instance the mark of this very mark, right here, or there, or this very sound, here, or there. This possibility is not reducible to the mark itself; its structure involves a certain futurity of the mark. This may very well apply not only to linguistic marks, but to all kinds of marks—which Derrida suggests more than one time. The structure of iterability is something offered from future; where it not for this abyssal resource there would be no mark, and certainly no language. The mark in itself, this on, for instance, harbors none of these forces. The ball hitting the other ball may involve iterability no less than this word hitting this word. A ball also complies with its iterability, no less than the word ‘ball.’ In this sense there is nothing outside of the text—if I may say so, even knowing that this was not what Derrida meant to say, even knowing how much controversy that little sentence made around the world. And even if Derrida may be said, which I don’t think, to interpret iterability and trace in terms of past workings, more in terms of radicalism than in terms of irradicalism and futurity, then I think still we should reinterpret his own interpretations—make of them ‘performative interpretations’—as is another motif of his. This is what could constitute an affirmative reading and writing of Derrida, an affirmation that is af-formative, that is to say, and affirmation that has no form precisely form is what only dreams of radicalism can make. Iterability and trace is afformativity, we could say.

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin will make this interpretation of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus”: the angel’s face is turned toward the past, and where we will see a chain of events, the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” Benjamin continues: “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” This is Benjamin’s Angel of History.

Giorgio Agamben will interpret this as a particularly felicitous image to describe what happens when we lose our link with our past and are therefore no longer able to find ourselves in history, when—and I quote—“suspended in the void between old an new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.” So much is Agamben’s thought berooted that he closes his thought by saying that “According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.”

This principle of the burning house needs be rethought. It seems to make good sense. But Agamben wants this to tell something more, something other. The original project, what was thrown out, projected to us to be our dwelling place, our house—it is urgent to see this, again, to have it visible. There is a pro-jectile, a throwing before, that seemingly is directed, somehow, toward us, precisely us, and any of us—present, or to come, or those even that will be the most distant of the ones to come—we the subjectiles: the burning house is the house of us all. Is not this archeological principle a call for power? And a power that again is rooted? Is not the mightiest power the one that enables itself and that is enabled to ground itself the deepest? The deeper the distance from past to present, the more potential for a growing power—or so radicalism thinks: it thinks this distancing, and it thinks this powering and growing. And it throws us before it. Rhizomism thinks in horizontals, not only in horizontals though, but in horizontals too. I am saying this because I am not convinced that rhizomatic thought is capable of being the other that it promises to be. At least not so when it comes to radicalism as at least I would like to articulate it—at least for the time being.

If future futures, and if there are only supernumerary futures in the future—if there is to be future, and this is an acute question today, and Derrida even says that there must be a possibility of no future for there to be a future, just as the promise to be a promise must be able to not be a promise, a broken promise—if so, then, we can see the possibility of total destruction both as promising a futurity, still, and very materially, this promising issuing from our construction of those bombs, and as instantiating a planetary symbol for our failure to face the gift of this future that futures and does so supernumerary: if this is so, we may understand Derrida’s question concerning pure desire, the nothing of the name, as desire of death (Lacan’s Ethics), as total atomic war, when he asks: “Who can swear that our unconscious is not expecting this? dreaming of it? desiring it?” (No Apocalypse, Not Now, “Seven missiles, Seven Missions”) And Elisabeth Weber writes that this is an explosive desire “whose interpretations decide on the mere possibility of the future.” She continues: “If the “massive destruction” that our century has witnessed “seems to us to be an inexplicable accident, a resurgence of savagery” [Lacan says this in his Ethics, 235] we should remind ourselves with Benjamin that the “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless, it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable.” [Illuminations, p. 257.] There is, again, the question of the progressivist metaphysics—“toward a better future” is its formula. We may think of that Big Bang that drives, propels everything forward whether they will or not, or that God that in the past created Man and his Descents, that political cause that everybody is on the verge to be, precisely, eradicated, under the pressure of capitalist desires, etc., etc., and we saw the sad picture depicted by Benjamin in his interpretation of Klee’s “Angelus Novus.” We don’t have our past in our backs anymore. And so we can neither see, nor eat, nor act. We are without ground as we no longer have the means of transmission between past and future, and so our desires are inclined toward pursuing in the real what is foreclosured (not repressed) in the symbolical, namely the desire of nothing. This is what is said. Maybe one should use Benjamin’s performative interpretation of Klee, and his formulations on progressivism against himself, or Agamben?—and Weber?, which says that Derrida is about remembrance, a remembrance that may help prevent the total catastrophe. And we could have mentioned many other great, contemporaneous, writers that share their vital stocks in this respect, in this nostalgic fire of something lost. “We must ground ourselves in the present, or there is no reality nor revolution!,” it is claimed, in choir.

