4/13/2008 07:55:00 AM

Of Aporutopias

The impasse of a utopia in the mode of a to come, an aporutopia is the open to which the determinate is exposed in its living. The to come is that unforeseeable to which all idiosyncratic instantiations invoking an empty signifier expose themselves. Lower case justice in the name of capitalized Justice exposed to the Justice to come. Temporally, the unforeseeable is the future of the forgotten and with the immeasurable demarcates the impossible.

The idiosyncratic instantiate, control and fill the empty signifier. Local, embodied justice acts in the name of Justice. justice is idiosyncratic. This is why humanity will never accomplish Justice. justice is idiosyncratic in that it is only ever present through people and so long as Justice is being served it never arrives.

The particular holds total hegemonic sway over the content of the signifier exposed to the aporutopia. This aporutopian opening is the impossible, what cannot be spoken of, brought into language in the guise of the to come as the absent sense (to use Blanchot’s terms) that cannot be designated (as in the series) or learned (as in the singularity), but, as Nancy writes, “makes sense in and by its very absenting.” The Democracy to Come, The Coming Community, The Language to Come, even the god that is coming: all aporutopias of considerable interest in recent Continental Philosophy. All designating outcomes we do not understand, that we have part in, but cannot bring about: the black box of creation, the unforeseen and the great forgetting. A locution attempting to speak from one register of the ever receding primal future, that impossible undecidable, that is the meaning of linear temporal existence, of finitude.

The world of human finitude, temporal existence, (or to invoke Heidegger) of dwelling, is about construction. It is about a particular remembering (which is always a way of forgetting). It instantiates, premeditates, orchestrates to bring about a particular construction of home. Creation is different from construction. The very patterns of construction always already bring deconstruction within them. That which cannot be deconstructed is created. Creation is scaled differently. We are exposed to it, but cannot bring it about. It calls to us as the earth and the sky, humanity and their gods. So when Derrida explains that Justice cannot be deconstructed he writes of a Justice whose we are—a Justice to come that is not ours to claim, but to which we are exposed as we instantiate justice.