Abstract

Does the future have a future in the Anthropocene? What can it mean to worry about a »common future« or a »future of the common« in the strangely »futureless« epoch of the Anthropocene, when time itself seems to be out of joint? This essay assumes that the ethical-political commitment in the Anthropocene consists precisely in questioning the »future« as an anthropocentric attractor of the »Global West«, in de-colonizing and de-humanizing it. In order to be able to respond to the »catastrophic times« of the Anthropocene, we are called upon not to remain in the problematic alternative between clinging to the »future« as a progressive promise of modernization and a hopeless »futurelessness«, but rather to ask for a possible transformation of the onto-epistemology of the future itself. How are resistant performances of futurity possible that disrupt and thwart the »future« as a violent and excluding onto-epistemological machine of modernity? And how can common practices of futurity be grasped that are not directed towards the development of a »common future«?