The Interpretive Spirit of Borderline Figures

The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared…is heralded by a species of monsters.A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would be a predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow.All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the future arrivant.(Derrida, 1995, 38-67)Derrida's notion of the arrivant refers literally to 'that which or the one who arrives'.It is a feature particular to borderlines, thresholds, and the monsters that emerge at the limin of such 'marginal' spaces (1993).From the Old French ariver, 'to reach shore' and the Latin 'ad ripa', to shore, the arrivant emerges a priori identification and naming.It is in this sense that Derrida (1995) suggests the arrivant as (a)kin to monstrosity, a word that etymologically evokes the presence of omens and signs of portend, demonstrations which both mark and disturb fixed conceptual categories.Marking by way of its exception, the arrivant exposes a metaphysical frame and the will to truth as the Nietzschean will to power.Such assumptions of logocentrism, or undivided truth, are disturbed and decentered by the arrivants' fragmentary effect.That is, the arrivant as a singularity functions as an excess or 'next case,' often in a manner requiring the reevaluation of 'the law' as universally applicable.Yet, this works both ways, as the abreaction of the Law often has the effect of stemming and reducing such untimely fragments.As Baudrillard (2001) suggests, this repressive function of the Law only produces further excrescences, which return to trouble the metanarrative illusions of modernity as the psychoanalytic 'return of the repressed'.Simply, despite the drive to foreclose on such unanticipated intrusions, the arrivant emerges "beyond our wanting and doing" (Gadamer, 1999, p. xxvii).As Derrida (1995) avers, such borderline figures 'dis-ease' categorization as either good or evil, cure or poison, fact or fiction, stranger or kin.They emerge through this wound, the hole (porta) of signification, as opportunities to maintain an openness to the wor(l)d 1 .In this vein, Derrida suggests the intimate relationship between the arrivant and hospitality itself (1995).This formulation is deeply pedagogical, suggesting more than "a matter of simply developing a tolerance for ambiguity… [requiring] of us a love of ambiguity which is at once a love of the generativity of new life as a gift bestowed from the Earth" (Jardine, 1994, p. 31).As Jardine suggests in Speaking with a Boneless Tongue (1994), it is also a matter of paying attention to borderline figures, those monsters lying at the margins of articulation and representation.Inhabiting the most familiar contours of belief, such arrivants might productively challenge the ways in which we frame and reinforce reality.Disrupting the comforting and coordinating territories of belief, a monster would emerge in my own teaching practice, giving rise to a productive pedagogical opportunity I will attempt to unfold in the subtitled section 'A Pedagogical Arrivant'.Monsters do not have to look monstrous.As Derrida (1995) develops, the monster is closely related to what is normal, with normalization and normality.While experience oriented to the future prepares itself for the monstrous arrivant, "that which is absolutely foreign or strange," one must, as Derrida suggests, "try to domesticate it…make it part of the 1 I am attempting to deploy a double meaning with the portmanteau term wor(l)d, intimating both an openness to language and experience.

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