Voir venir means anticipating while not knowing what comes

Evidence

‘Voir venir’, which means at the same time to anticipate while not knowing what comes, has been translated by the phrase ‘to see (what is) coming’, the parentheses marking the reserve inherent in waiting itself. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 182

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Clarifies the French expression ‘voir venir’ (anticipating while not knowing what comes) and the translator’s parentheses marking reserve in waiting.
• XREF: The reservation/waiting structure here connects to the theme of an anticipated-but-unknown future, which resonates with the speculative-anticipation theme in Kermode’s ‘The Sense of an Ending’ and with the ‘space between notes’ silence concept from the soundscape reading.

Related

• One expression can hold certainty and ignorance of the future together. (similarity 0.87)
• The French idiom ‘voir venir’ fuses certainty and ignorance of what comes (similarity 0.87)
• The future is what the For-itself has yet to become, its determining possible being. (similarity 0.83)
• Reading is the in-between experience of seeing and not seeing what comes (similarity 0.83)
• The future is neither fully visible nor invisible but frustrates anticipation by surprise (similarity 0.83)
• The French idiom voir venir holds anticipation and surprise in one dialectical movement. (similarity 0.82)
• The future’s anticipatory structure holds teleological necessity and surprise together (similarity 0.82)
• Seeing what comes means seeing without seeing, a future neither visible nor hidden (similarity 0.82)
• The Hegelian future is neither foreseeable nor hidden but an in-between (similarity 0.80)
• Anticipation of the future always operates through some form of blindness. (similarity 0.79)
• Anticipation and radical surprise coexist within a single act of awaiting the future. (similarity 0.79)