Anticipation of the future always operates through some form of blindness.

Evidence

We must go further than this paradox: in both terms of the alternative, in both figures of the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’ the theoretical and theatrical privilege of ‘seeing’ can also be suspended or see itself suspended. All of the senses are put into play here, and beyond the sensuous passivity, ‘all’ of the gestures are ‘active’. We can anticipate while ‘seeing’, but we can also anticipate without ever ‘seeing’, and first of all, because we can only truly anticipate something or someone if we go beyond what can be perceived, or what can present itself in the present tense of sight; we may no longer be capable of anticipation, let ourselves be surprised, because we no longer see or because we see without ever seeing what comes. In other words, within the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’, the anticipatory prevision must go beyond the category of ‘seeing’, must go beyond the present act of seeing the visible; furthermore, within the same expression ‘to see (what is) coming’, the exposition to surprise, the nonanticipation can paradoxically have the same effect: the surprise can be so explosive that it cannot even constitute itself as an object for the category of ‘seeing’. In both cases, as irreducible and as contradictory as they are and as they seem one in the face of the other, we only see coming if we no longer see: whether without seeing anything at all (the apprehension of the surprise), whether by relating to the future of what comes through the perception of what is and remains visible, in the full thematic and intuitive actuality of what is given to sight. The expression ‘to see (what is) coming’ is also plastic for it passes from one sense to the other and is not, from one end to the other, the affair of sight: to see coming, in the end, would always mean to see coming without ever seeing, whether we see beyond the visible present, whether we see nothing at all, whether again, what is announced or what surprises without ever being announced has nothing to do with the category of sight and is never given at all to sight. In all cases, there needs to be some sort of blindness. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 87

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The plasticity of ‘voir venir’ dissolves the very distinction between passivity (exposure to surprise) and activity (anticipation) by rooting both in a constitutive blindness — a dense point that bears on the reader’s enmity question.
• XREF: The plasticity-claim that receptivity and activity are fused in a single structure is precisely what the MOC thread interrogates; this passage locates that fusion in shared blindness rather than in an institutional switch.