The future is not the last stop in the journey of history. The future is the about-to-come, that which will never arrive at full presence. The future has the quality of infinite proximity, but it will never stand still in front of my eyes. Nevertheless, the demand that arrives from the future is that I act.

The formulations above follow Emanuel Levinas. He sees the future as an exteriority that remains exterior; it cannot be grasped, it differs from spatial exteriority, it is signalled through unanticipated signs, and it must remain an absolute surprise. Unlike Bergson, Sartre and previous theorists of time, Levinas demands that the future not be anticipated or projected. ‘The other is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future.’Footnote ¹ The future as such cannot be decoded through concepts such as ‘totality’ or ‘unity’ because the exteriority of the future leads us to an open end, or more accurately to a ‘no-end’ process guided by alterity, infinity and otherness. In this article I apply the Levinasian theoretical matrix for decoding the future, locating at its heart the ethical alterity of the ‘other’. Alterity requires a different perception of time – specifically of the future.

This infinite arrival of the other is an indication of the infinite demands that the ethics of the future forces upon the ego. The alterity of the other obligates the ego to approach the other, to share with him a visage in the world, to react to its alterity, to the fact that he is in the permanent condition of the one on the verge of appearing, on the threshold of presence, but will never gain a full presence. The face of the future will never be fully exposed. It has the quality of infinite proximity, but will never stand fully in front of my eyes. The future as exteriority can be tracked or signified only unpredictably, as a surprise at the moment when we are not prepared for it. If it were viewed from the point of view of the present, as a predictable object, it would be a false exteriority. The ethical dimensions of the future activate our critical activity in the present the same way the libido shapes or triggers our psychic life. This exteriority could be narrated only by those able to know and participate in this exteriority.

The Old Testament story of Jacob fighting the Angel can offer us a tangible equivalent of the above formulations. The depictions of this story by Delacroix and especially Gauguin offer us further insights into the question of the visibility of the future and the nature of art. This article is divided into three sections, treating the biblical performance, the painted interpretation of Eugène Delacroix focusing on that performance, and the audience or the feminine ‘other’ depicted by Paul Gauguin. The comparison between Delacroix's version of the story and Gauguin's is very illuminating.

The biblical performance

The story of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel is based on Genesis, chapter 32.Footnote ² On his way to Canaan, Jacob sends a messenger to his vigilant brother Esau, and they bring the message that his brother will meet him with an army of four hundred men. Jacob sends his wives, children and possessions in advance across the ford Jabbok, preparing for the worst; he puts his trust in God and waits for his brother. He spends the night alone and that night a mysterious being appears and wrestles with him. This being touches the sinew of Jacobs's thigh, hurting Jacob permanently. The Old Testament relates that after being hurt Jacob demands a blessing from this entity, and he is blessed to be named Yisra'el (meaning ‘one who has struggled with God’). The being refuses to identify himself and Jacob decides to name the place Pnei-el (Penuel, meaning ‘face of God’), as if the being he has struggled with had the face of God.

Throughout the fight the entity that possesses divine powers and secret knowledge, and is ‘signified’ a priory as the winner, is actually losing. The structure of the narrative maintains the balance between the protagonists, leading us to a ‘reasonable’ conclusion, and then turns it upside down. As the text proceeds we come to the conclusion that the strong unrecognizable ‘man’ is winning the fight. We can view the conflict between Jacob and this ‘unrecognized’ entity along two axes: on the horizontal axis Jacob has to fight Esau – the biblical father of the Edomites, the other nation – in order to be the master of his own geographical and political domain; and on the vertical axis he has to fight the most significant other, God. God himself is worried about, or even ambivalent towards, the birth of the nation as well as its future behavior, its sins and betrayals.Footnote ³ At the end of the narrative, the narrator hints at the future through two remarks: the changing of the name and the remark concerning the future of Bnei Israel (‘therefore the children of Israel do no eat the sinew of the thigh which is by the hip-socket to this day’). This means that Jacob has been wrestling with the future.

Looking at this struggle as a struggle for the future enables us to identify this situation as an encounter with exteriority, as an expression of the infinity of time. We can understand from the story that neither the narrative nor Jacob himself recognize the ‘man’ coming towards him. This meeting is definitely not a trivial one, and seeing in itself is not enough to encounter the transcendence needed in order to approach this entity. It must stay ungraspable, its face resists control, and it cannot be identified. This ‘man’ is coming from the outside of history and culture, and even from outside being, from outside the totality of the world. He forces Jacob to experience a total loss of all his possessions, material and conceptual; for ‘a moment’ Jacob loses all that he owns, including his self. The appearance of that man transforms Jacob's totality; this figure's actions are, paraphrasing Levinas, the sounds of infinity in the domain of the present. The figure appearing before Jacob is the sign of the direction Jacob has to take before becoming Israel. He should turn towards the absolute, infinite future.

