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The paper takes its cue from a brief but pointed passage in Specters of Marx, in which Jacques Derridadescribes as "latecomers" those who discuss the apocalypse in a manner that disregards previousdiscussions of the theme within philosophy and theory. Especially concerned with tracing Derrida'swariness of the beguilements of narratives of the end, Callus and Herbrecther analyze the implicationsof that wariness for any study of the vexed relation between the apocalyptic and the posthuman, doingso on the basis of reference to a number of the relevant essays by Derrida, but in particular to "On aNewly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." The main contribution of the paper, however, occurs onceit is suggested that in recent work by Derrida the previously strong suspicion of the apocalyptic hasbecome modulated by a different "tone" ­­ that of Derrida's essay on September 11th, "Autoimmunity:Real and Symbolic Suicides." Contrasting tonalities discernible in "Autoimmunity" with Derrida'sprevious discussions of the apocalyptic, Callus and Herbrechter argue that Derrida's response toSeptember 11 provides both the cue and the scope for an intriguing and urgent rethinking of his well­known views on "newisms," "postisms," and "seismisms." They suggest that, if it is arguable that theremight be "a change or a rupture in tone" in Derrida's approach to what might broadly be regarded as theposthumanous, it might also be viable to think that there might have arisen a worrying punctuality inthose whose talk on the apocalyptic might previously have come across, to Derrida and to others, as theprattle of "latecomers." Hence, if "we" do the apocalypse differently, "now," it is because it mightwell have become timelier to do so.

The Latecoming of the Posthuman, Or, Why "We" Do the Apocalypse Differently, "Now."

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter

How does one know whether the end is an end, if one is not narrating it?­­­Jean François Lyotard [1]

Is there an economy of the eve? ­­­Jacques Derrida [2]

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Figure 1: World Trade Center, September 11, 2002. Copyright ©2001 Claus Guglberger.

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1. Introduction

<1> In an early passage in Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida comments with some asperity about the

[m]any young people today (of the type "readers­consumers of Fukuyama" or of the type "Fukuyama"himself) [who] probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the "end ofhistory," of the "end of Marxism," of "the end of philosophy," of the "ends of man," of the "last man"

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and so forth were, in the '50s . . . our daily bread. We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouthsnaturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980, the"apocalyptic tone in philosophy" [3].

What instigates this sharpness is of course Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man (1992)and its contention that the ideology and the politico­economic model of capitalism and the free market appeared,at the time of that work's publication, to have prevailed. The debatable contrast between the alleged callownessof Fukuyama and his "readers­consumers" on the one hand and, on the other, the "we" alongside whom Derrida rangeshimself is further insisted upon when reference is pointedly made to the "classics of the end" (Derrida'semphasis). These classics, Derrida explains, "formed the canon of the modern apocalypse (end of History, end ofMan, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger . . . ," and they were read and analysed in the contextof an engagement with a particular "historical entanglement" involving, among other issues, "the Stalinism of thepast and the neo­Stalinism in process" witnessed in events like "the repression in Hungary" (15). Derridaconcludes: "[F]or those with whom I shared this singular period . . . for us, I venture to say, the media paradeof current discourse on the end of history and the last man looks most often like a tiresome anachronism. . . .As for those who abandon themselves to that discourse with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look likelatecomers . . . " (15).

<2> Such sentiments, expressive of wearied condescension in regard to contemporary endism generally and of afastidious disdain for its philosophical probity, are all of a piece with the general provocativeness of Spectersof Marx. Overshadowed by the attention accorded to the book's contentious view that Marxism's relevance might nowbest be projected as a principle of vigilance in an atheological heritage of the messianic, they have been lessthan regularly invoked in the multiple commentaries that, according to their very different lights, have soughtto either engage or exorcise Specters. Yet in heralding Derrida's later inductive question, "How can one be lateto the end of history?" (15), they provide the cue for the book's meditation on the generalized predicament oflatecoming, and hence on belatedness, untimeliness, ghosting, phatasmagorization, and spectropoetics.Immediately, therefore, they trouble the vexed and vast question of all that is denoted and connoted by theprefix post­. They recall the questioning of the temporality of supersedence and of the complex relation betweenthe anterior and the accompli that occurs in the Lyotardian timescapes of the future perfect and the event of theunpresentable (see below). The prefixed denotation of supplantedness (in the sense of the articulations withpost­ permitted by morphology) and the pre­fixing of what suggestedly befalls in the space cleared by thatsupplantedness (in the sense of the prefiguring of the goings and comings variously connoted by articulations ofpost­ with whatever is allowed to follow the hyphen) find themselves effectively and exemplifyingly doubted inLyotard's well­known formulations about the re­cognition of the postmodern. For the postmodern, as a particularlysignificant instance of those conceptualities marked by the post­ prefix, implies "a procedure of analysis,anamnesis, anagogy and anamorphosis which elaborates an 'initial forgetting,'" such that it would need to beunderstood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)," and in realization of "the rules forwhat will have been made" (Lyotard's emphasis) [4]. This heady timescape is displacedly comprehensible in thepassably synonymous sentences from Specters quoted above. That is because both Derrida and Lyotard stand alooffrom a clear­cut understanding of the terminal and the apocalyptic, and indeed from any notion involving anythinglike a clear cut. French theory, it would appear, is singularly averse to any straightforward understanding ofhow to proceed, after endings and from beginnings, straight forward.

<3> For that very reason, the intuitions of French theory call for urgent reappraisal in a context like thisissue of Reconstruction, focused as it is on the question of the posthumanous. The morphemes embedded in thiscompound adjectival term, posthumanous, cumulatively suggest an "after" of life (as suggested by the echo of

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posthumous), an "after" of terrestriality (humus is the Latin for earth), and an "after" of humanity (one alsohears, in posthumanous, the word posthuman). A dropped suffix, which would have allowed us to hear the wordposthumanist, also permits us to register, through an audible absence, the exceeding of all that was everinvested in humanism. This very loaded broaching, through the use of the word posthumanous, of the thought of anextreme posteriority finds itself sternly warned by Derrida's words, above. For what Derrida seems to be takingissue with is the currency of apocalyptism and, by extension, of the plausibility of the newness of any irruptiveparadigm of the end. He is doubtful about the identifiability of anything posited as being "last," and about thediscernibility of any "after." In other words, his disengagement from the excitable philosophizing of diverseendings and of what they could variously presage occurs in reaction to the plausibility of the broaching ofquestions of post­history (in the wake of Fukuyama's The End of History [1992]), of post­philosophy (in the wakeof all those announcing that event with rather less sensitivity than Heidegger's The End of Philosophy [1961]did), and, perhaps most fundamentally, of the post­human (in response to the many different narratives ofhumanity's transience, whether they conform to the conventions of Armageddon­shadowed scenarios ­­ as in the MadMax vistas discerned some time ago by a recently very messianic Mel Gibson ­­ or to the unease with a re­engineering of the very nature of the human ­­ as anticipated by Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future [2002]).

