Matt

A great quote. Levinas seems to touch on something often overlooked: capitalism promotes and requires a certain form of temporality. The future must be protected from risk of any kind - we must toil in the present in order to assure the secure redundancy of the status quo. This representation of time rests on the notion of presence, stability, predictability and controll.

It also touches on something Derrida references in his discussion of September 11th: The real trauma of the event takes place in the future - the ever threatening prospect that another attack is about to happen. It is this sense of impending catastrophe that was so effectively used by Bush in last years campaign. Thus Americans prefer the "certainty of tomorrow" over alternative possibilities today.
alain | 06.17.05 - 5:48 pm | #

Thanks for such a generous and thoughtful comment as always, Alain.

The connection with Derrida's point about the simultaneous foreclosure/opening of 'terror' on the future reminds me also of Ulrich Beck and his 'Risk Society.' Contra Beck, I think Derrida among others wishes to challenge the idea that risk (in its conception) is itself natural, or ever naturaliz-able.

As in how one proposes to combat 'risk' will always betray how one conceives of it in the first place.

Derrida himself admits to being drawn, does he not (if in a certain not uncritical sense of course) to the manifest destiny of/from 'America'--though he hesitates to go as far in glorifying (indirectly) as someone like Baudrillard of course.
Matt | Homepage | 06.17.05 - 6:15 pm | #