We have to ask what is untenable. Is it not being rooted in past or present, that is to say, in actuality? Being rooted in actuality is only another way of saying that one keeps ones tracks with the past. Or, is it to be unable to see that the gift of life comes, always already, from supernumerary futures? We have to ask, with Derrida, what it is to eat well. He writes his “Eating Well” with Jean-Luc Nancy as interlocutor, a little nice essay. Whatever we do, we always eat, takes, injects things in, in the real or symbolically; all life do. So how does one eat future well? That is a question that I’d like to be addressed, since future is what gives itself to eating, to be eaten, and since we cannot but eat, and since eating is something we shares. Its obverse is the thinking—we may perhaps name it ‘radicalist’—that rather than eating afresh, sharing and well, fills their mouths with excrements, and in this respect is carnivorous, virile, and anthropophagous—universal values for those in power nowadays. For such thought future is always the same, the same shit, the same good-tasting shit, but in the end so auto-anthropophagous that it no longer has any taste—as we know happens in regular food production, where animals are fed with their own shit, remnants of slaughtered siblings, industrial slam, etc. No more style or content—but this is not the man without content that Agamben writes about. I am not without content because I am uprooted from what is claimed to be my past, my shared past with you, that past that so to speak roots us together, or, because I am a futurist, or something like that. I cannot ever learn how to write I, if I am not enabled and able to eat future fresh, what is to be done well if there is to be any future, what is in each case what is given to me, to us, to all the I’s that are shattered around the planet. Paraphrasing Nancy’s “Shattered Love” we may say “Shattered Shitting,” I think this as our imperative of our own time, the time that threatens with real anachronicity by the fact of the mass destruction arsenals, but also by the sneaking fact that we pollute and destroy, irreversibly, everything from climate, to soil, air, and water, to genes. Therefore I end these little remarks with quoting Blanchot’s L’amitié: “And when we ask the question: ‘Who has been the subject of this experience?’ this question is perhaps already an answer, if, for the one who introduced it, it was affirmed through him in this interrogative form, substituting for the closed and unique ‘I’ the openness of a ‘Who?’ without answer. Not that this means that he simply had to ask himself: ‘What is this me that I am?’ but much more radically he had to seize hold of himself and not let go, no longer as an ‘I?’ but as a ‘Who?,’ the unknown and sliding being of an indefinite ‘Who?’” Derrida comments that this is why the determination of the singular “Who?” remains forever problematic, and that it should remain so, since the obligation to protect the other’s otherness is not merely a theoretical imperative. So in this way I would love to learn how to write, and eat, the I that I am, the I that am me, as an indeterminate who, and yes, not as in the abstention of an emptiness, as if this imperative were something that I needed to abstain from, refrain from filling and re-filling, but rather as an openness without answer, an openness even no longer traced by the question, and therefore no longer by the answer and the non-answer. The otherness of the other, in the other or in the other of me, or of the me of the other of the other, etc., is ir-radical: not without roots, because we have this history of the root, not simply negation or denegation, not a simple opposition, neither formal or empty nor determinate, but leaving the roots of oppositions and the oppositions of roots.