<4> Of course, all this is to be expected from Derrida. His remarks in Specters are consistent with a veritablesub­canon within his writings, one comprising texts which problematize straightforward apprehensions of crisisand deconstruct a thinking sold on successiveness and ruptures. His contribution to the discussion of what couldtake place in the space of the supposed terminality of the university and, more particularly, the humanities,provides a good instance of this [5]. Within a very specific context of apocalypse, the unavoidable points ofreference include essays like "The Ends of Man" (1972), "Of a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy"(1981), "No Apocalypse, Not Now" (1984), and "Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms,Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms" (1990). These provide careful and powerful articulations of the need toapproach millenarianism with an awareness that "the thinking of the end of man . . . is always already prescribedin metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man" [6]. Their elegantly equable tone is in telling contrast tothe remarks in Specters, which are similarly minded but testier in their articulation. Yet there is almost awinsomeness in that testiness. It comes from a candor that is generally more apparent from Derrida when he isanswering interviews than when he is elaborating the idiom of his essais, typically mediated through a greatercircumspection. Thus the remarks on Fukuyama in Specters occasion the frisson, if one may call it that, bound tooccur when witnessing a typically guarded philosopher unambiguously criticizing something he or she disdains. Theunguardedness does not merely provide some quiet drama, however. It is also intriguing because it suggests anunderlying and very decided prejudice ­­ in the Gadamerian sense. This should not pass unnoticed. The momentaryshedding of the poise generally characterizing Derridean rhetoric reveals some very decided views that becomemore starkly and directly available to assessment than would normally be the case. For any consideration of theposthumanous, the content of that directness arrives as an unmistakable warning against patterning anyunderstanding of the posthumanous in a way that is too callow or too "johnny come lately."

<5> For all that, however, the testiness of Derrida's remarks remains cautionary in another sense. It bespeaksthe decidedness of one confirmed in his philosophical ways, and it thereby perhaps also demonstrates just alittle predictability, just a little intransigence. In saying this we are all too aware that there is a mildopportunism in this fixing on some stray and quite unguarded remarks of Derrida's, and in suggesting that theyare rawly indicative of a bias that elsewhere in his work is productively nuanced. It could amount to point­scoring of the shallowest kind to seize upon any philosopher's distrait comments in order to exploit what thenbecomes a rather too expedient relevance to a question in hand. That strategy becomes even more questionable if,as we believe, Derrida's take on contemporary apocalyptic tones is in fact made all the fresher by his indulgence

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of some straight talking about a bête noire of his ­­ but especially if it could be shown that such talk masks adeeper apprehensiveness over the possibility that, if "we" do the apocalypse differently "now," we do so withgood reason rather than ineptly [7]. Indeed, we aim to show that the somewhat malapert remarks of Derrida onFukuyama open up onto something that is much more significant than scorn. Let us proceed, therefore, by firstdealing with the kind of knee­jerk reaction that could conceivably be prompted by Derrida's remarks, moving onafterwards to some different and possibly weightier reflections upon them. We hope that this will help us tounderstand why Derrida's outspoken suspicion of contemporary apocalyptism contrives to both be wide of the markand spot on: in other words, that his uncharacteristic impertinence is an excellent cue for thinking that theremight well pertinently be cause for detecting a new tone in his thought about the end, or ends.

2. Derrida and the Dubiousness of the Apocalyptically Posthumanous

<6> One of the easiest responses to the remarks by Derrida quoted at the start of our essay is that theirpeevishness seems that of a grand old man of letters or philosophy. "The apocalypse: been there, studied that":this, in reductive terms, is what they suggest. They scorn the discourse of the "Fukuyama­esque" and "young"commentators of today who seize upon the notion of the end as if it were some newly discovered andunpredecentedly compelling idea that had not been already quite exhaustively discussed before. Implicit in thisstance is the aggrieved recognition that "the "young" are overlooking the work of "those with whom [Derrida]shared this singular period," and for whom he "venture[s] to speak." He ventures that not on the grounds ­­ whichwould have been compelling enough ­­ of his being the "the last man" of the Lacan­Bataille­Althusser­Barthes­Blanchot­Foucault­Deleuze­Lyotard­Derrida line­up [8] ­­ but through an implicit claim on a perspectivalcommonality that remains tangibly there even across all his differences with them. The kinship arises because,for that extraordinary generation of penseurs, talk of the apocalypse was "daily bread" and hence mundane ratherthan glitzy. It was situated on the bread line of philosophical discourse rather than the front line of "mediaparades" shot through with a soundbit idiom. If this suggests hurt and even what is, when all is said and done, asense of rejection, there is also strong dismay at the allegedly inadequate current awareness of the past"historical entanglement" of endism in events like Stalinism or "the repression in Hungary." There is evenstronger dismay at the lack of familarity with philosophy's "classics of the end," with "Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche,Heidegger . . . ." "Young people," it appears, simply do not know enough.

<7> "Young people": we are then in the space of generation gaps, and amidst the gambits of generation games. Forthere is an interesting interplay in Derrida's words between an us and a them, between on the one hand theperceivedly seasoned understanding of the apocalyptic on the part of the "'50s" generation of (mainly French, butat any rate predominantly European) intellectuals and on the other an allegedly callow and excitable constructionof the posthuman by contemporary (mainly American, but quite certainly tendentially anglophone) thinkers ofapocalyptism in the guise of posthumanism [9]. After Hegel's reflections on the teleological within history,Marx's on the spectral haunting of Europe by what portends, Nietzsche's on the time of the Overman, Husserl's on"the crisis of philosophy," Heidegger's on what might need to be remembered in any "Letter on Humanism,"Foucault's on man being "an invention of recent date" whose "erasure" is a certain wager, Blanchot's on thepredicament of the "last man," Lyotard's on the nature of the "inhuman," and Derrida's on the suspect basis ofany "apocalyptic tone," what transpires is Fukuyama and like­minded "readers­consumers," with their talk onendism and posthumanism. So that, to rephrase a well­known sentence from the epilogue to Evelyn Waugh'sBrideshead Revisited (1945), then, "in sudden frost, came the age of Fukuyama." Faced with that, "old Europe," itmight not too fancifully be said, thinks "back." The apocalyptic and the posthuman(ous), then, seem singularlysubject to generational tensions, to nationally, continentally, and linguistically marked traditions of thought,and to a contingency determined by intellectual and political contexts [10].