At the end of the fight, after the reversal of the power relations, the figure asks of Jacob, ‘let me go, for dawn is breaking’. He might be seen as a spirit of the night or as a mythical figure that loses its powers in daylight.Footnote ⁴ This figure thus manifests the border or the limit of time, the location of all the dark figures with whom Jacob has to wrestle, outside or within himself. And this encounter signifies that the future does not come from the total outside, but rather comes at me; it is ungraspable, it is beyond my understanding of reality.

The future as something coming at me is uncontrollable and ungraspable, it is mysterious, absolutely other, and it is made of alterity embodied in the mystery of the other. The encounter draws attention to the fact that my time and the time of the other are incongruous and are not on the same level of perception. The other is unsettling my time, invading my time.

A tango with exteriority or a violent match?

Eugène Delacroix painted the scene of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel between the years 1854 and 1861, at Saint-Sulpice, Paris. Delacroix shows the two men as a dancing couple. On the one side we have the anxious, very firm and muscular (classicist) Jacob, and on the other hand we have the Angel, leading Jacob as though he were guiding him through a metaphysical tango. The absorptive body language of the anonymous ‘man’ leads the anguished Jacob beyond the wrestling situation; the Angel's gentle gestures are delicate and soft, they indicate disorientation, as if he does not know what he seeks in this fight. This hesitant divine figure holds and guides Jacob, but at the same time it slips away, withdrawing. The evasive conflictual visibility of this figure – its strong yet soft, assertive yet submissive, gestures – are an expression of the inaccessible other that is coming to the present but will never be fully present. These gestures are ‘the anticipation of . . . [a] pure future (avenir), without content.’ It opens ‘new perspectives onto the ungraspable’,Footnote ⁵ the future that is always about to come.

Delacroix loads the story with an erotic resonance. He is leading Eros into our discussion. Eros transgresses the economy of possessions and power. Eros is the axis that can enable us to decode relationships with alterity, to draw us near the mystery of the future. The biblical text telling the story of Jacob and the Angel speaks of touch, of contact between the hand of the Angel and the body of Jacob. Rendering this gesture in modern translations of the biblical text as a ‘strike’ and not as a ‘touch’ or ‘contact’ engages the terminology of violence and totality.Footnote ⁶ In contrast to that, in the painting of Delacroix (as in Rembrandt's depiction of the same story), the Angel almost avoids responding to Jacob's intensity. Their dance is charged with a sensuous dimension, where the Angel's gesture compares to a caress moving the event from a violent action taking place in the present to an encounter with the radical other, the future that is beyond the future. The gesture of the caress is actually seeking the ‘to-come’ knocking at the gates of being without being part of it, without enabling the ‘I’ to prepare himself for its arrival. In this sense the encounter between the two men is an encounter of love as the ultimate way in which the ‘I’ is distanced from any meaning, perception or picture of finality. This encounter is an event taking place beyond any phenomenon. If Jacob is the lover in these versatile relations, then the lover is losing its status as the subject. The pain marked in Jacob's body ‘is’ the text, indicating the softening of the self and of manhood. The Angel as the partner performing before us the ‘tango’ with Jacob enables Jacob to transcend himself, to get out of the finite time of the ego towards the infinity of the exterior, where good is exposed through the act of love, and where infinity is exposed in life.Footnote ⁷ The caress bears testimony to the encounter with the other; the ‘I’ is withdrawing into itself, it is softening its presence through the act of love.

In Gauguin's interpretation of the story (The Vision after the Sermon or Jacob Fighting the Angel), the encounter between the Angel and Jacob is extremely intense. We can see the peasant women in the foreground; they have just left the church and are now depicted in a ceremonial amphitheatre, envisioning an encounter between man and the absolute future, seeing the radical other depicted on the ‘stage’ in front of them. These women, the audience, envision a symbolic struggle between the absolute exterior and the interior, between the Angel and Jacob.

This event outside time, taking place at the upper part of the ceremonial theatre, is violent and contrasted with the calmness of the audience, the women of Brittany. If we still want to connect this picture to the figure of Eros, we can say that Eros as the ‘messenger’ of love signifies for us the way love is not the outcome of initiation, but something that ‘invades and wounds us, and nevertheless the I survives in it’.Footnote ⁸ This solution, as Levinasian as it might be, is not enough, because this narrative might be interpreted wrongly as if the self should only withdraw within itself to an absolute passive state with no obligation; the ‘I’/self allegedly should not do anything, and as such it has no responsibility other than to wait detachedly. What is missing in our explanation is the active dimension of the expectation of the arrival of the other. We are missing the performative dimension of self or of the audience. Contrary to Delacroix, Gauguin insists on the presence of the audience. This painterly move can be explained on the basis of the biblical text.

