‘The future matters: apropos of Derrida’s

touching on the technology of the senses

to come in a post-global horizon: Part II’

Martin McQuillan

The following solicitation was sent to eight of Derrida’s commentators

in March 2007:
How shall we read Derrida’s Touching On—Jean-Luc Nancy beyond the
intimacy of the fraternal relation between Derrida and Nancy? Can this
book initiate a thinking concerning the transformation, displacement and
mutation of models of assumption and inheritance from the enlightenment
and Abrahamic tradition regarding touch, haptology, materiality, the
phenomenon and the political? As we enter into an epoch of new materialities
for which we as yet have no theoretical vocabulary, and which deconstruction
must address as its own future, is it possible to read the matters touched on by
Derrida as indicative of a deconstruction-to-come? What is the future of this
book and of the book in general, of writing, of the hand, of comprehension,
of memory, of the machine, of the body, of the religious, of nature, and of
the animal? How can we begin the deconstruction of the future and how can
the corpus of Derrida point us towards the substance of this transformative
critique?

Texts by J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Bennington, Christine Irizarry and

Sean Gaston appeared in Derrida Today Vol. 1, Issue 2. The following
texts by Stephen Barker, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and Marc
Froment Meurice complete the responses. I am grateful to all the
contributors for their infinite patience and good humour. I would also
like to thank Jo Nassor for everything she does. I should also say that in
light of all the extraordinary work she has done to keep this edition on
track, Nicole Anderson should be rightly credited as co-editor of these
texts. My heartfelt thanks to her and Nick Mansfield, their work is a
light in the world.