where the Messiah never actually shows up, where the Messiah is the name of the pure structure of hope and expectation. In that understanding, if the Messiah did show up he would ruin everything, for then there would be no future, which is a way of saying that history would be over.

When we speak of something (say the United States) being “worthy of the name” (say, democracy), we are speaking of the event that name contains.

a possibility that inhabits the name, what that name is trying to express while never quite succeeding, something that the name recalls but never quite remembers, promises but never quite delivers.

simmering potency

but something going on in names or things, and it is that special something that commands the particular attention of deconstruction.

a theo-poetics—as opposed to a “theo-logic,”

“happening” (arriver) without ever quite “arriving” at a final, fixed, and finished destination. We cannot simply “derive” (dériver) direct instruction from it, but we must instead allow it a certain drift or free play (dérive), which allows that tradition to be creative and reinvent itself so that it can be, as Augustine said of God, ever ancient

but a “how,” a way of holding a position, of being under way or being on a path. It is an affirmation without being a self-certain and positive position.

“deferral,”