What Is to Be Done?

This essay offers a “post-deconstructive” take on the question what is to be done? Working through the question’s first appearance in the title of Chernyshevsky’s novel, through Lenin’s political mutation of it, to Derrida’s deconstruction of the question precisely as a question, it argues that what really is at stake in the question is the advent of sense—sense that always precedes, exceeds, or else even fall short of what we determine as that which should be done. It also suggests that what is critical in the question is the preposition “to,” which opens all actions or gestures involved in “what is to be done” to a multiplicity of sense.