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<8> There would, to be sure, be something tiresome in this replaying of what are essentially "Ancients­and­Moderns" and "French theory in America" controversies, had it not been for two quite significant considerations.The first involves the implications of Derrida's use in Specters of the trope of latecoming: "As for those whoabandon themselves to that discourse with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look like latecomers, alittle as if it were possible to take still the last train after the last train ­­ and yet be late to an end ofhistory" (15). Being late for the last train, as an alternative image for being late for one's own funeral: thisis beginning to seem distastefully like a row between the established and the parvenus over who is to presideover the obsequies for history, over who is to be the obituarist for the world, for discourse, and for humanityafter the cosmophagic moment. If history is written by the victors, by whom is its passing to be written: bythose who have already been lugubre and who have already written apopemptic words on history, philosophy, andhumanity, or by those who, though late for history, will claim to be in time with the present and in time for thefuture? The issues of ripeness and untimeliness which are latent here are ones to which we shall return. Thesecond point worth raising, meanwhile, is the fact that discussion of the apocalyptic and the posthuman(ous),"now," in what is "our" time, is not necessarily as inept as Derrida's remarks make it out to be. Perhaps if thatdiscussion has acquired a reprioritization and a new tone it is necessarily so. This, too, shall concern usbelow, in relation to the intuition that the worst is not yet come and in accordance with the impression thatthat worst is imminent. As we shall see, that intuition and that impression are shared and indeed articulated byDerrida himself. They compel a tonal shift in his discourse on the apocalyptic and on the constitutivity andreconstitutivity of the human.

<9> Clearly, then, we have to deal with the issue of tone. Indeed: how to intone the end? Could what might becalled "the right tone" be in fact what is missing in the projections of a posthuman future by "readers­consumers" of "the type 'Fukuyama'"? Surely what Derrida is at bottom reacting to when he takes that "type" totask is the impression of a certain depthlessness, in the Jamesonian sense. If he is perturbed it is because ofthe unentrenchedness of the resultant discourse in any very tangible philosophical nuancing, and because of thelack of any engagement with or deference to the extensiveness and rigor with which "the classics of the end" havealready scanned, before the event and avant la terreur, our posthuman future. The crudest evidence of that is thescantiness of reference to penseurs like Derrida, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl,Lyotard, and so on ­­ one gets the picture ­­ in the pages of The End of History (even if in fairness it shouldbe noted that Our Posthuman Future is more philosophically if not quite theoretically keyed). In other words,what is essentially being bemoaned by Derrida is the lack of any philosophical ­­ some would say also theoretical­­ tone in such apocalyptism. In his plain view, a nakedly apocaplyptic tone needs philosophical definition if itis to have a gravitas taking it beyond journalism or the kind of cultural studies about which Derrida hasdeclared some ambivalence [11]. Also potentially at stake, therefore, is a new take on the familiar issue of acontest of faculties: a stand­off between two discourses and their representatives, or at any rate between theiridioms and their tones.

<10> Now it is hardly a coincidence, of course, that tone is such an overriding concern in Derrida's "On a NewlyArisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." That essay is exemplarily respectful of the ethic of the relation betweendifferent generations of thinkers, and of the elders of philosophy. Is it not written in invocation of and incounterpoint to Kant's Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie" (1796) ("On a NewlyArisen Superior Tone in Philosophy")? The essay can therefore be seen as one that sets the tone for how a "'50s"penseur would discuss the prospect of the terminality of the human. Significantly, and almost as if incontradistinction to "young" "readers­consumers" nowadays, who might compile unphilosophical studies not steepedin previous discussions of the apocalyptic, Derrida resourcefully bases his essay on (in his words) a "less well­known pamphlet" of Kant's [12]. Derrida builds much on Kant's text, which just so happens to itself be an attack

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on "a tone that denounces something like the death of philosophy" (123; Derrida's emphasis). According toDerrida, what Kant was taking issue with was the transgression of "the atonal norm of philosophical address"(123). This created space for the "bonus of seduction or intimidation," of "heated proclamations on the end tocome or the end already accomplished" (125). In other words, "the "mystagogues make a scene" (125), doing so inphilosophy and with all the "airs" of an "upstart [parvenu]" (129). They carry on, then, much like the "young"and lately come Fukuyama­like "readers­consumers," whose tiresomeness is denigrated by Derrida almost exactly twohundred years later.

<11> An added and important twist to this is that, in announcing a "newly arisen" apocalpyptic tone, it is as ifDerrida's title had already intuited that apocalypse has something of the cyclical as well as the linear aboutit. Different generations do apocalypse anew: as if it had never already been done and as if there was a newnessabout it, and as if the thought of apocalypse can be renewed through the arising, as if "newly," of theapocalyptic tone. And what is re­energized in "prediction and eschatological preaching [predication]" is "thefact of telling, foretelling, or preaching the end, the extreme limit, the imminence of the last" (144). Whenthat happens, it does so in expectation of going one better towards the end, as it were. Soothsayers attempt tooutdo each other in saying sooth ­­ and here it should be remembered that the word sooth means, anciently,"truth," hence its appropriateness in any discourse of the apokalupsis, the disclosure, the unveiling of truth.For that reason as well as for a number of others, Derrida's words on a scene of oneupmanship in the differencesbetween various eschatologies arrive very pertinently:

Haven't all the differences [différends] taken the form of a going­one­better in eschatologicaleloquence, each newcomer more lucid than the other, more vigilant and more prodigal too, coming to addmore to it: I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of thatthere, the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, theend of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . . the end of the subject, the end of man, theend of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now, I tell you, in thecataclysm, the fire, the blood, the fundamental earthquake, the napalm descending from the sky byhelicopters, like prostitutes, and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing ofthe past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism andphallogocentrism, and I don't know what else. (145)

Clearly, then, Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Always, Apocalypse Variorum. The apocalypse is done now; the apocalypseis done successively; the apocalypse is done differently. Those who "do" the apocalypse therefore always do solate (because it has always been done already), and they always do so prematurely (because the unthinkability ofthe predicate(d) portends rather more than it impends). Hence they come lately to the apocalypse, which in turnis always late for them. There is some consolation in this for, as Derrida points out, knowledge of "the end ofthe end" must coincide, if it is to be clinching, with "the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatologicallanguage" (146). If soothsayers keep returning to tell the tale of the death of the world, of humanity, ofhistory, it must be because the leading to "the place where the first vibration of the tone is heard" (151)remains deferred. It is because soothsayers will always have gone before that Derrida could take lightly, if hewanted to, "readers­consumers" of "the type 'Fukuyama'" as they reinvent the wheel of the apocalyptic turn inphilosophy.

