On Being Haunted by the Future

Abstract

This chapter discusses the future as another site of contestation. Jacques Derrida insists that people understand the “to-come” not as a real future “down the road” but rather as a universal structure of immanence. However, such a structure is no substitute for the hard work of taking responsibility for what are often entirely predictable and preventable disasters. It is important to steer clear of the utopian black hole, the thought—or shape of desire—that the future would need to bring a future perfection or completion. To avoid the trap set by such a shape of desire, it is not necessary—indeed is necessary not—to reduce the future to a universal structure of immanence. What is equally disturbing is not people's inability to expect the unexpected but the failure of the institutions to prevent the all-too-predictable. Too many of the institutions have conditions of sustainability that are unhealthily insulated from the real world, or indeed coconspirators in the fantasy that people can go on like this.