...the ordeal of indecision is seemingly and necessarily anterior to any such ordeal.

**********

You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that I write exactly my opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words, you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. I have necessarily written myself upside down--and in order to surrender to necessity.--Jacques Derrida, Envois

In Politics of Friendship, Derrida spends an entire chapter examining Nietzsche's frequent use of the term "perhaps." On one level, Derrida is interested in the way in which this repeated "perhaps" suggests a certain way of understanding the possibility of friendship and, thus, the possibility of understanding, or "touching on," the other. Ultimately, though, Derrida comes to suggest that the perhaps denotes a type of promise, a type of promise that is (like any other Derridean promise) spectral, or ironically twofold, in nature. On the one hand, the perhaps promises that the statement in which it is lodged (like a ghost) could be true absolutely and without doubt; on the other, the perhaps defers and delays the possibility of such certainty. The perhaps thus promises, like the ghost that haunts Derrida's Marx in Specters of Marx, the possibility and the impossibility that the future as ghost will become manifest. It promises and denies the possibility of a future when we will be haunted no longer.

The "perhaps," then, is intimately tied to two of the most significant concepts that Derrida explores in his later work: "indecision" and "spectrality." Any discussion of the Derridean perhaps will thus require significant detours through these two concepts. The perhaps, though, is unique in its connection to the impossible possibility of friendship, of communion with the other. It draws us--and, with us, the concepts of indecision and spectrality--toward the theme of touching, of touching on some subject, of understanding perhaps (finally and at last) some unknowable other. Perhaps more so than any other discussion of Derrida and deconstruction, then, a discussion of the perhaps is an attempt to touch (on) Derrida. Not just to follow him, but to catch up finally. To grab hold. After all, to get it right finally--whatever "it" might be--is precisely what the perhaps promises, and (of course) infinitely defers. According to the logic of the perhaps, the promise that animates us is the promise of the perhaps itself: the promise that we can, finally, accept the dangerous irony of the perhaps. To "grasp" Derrida and deconstruction would thus be to endure and embrace the radical irony of the perhaps, the spectral promise of a truly "indecisive," and therefore ethical, mode of thought. But this is, necessarily, as Derrida frequently tells us, an impossibility. Yet, at the same time, this impossible task must remain our goal. We must keep the faith. We must believe in that which is, most certainly, impossible.

Is it possible, though, to keep faith in what we believe to be impossible? The problem with such belief--with what critics like John D. Caputo celebrate as Derrida's ethical commitment to a religion without religion, to a messianism without messiah (1)--is that it must necessarily circumvent the very indecisiveness, or spectral ordeal, that is its defining characteristic. Indeed, Derrida's endorsement of the perhaps cannot avoid becoming an imperative, an ethical appeal that is, itself, anterior to the ordeal of the perhaps--or rather, the ordeal of indecision, the ordeal of the specter. This is, in fact, precisely what Derrida's endorsement suggests: ethical decision-making can never endure the ironic doubt of the perhaps. Even the decision to endure and embrace the perhaps must be made in a state of absolute conviction. Like this paper, Derrida cannot help but be decisive; he is necessarily a man of absolute faith (even if his faith is in a faith without faith). The ordeal of indecision, the ordeal of the perhaps, must be endured. About this need for doubt, we can be (if we follow--or rather, "hold to"--Derrida) certain. There's no doubt about it.

While speaking on deconstruction's responsibility to a certain "specter" of Marx, or Marxism, Derrida falls back on a short essay by Maurice Blanchot, "Marx's Three Voices." In doing so, Derrida works to stress the necessity of making a decision in the absence of all the facts--in the absence, that is, of any assurance that our decision is a just decision: "a 'since Marx' continues to designate the place of assignation from which we are pledged [...], the 'since' marks a place and a time that doubtless proceeds us, but so as to be as much in front of us as before us. Since the future, then, since the past as absolute future, since the non-knowledge and the non-advent of an advent, of what remains to be: to do and to decide" (17). On the occasion of a conference aptly titled "Following Derrida," I cannot possibly ignore the ways in which the problems Derrida identifies with a "since Marx" are now also problems that must be addressed in any discussion of a "since Derrida." However, these are problems I must, at least for the moment, bracket. What I want to focus on presently is the idea that our responsibility to a predecessor--that is, our responsibility to make interpretive and ethical decisions in that predecessor's name, and since that predecessor--must remain tied to a certain ordeal of indecision, an ordeal that sees us having to gamble on a decision that we can only hope will be correct (finally and at last). This is an ordeal of faith without faith. All decisions concern the future, yet they must be made in the absence of any certainty about that future that is always still to come. Put differently, a decision "cannot provide itself with the infinite information and unlimited knowledge that could justify it" ("Force" 255). The decision-making process must anticipate, while determining, a future that paradoxically precedes it. In founding the future via an attempt to make it finally present, the decision-making process constantly repeats a spiral-like process of renewal that is always and necessarily missing, while simultaneously determining, its mark. I say "spiral" because this process never closes in on itself. As we see most explicitly in Derrida's discussion of law and justice in "Force of Law," the possibility of the future that determines a given decision is always refounded, and thus destroyed,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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