[A]ppealing to the other presupposes his advent. By this very gesture the other is made to come, allowed to come, but his coming is simultaneously deferred: a chance is left for the future needed for the coming of the other, for the event in general. For, furthermore, who has ever been sure that the expectation of the Messiah is not, from the start, by destination and invincibly, a fear, an unbearable terror -- hence the hatred of what is thus awaited? And whose coming one would wish both to quicken and infinitely to retard, as the end of the future? And if the thinkers of the "dangerous perhaps" can be nothing other than dangerous, if they can signify or bring nothing but threat and chance at one and the same time, how could I desire their coming without simultaneously fearing it, without going to all ends to prevent it from ever taking place? Without going to all ends to skip such a meeting? Like teleiopoesis, the messianic sentence carries within it an irresistible disavowal. In the sentence, a structural contradiction converts a priori the called into the repressed, the desired into the undesired, the friend into the enemy. And vice versa. I must, by definition, leave the other to come (the Messiah, the thinker of the dangerous "perhaps," the god, whoever would come in the form of the event -- that is, in the form of the exception and the unique) free in his movement, out of reach of my will or desire, beyond my very intention. An intention to renounce intention, a desire to renounce desire, etc. "I renounce you, I have decided to": the most beautiful and the most inevitable in the most impossible declaration of love. Imagine my having thus to command the other (and this is renunciation) to be free (for I need his freedom in order to address the other qua other, in desire as well as in renunciation). I would therefore command him to be capable of not answering -- my call, my invitation, my expectation, my desire. And I must impose a sort of obligation on him thereby to prove his freedom, a freedom I need, precisely in order to call, wait, invite. What I thus engage in the double constraint of a double bind is not only myself, nor my own desire, but the other, the Messiah or the god himself. As if I were calling someone -- for example, on the telephone -- saying to him or her, in sum: I don't want you to wait for my call and become forever dependent upon it; go out on the town, be free not to answer. And to prove it, the next time I call you, don't answer, or I won't see you again. If you answer my call, it's over.

-- Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins, Verso 1997, pp. 173-74.