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Unit 7: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences-Jacques Derrida

7.6.2 Wholly Other/Messianic Notes
This brings us to a term that Derrida has resuscitated from its association with Walter Benjamin
and the Judaic tradition more generally. That term is the messianic and it relies upon a distinction
with messianism.
According to Derrida, the term messianism refers predominantly to the religions of the Messiahs-
i.e. the Muslim, Judaic and Christian religions. These religions proffer a Messiah of known
characteristics, and often one who is expected to arrive at a particular time or place. The Messiah
is inscribed in their respective religious texts and in an oral tradition that dictates that only if the
other conforms to such and such a description is that person actually the Messiah. The most
obvious of numerous necessary characteristics for the Messiah, it seems, is that they must invariably
be male. Sexuality might seem to be a strange prerequisite to tether to that which is beyond this
world, wholly other, but it is only one of many. Now, Derrida is not simplistically disparaging
religion and the messianisms they propound. In an important respect, the messianic depends
upon the various messianisms and Derrida admits that he cannot say which is the more originary.
The messianism of Abraham in his singular responsibility before God, for Derrida, reveals the
messianic structure of existence more generally, in that we all share a similar relationship to
alterity even if we have not named and circumscribed that experience according to the template
provided by a particular religion. However, Derrida's call to the wholly other, his invocation for
the wholly other "to come", is not a call for a fixed or identifiable other of known characteristics,
as is arguably the case in the average religious experience. His wholly other is indeterminable and
can never actually arrive. Derrida more than once recounts a story of Maurice Blanchot's where
the Messiah was actually at the gates to a city, disguised in rags. After some time, the Messiah was
finally recognised by a beggar, but the beggar could think of nothing more relevant to ask than:
"when will you come?". Even when the Messiah is 'there', he or she must still be yet to come, and
this brings us back to the distinction between the messianic and the various historical messianisms.
The messianic structure of existence is open to the coming of an entirely ungraspable and unknown
other, but the concrete, historical messianisms are open to the coming of a specific other of known
characteristics. The messianic refers predominantly to a structure of our existence that involves
waiting - waiting even in activity - and a ceaseless openness towards a future that can never be
circumscribed by the horizons of significance that we inevitably bring to bear upon that possible
future. In other words, Derrida is not referring to a future that will one day become present (or a
particular conception of the saviour who will arrive), but to an openness towards an unknown
futurity that is necessarily involved in what we take to be 'presence' and hence also renders it
'impossible'. A deconstruction that entertained any type of grand prophetic narrative, like a Marxist
story about the movement of history toward a pre-determined future which, once attained, would
make notions like history and progress obsolete, would be yet another vestige of logocentrism and
susceptible to deconstruction (SM). Precisely in order to avoid the problems that such messianisms
engender - eg. killing in the name of progress, mutilating on account of knowing the will of God
better than others, etc. - Derrida suggests that: "I am careful to say 'let it come' because if the other
is precisely what is not invented, the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in
opening, in uncloseting, in destabilising foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage
toward the other".

7.7 Possible and Impossible Aporias

Derrida has recently become more and more preoccupied with what has come to be termed
"possible-impossible aporias" - aporia was originally a Greek term meaning puzzle, but it has
come to mean something more like an impasse or paradox. In particular, Derrida has described
the paradoxes that afflict notions like giving, hospitality, forgiving and mourning. He argues that
the condition of their possibility is also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility. In this
section, I will attempt to reveal the shared logic upon which these aporias rely.

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