<12> Yet he does not, as the rather odd discomposure of the remarks from Specters of Marx make clear. Why? Afterall Derrida was primed by his very essay to expect Fukuyama, or at least a Fukuyama. Yet he is visibly put out byhim in the very text, Specters, which famously and recurrently speaks of a time that, if not apocaplyptic, is out

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of joint. Again: why? What might be read in Derrida's very tonally determined deviation from the atonality ofphilosophy as he takes Fukuyama's apocalyptically toned reflections to task? Has something changed in the wayapocalypse is being done or prospected now? Is there currently, perhaps, a striking difference to the way it hadalways been done that Derrida has grown keenly aware of, and could it possibly be that the realization of thecogency of that difference is one that leaves him piqued, prompting a reaction that is, as it were, somehow outof time as well as off key?

<13> If we are to address this issue we need to characterize the manner in which Derrida has typically discussedthe apocalyptic. What above all seems to distinguish this manner is a certain "counter­intuitiveness." By this wemean the disposition to think matters in a manner beyond their commonsensical apprehending by those members ofhumanity who are not philosophers or "theorists," and who intuit the end as an end, "pure and simple," so tospeak, without laying much store by the thought that apocalypse has always been, will always have been, with us.Hence thought of the apocalypse, of posthumanous threats by forces that are extra­human, are straightforwardlyand popularly thinkable, and lead to a rhetoric that understands the threat of apocalypse as a crisis and interms of the urgency of "doing something about it," as the popular phrase has it. This is what makes soaccessible to the popular imagination the speech given by the character of the American president in the filmIndependence Day (1996). It is a speech quoted to good effect by Christopher Keep in his article in a previousnumber of Reconstruction:

Mankind. That word should have new meaning for all of us. We can't be consumed with our pettydifferences anymore. We will be united in our common interest. Today is the Fourth of July ... andshould we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as theday when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanishwithout a fight.. . . Today we celebrate our Independence Day! [13]

(American­inspired) independence from apocalypse is something everybody can unite behind, then: no doubt howeverwith the exception of a (French) philosopher or theorist here and there who will insist on thinking thingsdifferently. That difference might modulate itself in the Lyotardian terms of the post, for instance, and theirreleasing of the pertinence of the future anterior tense rather than of the more urgent tonalities of doingsomething in the present to prevent the future from becoming humanity's past. Many other examples of indulgenceof the counter­intuitive from the generation of thinkers associated with the "canon" of theory could be cited.Indeed one could start with Derrida's own, including the well­known deconstruction in Of Grammatology (1967) ofspeech's primacy over writing, or he complex and non­linear timescapes that dominate the spectropoetics ofSpecters. Or, to come round to the apocalyptic again, the view expressed in "No Apocalypse, Not Now" that anotherpotential harbinger of the posthumanous, the nuclear threat, "is dealt with more 'seriously' in texts byMallarmé, or Kafka, or Joyce, for example, than in the present­day novels that would offer direct and realdescriptions of a 'real' nuclear catastrophe" [14].

<14> Indeed, Derrida's discussion of the nuclear threat in that essay might seem to provide a good example of adisinclination to think the nuclear threat in straightforward apprehension of and about ends. Decontextualized,his assertions on that theme can appear deeply capricious. The following is a relevant example: "The only'subject' of all possible literature, of all possible criticism, its only ultimate and a­symbolic referent,unsymbolizable, even unsignifiable; this is, if not the nuclear age, if not the nuclear catastrophe, at leastthat toward which nuclear discourse and the nuclear symbolic are still beckoning: the remainderless and a­symbolic destruction of literature" (28; Derrida's emphasis). The unexpected equivalence exists because "[t]heonly referent that is absolutely real is . . . of the scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that

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would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity," such that [t]he absolute referent ofall possible literature is on a par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the onlyineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely other, 'trace du tout autre'" (28). The projectionof the nuclear age as bound up with what others have elsewhere called "the literary absolute" is, clearly, notthe most intuitive of thoughts [15]. It is why Derrida's thought generally remains a challenge, and why it wouldbe particularly significant to discern any convergence between deconstructive counter­intuitiveness and morestraightforwardly linear understandings of the posthumanous. It is this convergence, we suggest, that might havebecome more tangible in some of Derrida's recent reflections on the apocalyptic, and it is this shift in tonethat we would like to trace in what follows.

3. Of a Newly Apprehensive Apocalyptic Tone in Derrida's Philosophy

<15> That there might have been arising, gradually and through a long gestation, a newly apprehensive tone indeconstruction is detectable even in "No Apocalypse, Not Now." Derrida there admits that ingeniousness is allvery well, but it does not safeguard the philosopher from generally shared extermination. Turning to consider thepossibility of whether there is or is not a "radically new predicate in the situation known as 'the nuclearage,'" which he characterizes as one underpinned by dramatic "acceleration" and therefore in need of "criticalslowdown," he concedes: "But this dissuasion and deceleration I am urging carry their own risks: the criticalzeal that leads us to recognize precedents, continuities, and repetitions at every turn can make us look likesuicidal sleepwalkers, blind and deaf alongside the unheard­of" (Derrida's emphasis). And further: "One may stilldie after having spent one's life recognizing, as a lucid historian, to what extent all that was not new, tellingoneself that the inventors of the nuclear age or of nuclear criticism did not invent the wheel. . . . That's theway one always dies, moreover, and the death of what is still now and then called humanity might well not escapethe rule" (21). An acknowledgement, then, that one would look pretty silly dying in the apocalyptic moment whileone is still in eloquent philosophical, critical, and historical denial of the apocalypse. An indication, too,that the disdain for "readers­consumers" might mask a deeper concern.

