When we perceive a failure of the future, when we begin to feel that we have no future, and we lose hope and experience acute anxiety. We do not like to have a dead end to our future. Shakespeare’s Hamlet portrays this anxiety through a scene where Halmet on encountering his dead father says : ‘ time is out of joint’ . Something is not alright about the flow of life. Life seems to be falling apart. We seem to experience a haunted present. The future being closed, we only have the past to rely on. The past irrupts through its specters. This makes our present feel strange and dissonant. We seem to be living in a state what has been rightly called After Future. by Italian thinker Franco Bernandi What is After Future is our experience of the present. The present is haunted by a sense of lost futures. The disappearance of the future has crippled our imagination. This is why the ability to hope is also disabled. We seem to have lost our capacity to imagine that the world could be radically different from what it is now. We have reached the end of history that was described by Francis Fukuyama. Time has ended. We have touched the sky. History has come to its closure.
Future is always experienced as a haunting. As it stays in the coming, it impinges on our present. Can we substitute the term future with Hope? Hope too stays in the coming and is, therefore, softly haunting the present. With the disappearance of future, perhaps, we are experiencing the disappearance of hope. We seem to be left with disoriented hope. This means future is no longer what it was and hope is also no longer what it was. Our ability to hope is weaken under this new condition that we find ourselves. We have to come to terms with the collapse of time. Time is indeed out of tune. We have stepped into what we may call After Future Society / Post-Future Society . We have become children of After Future. This means history has ended and we only seem to have a past and the present to work with . This is why we experience alienation or unwelcome in the present. It follows from the broken sense of time that has taken a hold over us.
Jacques Derrida tries to understand our broken experience of time. His understanding stays withing his project of overcoming privileging present in his thinking. He calls this privileging of presence as the Metaphysics of present. We never experience presence as fully given. It is also mixed with the past and future. to identify the same we have to examine the latencies and tendencies embedded in the present. Present, therefore, can never be fully present but we have the challenge to critically discern the same. Now that we are experiencing a disappearance of the future, we are experiencing a distorted present. We do not just feel dislocated from time, we also feel displaced from space. We might get an insight into this state of affairs, if we delve on the notion of non-place developed by Marc Auge. Maybe we are living in non-time and non-place in what we have come to call After/Post-Future Societies. Haunting, therefore, may be our resistance to the constriction and disappearance of time and space. We are drawn into a never ending now and homogeneous drapery of space with everything rewinding and recycling again and again. The constriction of time and space results in the constriction of hope.
Derrida’s turn to hauntolgy has inaugurated an important aspect of the ethical turn of deconstruction. It leads us to accept that our living present is not as self-sufficient as it appears to be . Therefore, we have to examine the latencies and tendencies that inhabit it and scrutinize how they animate our hope so that we can come to discernment of authentic hope. The scrutiny of the latencies and tendencies can lead us to envision alternate futures. Instead of staying confined to the dead end necronomy of After Future Societies, we have to find our autonomy that will become an out-nomy from Platonic cave of closure of a future. The push to out-nomy will enable us to exit from strangulating norms ( Nomy) of the After / Post-Future Societies and enable us to imagine alternate futures. These alternate futures will ignite new vistas of hopes and we might be enabled to break the barriers of the After/Post-Future Society and thus break open the closed future imposed by late capitalism on our societies. This means we have to awaken up to the fact that past is never really dead. The past is never past nor the future is never closed. The future is not just in the future. We anticipate it as well as walk towards it. We also access the past in the present and project a future. Therefore, we can indeed reimagine alternate futures and work to actualize the same in the living present without waiting for the opportune time to arrive. This sense of the present will give us energy to invest our present to cultivate alternate futures that are emancipative and work to bring them into actuality.
