3: Three Quotes from Derrida on the Future

1
It is perhaps necessary to free the value of the future from the value of ‘horizon’ that traditionally has been attached to it—horizon being, as the Greek word indicates, a limit from which I pre-comprehend the future. I wait for it. I predetermine it. And thus, I annul it (Taste for the Secret 20).

2
If there is a future, or as he would have liked to put it if there is such a thing, there must be some opening that calls to us in the form of an appeal. This appeal of the other demands that we respond now; indeed, the mark we leave on the world we share will be inseparable from those infinite appeals made to us and how we responded when we were called. As Derrida tells us:
A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed. As a result, this appeal, this promise of the future, will necessarily open up the production of a new context, wherever it may happen. The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it; and because there is a future, a context is always open. What we call opening of the context is another name for what is still to come (Taste for the Secret 19-20).

3
It is a matter of looking for something that is not yet well received, but that waits to be received. And one may posses a kind of flair for that which, going against the current, is already in touch with the possible reception. So—if I may refer to my own case—in all likelihood, each time I have attempted to make a gesture that was, as you said, bizarre or untimely, it was because I had the impression that it was demanded, more or less silently, by other areas of the field, by other forces, that were still in the minority, that were there. So there is a sort of calculation in the incalculable here, and the untimeliness is a sort of timeliness in the making (Taste for the Secret 16).

Found at: http://www.fehe.org/index.php?id=283 In an article 'Derrida: The Gift of the Future'
by Drucilla Cornell.