<16> If that were so, it would indeed be possible to speak of what would come across as a newly apprehensive tonein Derrida's thought of the apocalypse, and of a greater readiness than may have been expected from such acounter­intuitive thinker to accord with a more common drift in discussions of that theme. Of course, thequerulousness expressing suspicion of thoughts of ruptures or breaks survives, as when he asks elsewhere why itis that the kind of "reaffirmation" provided by "thinkers of the abyss" appears to "have a future only throughthe seism of a destruction" [16]. But receptivity to a possibly newly arisen apprehensive tone permits one topick up on overtones that go beyond such querulousness. It is therefore very significant that Derrida himselfraises the issue of what might be at stake when a change in tone, or a new tone, becomes distinguishable in athinker's work. In a passage that is absolutely crucial to what we are discussing here, he declares:

The attention to tone, which is not just style, seems rather rare to me. Tone has been little studiedfor itself, if we suppose that is possible or has ever been done. A tone's distinctive signs aredifficult to isolate, if they even exist in complete purity, which I doubt, above all in a writtendiscourse. By what is a tone marked: a change or a rupture in tone? And how do you recognize a tonaldifference within the same corpus? What traits are to be trusted for analyzing this, what signposting[signalisation] neither stylistic, nor rhetorical, nor evidently thematic or semantic? The extremedifficulty of this question, indeed of this task, becomes more accentuated in the case of philosophy.Isn't the dream or the ideal of philosophical discourse, of philosophical address [allocution], and ofthe writing supposed to represent that address, isn't it to make tonal difference inaudible, and with

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it a whole desire, affect, or scene that works (over) the concept in contraband? Through what is calledneutrality of tone, philosophical discourse must also guarantee the neutrality or at least theimperturbable serenity that should accompany the relation to the true and the universal. [17]

This is intimidating. It intimates just how difficult it will be to establish that there is, demonstrably, acertain "change or rupture in tone" (to repeat Derrida's own words) in Derrida's oeuvre, and how inscrutable andelusive the resources for doing that must be. All the more so if, as we are contending, the shift is perceptiblewhen Derrida is speaking of the apocalyptic: of that which, etymology shows, must unveil "the true and theuniversal," and about which Derrida speaks with tones shaded by irony and elusiveness. To do justice to theextreme difficulty of detecting a change or rupture in tone in Derrida's corpus would require much more spacethan is available to us here. We can however attempt to at least show the way by, precisely, showing. We shall doso through quoting certain specific passages from certain distinct texts of Derrida's that appear to mediate arelation to the posthumanous that seems to be entrenched in a different way of doing the apocalyptic than maypreviously have been the case. A sanction for this derives from the reassurance provided by Herman Rapaport thatthere is, in fact, an identifiably "later Derrida," with distinct tonalities of thought to his earlier personas[18]. And the ultimate stakes are clear: if even Derrida "does" the apocalypse differently, "now," then "we" mayall start to consider whether we should do so too. In order to keep things manageable in an essay of this scope,we have opted to allude to two texts of Derrida's which seem to be particularly relevant to any thought of the"posthumanous." These are the essay "The Aforementioned So­Called Human Genome" (first published in 1996 butoriginally an address delivered in 1992, hence just one year before the appearance of Specters of Marx), and thedialogue with Giovanna Borradori on the implications for philosophy of September 11, entitled "Autoimmunity: Realand Symbolic Suicides" and collected in her book Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) ­­ which also includes adialogue with Jürgen Habermas.

<17> What intrigues Derrida in "The Aforementioned Human Genome" is, in his terms, the clash between the"question of human universality" and that of the "patentability" of the human. "What is man?" he asks, and "Whatmight the so­called genome of the said man be?" [19] Additionally: "Where is a secret, in a sense, registered?"How, therefore, to register the "patent" of the reengineered essence of man, whose legal status becomes ambiguousin the new protocols of identity and similarity? Indeed: is the secret, the genome, of what man is to beregisterable according to the law's provisions for "the sacred rights of patents" (203; Derrida's emphasis),given also that what immediately becomes subject to legislation is "the essence of the human" and its relation to"reproductive programming of the same or the similar," to "the unpredictable production and invention of thetotally other" (206­07)? No response, as such, is given, but there ensues the following passage that is deeplyrelevant to discussion of any newly apprehensive tone in Derrida's discussion of the apocalyptic:

One has the impression (and I am describing my first impression, that of a tragic, apocalyptic pathos). . . that the risk that is run at this unique moment in the history of humanity is the risk of newcrimes being committed against humanity and not only, if I can say this, against millions of real humanbeings as was the case, but a crime such that a sorcerer's apprentice who was very cunning, the authorof potential genetic manipulations, might in the future commit or supply the means for committing . . .against man, against the very humanity of man, no longer against millions of representatives of realhumanity but against the essence­itself of humanity, against an idea, an essence, a figure of the humanrace, represented this time by a countless number of beings and generations to come …. (207­08;emphasis added)

Hence there can be little doubt that the apocalypse, or at least the potential for it and for the posthumanous,

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can be done differently "now." This "now" marks itself out by being, as Derrida has it, a "unique moment." For "[a]re we not," asks Derrida, "at this unheard­of moment in the history of science or techno­science and ofhumanity, in a situation where a terrible suspicion sets the stage for a grand judgment whose apocalypticproportions begin to resemble a large judgment?" (208­09). If there is indeed scope for a new apprehensiveness inDerrida's discourse on apocalypse, it is because the disparities between the humanly possible and the inhumanlyand dehumanizingly impossible have significantly altered and narrowed. In question is no longer "merely" theextermination of countless humans, but of the work of readaptation which can be undertaken on the very basis ofthe human. If Derrida's tone in discussions that open onto the posthumanous is discernibly changed, then, it isin recognition that "the question, What is man? could no longer wait as it seems to have done formerly." That isbecause it is "today taking on, here, now, a terribly concrete and urgent form at an infinitely accelerated rate"(209). In such circumstances, to be deconstructively counter­intuitive could risk appearing neither punctual noras striking the right tone ­­ especially when the posthumanous arrives with the prospect of "the programmablereproduction of the identical to infinity, excluding mutability, progress as well as history" (212).

<18> Of course, this is very close to Fukuyama's own concern at the implications of the biotechnology revolution.Indeed, even while noting that Derrida's essay predates Fukuyama's by ten years, it is important to acknowledgethat the Derrida of "The Aforementioned So­Called Human Genome" is much closer to the Fukuyama of Our PosthumanFuture than is the case with the Derrida of Specters of Marx and the Fukuyama of The End of History. Fukuyama'srecent book is, it has to be said, a much more nuanced study than Fukuyama's earlier one, but if there is agreater movement of convergence between what Derrida and Fukuyama respectively represent in the multivalentgeneral discourse concerning apocalyptic threats to the human, it is at least as much the result of a moreengagement on Derrida's part with the posthumanous as it is of an emancipation on Fukuyama's part from the rathermore jejune tonalities of The End of History.

