A Certain Perhaps: Touching on the Decisiveness of Derrida’s Indecision JOSH TOTH Mosaic 40/2 0027-1276-07/245016$02.00©Mosaic I n Politics of Friendship, Derrida spends an entire chapter exam- ining Nietzsche’s frequent use of the term “perhaps.” On one level, Derrida is interested in the way in which this repeated “perhaps” suggests a certain way of understanding the possibility of friendship and, thus, the possibility of understanding, or “touching on,” the other. Ultimately, though, Derrida comes to suggest that the perhaps denotes a type of promise, a type of promise that is (like any other Derridean promise) spectral, or ironically twofold, in nature. On the one hand, the perhaps promises that the statement in which it is lodged (like a ghost) could be true absolutely and without doubt; on the other, the perhaps defers and delays the possibility of such certainty. The perhaps thus promises, like the ghost that haunts Derrida’s Marx in Specters of Marx, the possibility and the impossi- bility that the future as ghost will become manifest. It promises and denies the possibil- ity of a future when we will be haunted no longer. This paper explores Derrida’s use and understanding of the term “perhaps”—and, by extension, his use and understanding of concepts like indecision and spectrality. In highlighting Derrida’s strange certainty about the ethics of uncertainty, it considers the fact that the imperative to endure the ordeal of indecision is seemingly and necessarily anterior to any such ordeal. You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that I write exactly my opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words, you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. I have necessarily written myself upside down—and in order to surrender to necessity. —Jacques Derrida, Envois