What can a world be that cannot imagine its own future? Far from being mere empty rhetoric, this question touches the very core of our condition. For what has been exhausted is not simply an era or a political paradigm, but the very capacity to project the future as a horizon of meaning. The devastation of the planet, the explosion of war and genocide, have placed our generation in an unprecedented position: that of passively awaiting a destruction that promises no redemption. And it is here that reflection must pause, not to lament, but to interrogate the structural feature of this suspension. The Latin word futurum originally designated what is to come, the future participle of esse with the nuance of a reality not yet present but charged with necessity. However, the Roman futurum does not coincide with the Christian expectatio nor with the avenir of secularized modernity. What has died in our time is not the future as such, but a particular way of relating to becoming: the one that, from messianic eschatology to enlightened progress, articulated waiting as a striving toward fulfilment. Today, on the contrary, we live under the domination of a time that no longer opens up, but rather prolongs itself in the mere persistence of what exists.
This time without a future is not, however, a natural inevitability. It is the product of a twofold operation: on the one hand, the conversion of all potential into actuality, such that nothing is left for the future; on the other, the transformation of politics into the administrative management of survival. When Augustine wrote that time is a distensio animi, distension of the soul, an extension of the soul between memory and expectation, he was still thinking of a subject capable of distributing itself among three temporalities. But contemporary man has lost this distension: their soul no longer extends, but contracts in the continuous present of a featureless actuality. Expectation has been replaced by anxiety, and anxiety does not project, but accumulates. The explosion of contemporary wars reveals this temporal contraction in its rawest dimension. Genocide no longer operates as a specific exception within a legal order that could be restored; it operates as a revelation that this order was nothing but a veil for structural violence. As Giorgio Agamben aptly observed, when the sovereign decides on a state of exception, they do not merely suspend the norm temporarily to save it: they demonstrate that the norm and its suspension are two sides of the same coin, a mechanism that governs life in its bare, unadulterated reality. War then ceases to be the ultimate rationale of politics and becomes its habitual form, the dark backdrop against which peace is but the illuminated surface.
In the face with this horizon of destruction without redemption, one might ask whether the question itself is flawed. Perhaps what we need is not to reclaim the future, but to unlearn our dependence on it. The Western obsession with the future—that teleology that runs from Roman Providentia to the historical laws of the 19th century—has always been, in a way, a form of colonisation of the present. The future functioned as a mechanism of capture: it legitimised the sacrifice of the now in the name of a then that never arrived. When that realm was revealed as a fable, the disillusionment was not only political, but ontological: the very meaning of waiting was lost. But there is, perhaps, a waiting that expects nothing. Gershom Scholem carefully distinguished between the messianic expectation of redemption and the mere anticipation of an event. The former is not oriented toward a specific content: the messiah is not a solution, but a transformation of the very field of possibility. In this sense, one of the deepest insights of our tradition—both in its Jewish dimension and in a certain Christian interpretation of parousia—is that salvation does not come to solve a problem, but to dissolve the framework in which the problem arose. What we can expect, then, is not a better future, but the end of the future as a category of governance.
Transforming our way of inhabiting the world is therefore neither a political program nor a moral slogan. It is, above all, a modification of the affective tone of our existence. Affects are not private psychological states: they are the vibrations through which a social body resonates with its own condition. When we speak of making affects reverberate, we are not invoking sentimental voluntarism, but a practice of attention. Paying attention to what affects us, to how it affects us, is the first act of resistance against the generalized anaesthesia that characterizes late-capitalist societies. This brings us closer to what we might call, following the path from Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze, an ethics of immanence. It is not a matter of rising above the passions to judge them from a supra-mundane tribunal, but of understanding them, of finding in their composition the point at which they transition from servitude to freedom. An affect is neither free nor enslaved in itself: it is so according to the disposition of the forces in which it is immersed. To resonate with emotions means to alter that disposition, to create the conditions so that sadness ceases to be passive resignation and becomes the starting point for a new configuration of desire. Desire, here, is not a lack: it is a positive force that expands the field of what a body can do.
The horizon that opens up from this transformation is not a horizon of destiny. The notion of destiny—destinare, to direct toward an end—implies a prefigured path, a route already laid out. But the horizon we are speaking of has no end. It is a horizon in the pictorial sense: the line where sky and earth seem to touch, knowing that such a meeting is an illusion of perspective. Approaching it is not approaching an end, but rather expanding the visible field. The political imagination that can emerge from this operation is not utopia: it does not design ideal cities. It is, rather, the capacity to see in what exists the cracks through which something unprecedented can erupt. This imagination, however, requires a precondition: the renunciation of security. Modern politics has been founded on the exchange between freedom and security, where the latter always prevailed. Hobbes saw this clearly: the Leviathan is justified because without it there is bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all]. But the price of security has been the surrender of the very power to act. The modern citizen is safe from the violence of others, but is also safe—protected, sheltered—from the very adventure of their existence. Security has revealed itself as the contemporary form of disempowerment.