<19> The views of Derrida on the import of September 11 further reinforce the impression of a greater willingnessto address a broad worry less counter­intuitively than might earlier have been the case. The new tonality of hisdiscourse on such matters might usefully be demonstrated by drawing attention to the frequency with which oneword, bad recurs in Philosophy in a Time of Terror. It does so most often in the form of the comparative and thesuperlative of bad: worse and worst. Borradori's otherwise excellent commentaries on her dialogues with Habermasand Derrida overlook this really rather remarkable feature and its implications for an understanding of how "we"­­ and Derrida too ­­ might be "doing" the apocalypse differently, "now." Here, before we probe this issuefurther, are some examples of the incidence of worse or worst in the book, with respective authorship indicated:

Borradori: In all its horror, 9/11 has left us waiting for the worst. [20]Habermas: In New York people seemed ready for the worst. [21]Derrida: At issue again is . . . what, when seen from the Capitol, might be worse than the Cold War.Derrida: Or at least, if it is the present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body theterrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has evertaken place. (Derrida's emphasis)<br> Derrida: Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, bythe threat of the worst to come, rather than by aggression that is "over and done with." (Derrida'semphasis)Derrida: But, and here's another paradox . . . even if this terror is the very worst, even if ittouches the geopolitical unconscious of every living being and leaves there indelible traces . . .because of the anonymous invisibility of the enemy, because of the undetermined origin of the terror .. . the worst can simultaneously appear insubstantial, fleeting, light, and so seem to be denied,repressed, indeed forgotten, relegated to being just one event among others, one of the "major events"

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. . . in a long chain of past and future events. (Derrida's emphasis)Derrida: One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and withoutany bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which the entire life . . . of a"great nation," of the greatest power on earth, depends. Derrida: We thus deny the irresistible foreboding that the worst has not taken place, not yet. [22]

<20> We do not claim to have inventorized all instances of the words worse or worst in Philosophy in a Time ofTerror, and we are keeping in reserve reference to at least one other [23]. That said, it is striking that worseand worst clearly recur more frequently in Derrida's text than in those of the two others, Habermas and Borradorihereself, represented in the volume. This is all of a piece with the unwavering, uncompromising focus of Derridaon just how apocalyptically bad the aftermath of September 11 could conceivably turn out to be. For there couldbe little that is worse than the apocalypse, or darker than that posthumanous brought about by the readiness of afew to precipitate the unthinkable and the incalculable upon multitudes. Hence Derrida dares to express thisunthinkable and this incalculable, inevitably deploying a further mention of worse:

One day it might be said: "September 11" ­­ those were the ("good") old days of the last war. Thingswere still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, what height! There has beenworse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable,capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet ourunconscious is already aware of this; it already knows it, and that's what's scary. (102)

The prospect is sufficiently disturbing to induce Derrida to denounce and to take sides ­­ with qualifications,but nevertheless quite unequivocally:

What appears to me unacceptable in the "strategy" . . . of the "bin Laden effect" . . . is, above all,the fact that such actions and discourses open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. If weare to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico­political scene,of the "world" itself, then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter. .. . That is why, in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides andchoose in a binary situation, well, I would. . . . I would take the side of the camp that, inprinciple, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the "political,"democracy, international law, international institutions, and so on. . . . I don't hear any suchpromise coming from "bin Laden," at least not one for this world. (113­14; Derrida's emphasis).

<21> Strong words from the arch­deconstructor of binary oppositions, and a significant choice between binaryopposites. It is a choice understandable in terms of the apocalypse being that which, by definition, leaves nofuture, and in this sense what Derrida terms the "bin Laden effect," which opens onto no future, is the veryfigure of the apocalyptic. But of course what is telling here is the newly urgent tone in Derrida's idiom. It isa tone that is more consistently earnest (certainly more so than that discernible in the ludic spaces ofDissemination (1972) or Glas (1974), for instance) ­­ no doubt in part due to the overtly political theme and theall too tangible gravity of what is being discussed. True, the deconstructively mercurial insight is still inevidence, as in the paragraphs assiduously thinking the date/name September 11 as a "telegram of metonymy" (86),and most particularly in the fastidious rigor with which the "autoimmune logic" that made September possible ispursued throughout (see below). But what is ultimately noteworthy is the readiness with which it is suggested byDerrida that, at a time when September 11 is clearly the contemporary counterpart to the events called "Stalin"or "Hungary" that were mentioned in the passage from Specters of Marx quoted earlier, circumspection is no

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option: "If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors, artists, and journalists do not, before all else, standup together against such violence, their abdication will be at once irresponsible and suicidal" (125).Admittedly, one must be careful here. The context is by this point in the dialogue with Borradori a discussion ofthe probity of tolerance rather than of any coordinated denunciation of the "bin Laden effect." Yet the contrastwith another Derrida who admits to not having been a soixante­huitard because of his aversion to, in his words,"vibrating in unison," will not, we think, be lost upon those who have followed the development of his work [24].More so since, in the same context, there is the further suggestion that "one of our first responsibilities [is]to analyze the emergence of what is new and unprecedented," and the reflection as well that "[o]nly by rigorouslytaking into account this novelty will we be able to adjust our ripostes and our acts of resistance" (125­26). Andalso, one might add, our tonalities.

<22> It is difficult to be clinchingly persuasive about these new tonalities in Derrida's writing withoutundertaking more extended comparative analysis on the differences between the earlier and the later work, andwithout engaging with the "new criteriology," as Derrida has it, that may have emerged in the wake of recentevents [25]. We hope to have provided in this section at least some preliminary evidence to support thesupposition that the difference in tone is in fact demonstrably there. In the background of that, it becomesopportune to return to our opening and reconsider the viability of Derrida's suggestion in Specters of Marx thatcontemporary posthumanists are seemingly unaware that they are latecomers to the end of history. Thatreconsideration should assist an understanding of why "we" do the apocalypse differently, "now."

4. The Latecoming of the Posthuman, or, Why "We" Do the Apocalypse Differently, "Now"

<23> It needs to be said immediately that if "we" are starting to discuss endism differently it is because theapocalypse can be done so more unthinkably and incalculably now than was ever the case. The challenge of thenuclear that provided a focus for "No Apocalypse, Not Now" is one about which it is possible to be almostnostalgic in the context of all the circumstances that make the posthumanous so immediate to both experience andpossibility: the biotechnology revolution and the various technologies for the prosthesization of the human, theprospect of engineered pandemics, worldwide virality that could be digital as well as organic, indeed all theprocesses that could conceivably operate according to the logic of autoimmunity, whereby "a living being, inquasi­suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own'immunity" (Derrida's emphasis) [26]. According to Derrida, "what is put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitarylogic is nothing less than the existence of the world, of the worldwide itself" (Derrida's emphasis; 98­99). Thisrisk, whereby the human itself creates the conditions for that which might exceed it, doing so withoutsimultaneously immunizing itself against the worst with any adequacy or proper foresight, is what makes theposthumanous the episteme of our time. Reflections upon it could therefore look like a processual rather thanposthumous epitaph on the human. In that context, the (sur)passing of the human becomes less amenable to theprotocols of poststructuralist counter­intuitiveness than may previously have been the case. Hence, to recast thefamous reflections from the conclusion to Foucault's The Order of Things (1966), the posthumanous is an inventionof very recent date, and what is therein discovered is that the erasability of the human is an all too immediatewager.

