The French idiom voir venir holds anticipation and surprise in one dialectical movement.

Evidence

We need time and time again to meditate this quasi-automatic alliance between chance and necessity, between accident and essence. Catherine Malabou gives all its chances to this chance of and in the idiom itself, and thus claims all that is announced from another idiom, following Hegel’s ‘imperative to philosophize in one’s idiom’. … ‘To see (what is) coming’ is to anticipate, to foresee, to presage, to project; it is to expect what is coming; but it is also to let what is coming come or to let oneself be surprised by the unexpected, by the sudden appearance of what is un-awaited. ‘To see (what is) coming’ means at the same time to anticipate and to let oneself be surprised, to bear and, at the same time, I mean precisely at the same time, not to bear the unexpected. In other words, the surprise in what is coming, the event of what is coming: the future. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 48

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines voir venir as simultaneously anticipating and being surprised, the temporal hinge of the book.
• SEED: An essay angle on untranslatable idioms as vehicles of philosophical concepts — what a single French phrase carries that English cannot.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s brain-work theme: plasticity as holding expectation and surprise together maps to neural prediction and updating. — connects to: The French idiom ‘voir venir’ fuses certainty and ignorance of what comes — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 55; Voir venir means anticipating while not knowing what comes
• CANDY: The neat paradox that ‘to see coming’ also means to let yourself be surprised is a portable conversation piece about language and time.
• recurring: this claim recurs 4 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Voir venir means anticipating while not knowing what comes #expands (0.95)