{"id":9356,"date":"2012-09-29T11:21:04","date_gmt":"2012-09-29T16:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9356"},"modified":"2012-09-29T11:21:45","modified_gmt":"2012-09-29T16:21:45","slug":"avenir-futur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/09\/29\/avenir-futur\/","title":{"rendered":"avenir futur"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, <em>The Year of Living Dangerously<\/em> 2012<\/p>\n<p>There are in French two words for \u201cfuture\u201d which cannot be adequately rendered in English: <strong><em>futur<\/em><\/strong> and <em><strong>avenir<\/strong><\/em>. Futur stands for \u201cfuture\u201d as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of tendencies already in existence; while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present\u2014<em><strong>avenir<\/strong><\/em> is what is to come (a venir), not just what will be. Say, in today\u2019s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the future is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian \u201cfixed point,\u201d the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos\u2014even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual \u201cattractor\u201d towards which our reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts that interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic \u201cfixed point\u201d and<strong> take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness \u201cto come.\u201d<\/strong> We can see here how ambiguous the slogan \u201cno future\u201d is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for\u2014to break the hold of the catastrophic \u201cfuture\u201d and thereby open up a space for something New \u201cto come.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Based on this distinction, we can see a problem with Marx (as well as with the twentieth-century Left): it was not that Marx was too utopian in his Communist dreams, but that his Communism was too \u201cfutural.\u201d What Marx wrote about Plato (Plato\u2019s Republic was not a utopia, but an idealized image of the existing Ancient Greek society) holds for Marx himself:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"> what Marx conceived as Communism remained an idealized image of capitalism, capitalism without capitalism, that is, expanded self-reproduction without profit and exploitation.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is why we should return from Marx to Hegel, to Hegel\u2019s \u201ctragic\u201d vision of the social process where no hidden teleology is guiding us, where every intervention is a jump into the unknown, where the result always thwarts our expectations. All we can be certain of is that the existing system cannot reproduce itself indefinitely: whatever will come after will not be \u201cour future.\u201d A new war in the Middle East or an economic chaos or an extraordinary environmental catastrophe can swiftly change the basic coordinates of our predicament. We should fully accept this openness, guiding ourselves on nothing more than ambiguous signs from the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, The Year of Living Dangerously 2012 There are in French two words for \u201cfuture\u201d which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for \u201cfuture\u201d as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of tendencies already in existence; while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/09\/29\/avenir-futur\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;avenir futur&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9356"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9358,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9356\/revisions\/9358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}