<24> A grim scenario brings this point starkly home. It has to do with the fact that the worries of the Cold War,even the rigors of all previous wars, look ­­ and one hopes to be forgiven for saying this ­­ almost quaintbeside the order and enormity of the posthumanous understood as the apocalyptic eventuality that is scripted bythe various formulations of the autoimmunity contrived by the human. It is by no means certain, to followBlanchot and Rapaport, that humanity will grow quite as blasé about the banality of the end as it had grown

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inured, through thanatopraxie and the various resources of the writing of the disaster, to Cold War menaces [27].Quite simply, that is because it is possible to do the apocalypse more inventively now, and through all theinventions that have made previous technologies of the end obsolete and that will continue, in a paradoxicalrenewing of their ends, to do so. This, in fact, is itself a sign of the apocalyptic newness of the "now."Previous apocalyptic technologies have been obliterated by an accelerated logic of obsolescence, almost as ifprevious generations seem datedly exterminable, while "we" appear to be available to more designedly state­of­the­art (indeed practically "designer") endings which are potentially procurable by those ­­ and this whereterrorism comes in ­­ undeterred by any détente. Consequently, the worst is not merely thinkable, butapprehensible as something on this side of improbability. In that apprehending the mannerisms of deconstructive,poststructuralist, or postmodernist logic, particularly their counter­intuitive temporalities and theirreluctance to countenance straightforward projections of supersedence, seem to lack le bon ton. Indeed, there isno greater indication of the appositeness of a different tone and a different temporization of the posthumanous,and of the way in which even deconstruction finds itself driven to do the apocalypse differently now, than thefollowing statement by Derrida:

We are talking about a trauma, and thus an event, whose temporality proceeds neither from the now thatis present nor from the present that is past but from an im­presentable to come (à venir). A weaponwounds and leaves forever open an unconscious scar; but this weapon is terrifying because it comes fromthe to­come, from the future, a future so radically to come that it resists even the grammar of thefuture anterior [emphasis added]. [28]

Never before this did there seem to have been such cause for the newly apprehensive apocalyptic tone in Derrida.The shift is precipitated by what is glimpsed in the words we have italicized in the above quotation. They areclear enough: in a time of apocalypse, the simple tenses may become more apt than the complex ones.

<25> If we overstate or overdramatize this shift in tense and tone, it is with a purpose: to bring to starkdefinition the realization that talk of the posthumanous can no longer seem, as it may have done to Derrida in apiqued moment in Specters of Marx, the excitable futurological prattle of those whom, as has been seen, hedesignated as "latecomers." Needless to say, there must be some embarrassment there: at having to shift tone, andat the sensation of suddenly starting to come across as ever so mildly apprehensive. Derrida himself tries totake the edge off the intensity of his tonally different concern with the end when he asks an apparently offhandquestion: "Either there will be another suicidal attempt to harness technology to the ends of man (fascism inalliance with biogenetics is perhaps our worst future) and/or technology, an inhuman will to power, willoverpower humanity. Is this proposition too oppositional, too human, too pious?" [29] Perhaps he need not havefretted, however, at this redramatization of what has been called postmodernism's "de­dramatization of the end"[30]. One may take exception to the tones and styles and intensities of various apocalyptic rhetorics of ourtime, to their varying abilities to overcome depthlessness, to the sensitivity of their understanding of thepathos of the human shading into the posthumanous ­­ but their pertinence, even amid all the potentiallyimpertinent counter­accusations levelled at each other by the different camps saying sooth, is safe, even whilenothing else seems to be.

<26> If we are right in what we have claimed above on the currently boosted relevance of the simple tenses, thenit might have become "unfashionable" to respond counter­intuitively [31]. Indeed, had the discernibility of thenewly apprehensive apocalyptic tone in Derrida's writing on the posthumanous not been "exemplary," and quite upto the recent "fashion," this would have been the section in our paper where we would have needed to problematizethe notion of the posthuman's latecoming. We could have subjected it, for instance, to a reading informed by the

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counter­intuitive temporalities of the spectropoetics advanced by Derrida in Specters of Marx. We would have gonealong with the typically poststructuralist modulation of the simple tenses through the devices ofauxiliarization, citing, for instance, Geoffrey Bennington's words on the anticipation of the absolute event: "[The] anticipatory gesture is itself complex: the event anticipates on a time which it will turn out to be rightor appropriate, it will drag the time in which it occurs along to the stage which it already represents, ahead ofits time; but it also anticipates on a time in which it will be possible to see that it always was going to turnout to be appropriate, that the next stage already was 'formed in the womb of time', as its very appearance willhave proved" (Bennington's emphasis) [32]. Yet Derrida's words on the resistance of a new apocalyptics to thegrammar even of the future anterior is dissuasive. They signal a change in the tone with which Derrida approachesendism and its rhetoric, and something of a diminished readiness to ironize the "postisms," "newisms," and"seismisms" devolving upon any broaching of the posthumanous. It is enough to move us to reassess our own callfor "a critical posthumanism" in our previous reflections upon the topic: not because a critical posthumanism isany less necessary or more mistimed now, but because the resistance of "state­of­the­art" apocalypse to anypoststructuralist protocols investing in the logic of the future anterior needs to be critically rethought beforepoststructuralist counter­intuitiveness can be reasserted [33]. This paper therefore announces, as it were, theurgency of that rethinking, which has implications for an evaluation of poststructuralist pertinences in the timeof the posthumanous. A fuller rehearsal of that rethinking, however, must be deferred to another context, toanother time, in a postponement that can however at least declare here that what suddenly grows urgent in thetime of the posthumanous is the thought not of the future anterior or even of the supersedence which linear timemakes possible, but the intuition announced by Bennington: "The time is always ripe just for the untimely"(Bennington's emphasis) [34]. For the posthumanous, there is always time.