The audience or the feminine other

The last verse of the biblical story of Jacob and the Angel emphasizes the obedience of the witnesses, the audience, to this event: ‘therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh which is by the hip-socket to this day’. After the transformation and the naming (or baptism), Jacob becomes Israel, and the children of the nation are the ‘children of Israel’, and the prohibition effective ‘to this day’ marks the connection and even mythical identification with the ‘eponymous ancestor who wrestled through the night with a man who was no man’.Footnote ⁹

The feminine audience depicted by Gauguin is very significant, creating a theatrical situation. These women are holding their hands in prayer, closing their eyes and postponing their awareness in favour of an event of a different order. The everyday or sociological time they are living in is displaced and a ‘real’ time is exposed, a time that will gain its meaning through its relation to the other. This time is conditioned by extending beyond all usual patterns and norms defining thought itself, crossing all the a priori conditions of thought. These women are even invited to transcend the habitual transcendence which they experience in the nearby church, and here they are requested to move to a different space, beyond the limits of the daily architecture of institutionalized religion. They are envisioning a sublime encounter that is other than the theatre of everyday life, not because the vision in front of them is showing a violent or a physical alterity to the religious communal rituals, but because they are leaving the remnants of present time in favor of a new event. If these women are perceptive and willing, they will gain absorbed sensuality, lacking ceremonial defences, and they will be in the most raw or crude situation of their existence, exposed and vulnerable in a radical way.

The feminine audience is the main component of this theatrical situation; they mark the future not through imagination or anticipation as such, although these are certainly part of their own ‘vision’. But their active stance in the depicted theatre positions them in opposition to the total ‘theatrical’ or orchestrated action on the stage. The audience in this theatrum mundi signifies alterity because these women's modest position, their humble acceptance of that which is to come, contradicts the logic of subjectivity or consciousness. ‘Alterity is accomplished in the feminine . . . the feminine is not accomplished as a being (étant) in a transcendence toward light, but in modesty.’Footnote ¹⁰ While consciousness is signified by a ‘clear’, enlightened movement towards transcendence, the feminine moves not towards the unconscious or subconscious but towards mystery. These women play the right audience to accept alterity and future, because they constitute an audience that is not waiting for the play to happen; they do not wait for an alterity to come through creation (the director) or through any procedure that is attached to the present. Their modesty echoes the significance of time; their vision is a new birth.

This theatrical painting makes unthinkable the situation of an autonomous performance image, or a text independent of an observer.Footnote ¹¹ Although painting and theatre are phenomenologically and ‘traditionally’ different, we might extract a general condition for renegotiating the two media. Erika Fischer-Lichte has argued in relation to the pantomime Sumurun by Max Reinhardt that the role

Here, theatre becomes a ‘communicative condition’,Footnote ¹³ a form of theatricality that underlies the arts in general. Although the ‘constructive’ active performative dimension attributed to spectatorship, thoroughly discussed in the context of theatre by Fisher-Lichte, is in tension with the religious absorptive introversive and deconstructive dimensions of the Breton women spectators in Gauguin's ‘theatre’, I think that, in both, dimensions of the future are exposed through the act of creativity and a reflection that exposes the universalistic thought that ‘the opposition between the self and the world, as that between the senses or appearance of things and object dissolves completely’.Footnote ¹⁴ Here the real, the material and the theological are exposed or performed as the unknown alterity to come, the future.

In conclusion, we can ask, is the future sewn in the Levinasian theoretical threads not another name for God? Is the ‘futuration of the future’, the ethical obligation to the other, not a screen signifying the coming of God? Levinas answered this question: ‘The Futuration of the future is not a “proof of God's existence,” but “the fall of God into meaning”’.Footnote ¹⁵ Here we can see the way in which the religious permeates or diffuses into the reading of history, or the spreading into the ontology of Levinas. The ethical obligation towards the future – meaning an obligation to one's neighbour, responsibility towards the other, accepting the demands of the other – means doing justice. If the other has the face of God, if the future has a face, if it has a religious resonance, these echoes are materialized in the interaction between people. This is where sanctity dwells. The journey of Jacob, his transformation into Israel, is not a journey that will take him to a future as a final stop. Jacob's encounter with the angel reveals its acknowledgment in the ultimate alterity of the future (actually encoding for him another period of exile and other trials). This is not a calm odyssey, to use Richard Cohen's vocabulary,Footnote ¹⁶ but a permanent obligation performed in the relations between myself and the future, as the otherness perpetually continues to happen.