I feel a lot of sympathy with Derrida’s idea of the “messianic structure of existence.” He describes this as the general idea of an approaching future alterity, a future which, as it is not yet invented, is so different from what we are accustomed to that it cannot even be conceptualized. I have had a sense of something similar for some time, and bring this into much of my work, though I have never had any idea where this sense of a future containing something so radically different comes from, other than the general sense of the Western rationalist outlook being unsustainable. Like Derrida, I believe all we can do is try to break down the current paradigm in order to allow this impossible future to appear.

Here’s what Derrida says:


“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”: