the future of emancipationlish as “waiting without expectation” or “waiting without waiting.”^15
Now, our complaint would be — to put it in somewhat crude terms
— the following: if we are to wait without expectation, or “wait with-
out waiting,” which surely does not fall far short of waiting for noth-
ing in particular, or even waiting for nothing at all, how are we to guard
ourselves from falling asleep?
Consequently, the all-important theoretical question becomes the
following: how does this awareness, which is a sine qua non of the
Derridean idea of justice and of the related idea of a democracy-to-
come, alter our attitude in the present moment, here and now? It
would seem that what it robs us of is, precisely, the access to what
Benjamin calls Jetztzeit, the “moment of the now” when we realize, all
of a sudden, that now the time has come to make a move, to make the
“tiger’s leap” which, of course, is also, irrevocably, a moment of real
danger.
In this way, malgré lui, Derrida comes dangerously close to suc-
cumbing to what Benjamin terms historicism or conformism —
providing an account of temporality and of historicity which, in the
final reckoning, neglects the chance of the Jetztzeit and for that reason
runs the risk of becoming “a tool of the ruling classes.” However, it
must be admitted that such a reading of Derrida would not be
altogether fair and just — for, in Specters of Marx, we find Derrida
already protesting against this type of charge:
Permit me to recall very briefly that a certain deconstructive procedure,
at least the one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the
outset in putting into question the onto-theo- but also archeo-teleol-
ogical concept of history — in Hegel, Marx, or even in the epochal
thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to oppose it with an end of history
or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show that this onto-
theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels
historicity. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity — not a
new history or still less a “new historicism,” but another opening of
event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the
contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic- For the French attente sans horizon d’attente, the English translation gives “await-
ing without horizon of the wait” (65/111) and “a waiting without horizon of ex-
pectation” (168/267).