<27> In the meantime, there remains one issue that needs addressing: the we in our title, and its subsequentappearance within quotation marks at various points in the text of our essay. In the "Reading Us" section of "TheEnds of Man," but even before, Derrida speaks of the inscrutability of the use of we and also of its entrenchmentin a certain tradition of Western metaphysics. "The we," he notes, "is the unity of absolute knowledge andanthropology, of God and man, of onto­theo­theology and humanism" (121). We, then, can be said in the context ofdiscourse of absolutes and humanism and when these are not subject to the experience of tenuousness. Derrida isclear­minded about the consequences of that: "Once one has given up positing the we in the metaphysical of "wemen" with the metaphysical determinations of the proper of man, it remains that . . . the thinking of the properof man is inseparable from the question of the truth of Being." One would presumably have to pass, then, throughHeidegger. But ­­ and it is almost as unconscionable to ask this as it is symptomatic of what it is in fact veryurgent to ask ­­ does that passage remain as pertinent in the age of the posthumanous? Does the posthumanous notmake even Heidegger, with his fastidious musings on an essence of the human, "quaint"? To "keep within anunderstanding of the is" (124), Derrida says, becomes harder when the thought of a collective we "no longer"irrupts, when "[w]hat is threatened in the extension of metaphysics and technology . . . is the essence of man"(128). We therefore becomes a far from innocent word at the moment of the apprehending of the worst and of theapocalyptically posthumanous, when the realization that is uppermost is that we have autoimmunizingly putourselves in the position of proceeding to make ourselves "quaint." And quaint, it should be remembered here,derives from old French cointe, "knowing." A heavy irony, when, as the epigraph from Lyotard points out, we arehardly in a position to know the end, to hear anybody deploy the past or indeed the future anterior in ourregard, to hear a "they [for "we" will not be around to say we] were" or a "they will have been." At the time ofthe posthumanous we are as "unbeknownst" ­­ another word of Lyotard's [35] ­­ as ever. We may wonder, sometimesvaguely, sometimes intently, about apocalypse and its doing: whether the "Come" invoked at the end of Revelationor indeed "our" meddlings with autoimmunity beckon something that might yet be later or earlier than anticipated.We may speculate too whether they will presage anything very different from what was said, perhaps not all that

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soothly, by all the eschatological visions of the past on their way to becoming all our presents. Hence, in themidst of an economy of the eve, all that remains is to consider whether to change tone in reflection of all theshifts, as they arise, of "our" (un)timely meditations on the (un)punctual.

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Notes

[1] Jean François Lyotard, "Being Done with Narrative by Cubism and André Malraux," in Robert Newman, ed.,Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79. []

[2] Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1982), 136. []

[3] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14­15. []

[4] Jean­François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982­1985, ed. Julian Pefanis andMorgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 93 and 24. []

[5] See Jacques Derrida, "The future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the

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'Humanities,' what could take place tomorrow," in Tom Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A CriticalReader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24­57. []

[6] Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (New York: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1982), 121. []

[7] In what follows, and as in our title, the use of we and now will regularly be kept within quotation marks.This is being done in order to foreground the fact that in the contexts cited they are less than innocent terms,but also in anticipation of their problematization in our conclusion. []

[8] Clearly, not all in the line­up belong, strictly, to a "'50s" generation; their inclusion can however bepermitted if it is accepted that what is at stake is as much a tonality of French theory (about which more issaid later in the essay) as a particular "vintage" of it. []

[9] We are here using the term "'50s" generation in echo of Derrida's own use of '50s in the passage quoted fromSpecters at the start of our essay: though the reference is to figures whose first important work may haveappeared in the 60s, Derrida's point is surely that the intellectual formation behind that work was, at least inpart, the product of readings and of an education informed by the agendas of the earlier decade. []

[10] On this issue, see Derrida's comments on France and "national philosophical identity" in "The Ends of Man"(particularly the first two sections). []

[11] See Derrida, "The future of the profession," 50. []

[12] Jacques Derrida, "Of a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy," Raising the Tone of Philosophy: LateEssays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1993), 122. []

[13] Christopher Keep, "Of Technology and Apocalypse, or, Whose Independence Day?" Reconstruction 4.1 (2004).Available online: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/home.htm []

[14] Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," trans.Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, diacritics, Summer 1984: 27­28. []

[15] See Philippe Lacoue­Labarthe and Jean­Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in GermanRomanticism, trans. Philippe Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New Press, 1988). Forfurther reflections on this theme, see Joseph G. Kronick, "Deconstruction and the Future of Literature (or,Writing in the Nuclear Age)," in Derrida and the Future of Literature (New York: State University of New YorkPress, 1999), 101­41. []

[16] Jacques Derrida, "Nietzsche and the Machine," trans. Richard Beardsworth, in Negotiations: Interventions andInterviews 1971­2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 219. []

[17] Derrida, "Of A Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy," 122­23. []

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[18] See Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge, 2003). []

[19] Jacques Derrida, "The Aforementioned So­Called Human Genome," in Negotiations, 202. []

[20] Giovanna Borradori, "Introduction: Terrorism and the Legacy of the Enlightenment­Habermas and Derrida," inPhilosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2003), 21. []

[21] Jürgen Habermas, "Fundamentalism and Terror­A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas," in Borradori, Philosophy in aTime of Terror, 26. []

[22] The quotations from Derrida are taken from "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides­A Dialogue with JacquesDerrida," in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 96­97, 99, 101, and 189. []

[23] See, apart from the mention of worst being held "in reserve," that which occurs in Derrida's argument(discussion of which is not quite relevant in this context) on how "the worst . . . is also the best"­"Autoimmunity," 124 (Derrida's emphasis). []

[24] See Jacques Derrida, "A Madness Must Watch over Thinking," in Points . . . Interviews, 1974­1994, ed.Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 347­48. []

[25] Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 106. []

[26] Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 94. []

[27] See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1986), and Herman Rapaport, "Deconstructing Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Ashbery, Derrida, Blanchot," Criticism 27.4(1985): 390. []

[28] Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 97. []

[29] Derrida, "Nietzsche and the Machine," 253. []

[30] Klaus R. Scherpe, "Dramatization and De­dramatization of 'the End': The Apocalyptic Consciousness ofModernity and Post­Modernity," trans. Brent O. Peterson, Cultural Critique 5 (1986): 102. []

[31] We are using unfashionable here in the sense used by Geoffrey Bennington in Interrupting Derrida (New York:Routledge, 2000), 129­a sense to do with the hope of academic discourse that it will be able "to set the toneagain."

[32] Bennington, 133. []

[33] See our "extroduction" to Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, eds, Discipline and Practice: The﴾Ir﴿Resistibility of Theory (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; forthcoming), and also our "What's Wrongwith Posthumanism?" in Rhizomes 7 (2003). Available online: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue7/callus.htm []

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[34] Bennington, 130. []

[35] See Jean­François Lyotard, "Unbeknownst," in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van der Abbeele (Minnesota:University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 185­97. []