A truly open future requires an accidental, non-appropriable event.

Evidence

For the future to have a future, and because God himself remains still to come, should not his death, if it has ever taken place, be purely accidental? Absolutely unpredictable and never re-appropriable, never re-essentializable, not even by some endless work of mourning, not even, and above all, by God himself? A God who would have, without ever seeing it come, let an infinite bomb explode in his hands, a God dead by some hopeless accident, hopeless of any salvation or redemption, without essentializing sublation, without any work of mourning and without any possible return or refund, would that be the condition of a future, if there must be such a thing called the future? The very condition for something to come, and even that of another God, of an absolute other God? — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 171

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the future against ‘seeing what is coming’ — providence/theodicy as the opposite of an open future, and ties the future to the purely accidental rather than the essential.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Hegel plasticity project: Derrida here reverses the Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) that would re-essentialize even God’s death — the very dialectical move plasticity theorizes. — connects to: A distant future that is not awaited ossifies into a thing-like given possibility. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 493; An open project enfolds future modifications, so catastrophe feels fated rather than surprising; Salvation must be secured in finite present action, not a mythical future. (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, paradigm-shifting passage: redefines the very condition of futurity as grounded in an un-mournable, unrecoverable accident rather than any dialectical recovery — sits at the core of the plasticity/event relationship.

Broader Connections

• Salvation must be secured in finite present action, not a mythical future. #complicates (0.80)
• Planned chance serves as an alibi for rationalized society #complicates (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113
• The future is neither fully visible nor invisible but frustrates anticipation by surprise #complicates (0.75)
• Freedom requires temporal continuity, not isolated instants of choice. #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 24
• The future is neither wholly invisible nor foreseeable but surprises by precipitation #complicates (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1239
• Rare events justify mechanisms requiring many precise conditions #expands (0.70) — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 719