“What comes?” quizzically asks Elisabeth Roudinesco, eminent historian of psychoanalysis and interlocutor of Jacques Derrida. “Yes, what arises unforeseeably,” Derrida responds,

what calls upon and overwhelms my responsibility […] the event, the coming of the one who or which [(ce) qui] comes but does not yet have a recognizable figure— and who therefore is not necessarily another human, my likeness, my brother, my neighbor.

“It can also be,” Derrida adds, “a ‘life’ or even a ‘specter’ in animal or divine form […] and not only a man or a woman, nor a figure sexually definable according to the binary assurances of homo- or heterosexuality” (90–1/52). Derrida is in conversation with Roudinesco in a text named after Victor Hugo's poem and collected with other conversations entitled For What Tomorrow … (2001). “Thinking What Comes” serves as the title and the main motif of a discussion by Derrida and Alain Minc, convened at the Sorbonne Auditorium on January 18, 1994, on the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx and Minc's Nouveau Moyen Age. First published in Derrida pour les temps à venir, the essay now appears in English translation for the first time, and supplies the title of the present collection.

Thinking What Comes, comprised of two volumes, contains twenty-five of Derrida's thus-far- untranslated pieces ranging from informative discussions in interviews, contributions to conferences and special issues of publications, to prefaces to the works of friends, political messages, and documents. In this wide array of texts, all previously unpublished in English, Derrida considers topics as varied as the world, writing, the promise and its relation to the messianic, fidelity, loyalty, filiation, hospitality, “poeticity,” substitution, and drug addiction.