Adventure, from its Latin root adventura, refers to what is yet to come, to what is to happen. It is not a calculated undertaking: it is a disposition toward the unexpected, an openness to the transformative encounter. The adventure of existence has no predetermined itinerary or established goal. It is more like a stroll than a journey, more like drifting than an expedition. And it is precisely in this drifting that life recovers its power, where the pure gesture—without productive end, without strategic objective—reveals the immanence of the political. The gesture, Agamben wrote, is what remains when the act has lost its support in the will to dominate. The world is not an object awaiting our action: it is the medium we inhabit, the atmosphere we breathe, the language we speak without having learned it. Transforming the way we inhabit it is the effect of active patience, of an attention that is sustained without demanding results. In a certain contemplative tradition—both Greek and Arab—seeing the world was already to transform it, because the way we see shapes what is visible.
Our generation, which has witnessed the end of grand narratives and the proliferation of small catastrophes, is perhaps uniquely positioned to rediscover this objectless contemplation. It is about understanding that all genuine action springs from a vision, and that all vision requires silence. Silence as the presence of language itself, in its pure, sonorous facticity.
Thus, the expectation of destruction without redemption that seemed to condemn us to passivity can be redirected into an active waiting, a vigil. A vigil of those who remain awake because they know the messiah arrives at midnight, but midnight can be any instant. The destruction announced in headlines, in weather reports, in images of ruins—that destruction is not the end, but the caesura, the interruption that allows us to begin again from another point. And that other point is not in tomorrow: it is here, in the density of this instant, in the force with which we make reverberate the affections that constitute us. Political imagination does not need a horizon of redemption to operate: it only needs the certainty that the present is always more powerful than any destiny assigned to it.
Tariq Anwar: Without a future
From Ficción de la razón (02/07/2026)
What can a world be that cannot imagine its own future? Far from being mere empty rhetoric, this question touches the very core of our condition. For what has been exhausted is not simply an era or a political paradigm, but the very capacity to project the future as a horizon of meaning. The devastation of the planet, the explosion of war and genocide, have placed our generation in an unprecedented position: that of passively awaiting a destruction that promises no redemption. And it is here that reflection must pause, not to lament, but to interrogate the structural feature of this suspension. The Latin word futurum originally designated what is to come, the future participle of esse with the nuance of a reality not yet present but charged with necessity. However, the Roman futurum does not coincide with the Christian expectatio nor with the avenir of secularized modernity. What has died in our time is not the future as such, but a particular way of relating to becoming: the one that, from messianic eschatology to enlightened progress, articulated waiting as a striving toward fulfilment. Today, on the contrary, we live under the domination of a time that no longer opens up, but rather prolongs itself in the mere persistence of what exists.
This time without a future is not, however, a natural inevitability. It is the product of a twofold operation: on the one hand, the conversion of all potential into actuality, such that nothing is left for the future; on the other, the transformation of politics into the administrative management of survival. When Augustine wrote that time is a distensio animi, distension of the soul, an extension of the soul between memory and expectation, he was still thinking of a subject capable of distributing itself among three temporalities. But contemporary man has lost this distension: their soul no longer extends, but contracts in the continuous present of a featureless actuality. Expectation has been replaced by anxiety, and anxiety does not project, but accumulates. The explosion of contemporary wars reveals this temporal contraction in its rawest dimension. Genocide no longer operates as a specific exception within a legal order that could be restored; it operates as a revelation that this order was nothing but a veil for structural violence. As Giorgio Agamben aptly observed, when the sovereign decides on a state of exception, they do not merely suspend the norm temporarily to save it: they demonstrate that the norm and its suspension are two sides of the same coin, a mechanism that governs life in its bare, unadulterated reality. War then ceases to be the ultimate rationale of politics and becomes its habitual form, the dark backdrop against which peace is but the illuminated surface.
In the face with this horizon of destruction without redemption, one might ask whether the question itself is flawed. Perhaps what we need is not to reclaim the future, but to unlearn our dependence on it. The Western obsession with the future—that teleology that runs from Roman Providentia to the historical laws of the 19th century—has always been, in a way, a form of colonisation of the present. The future functioned as a mechanism of capture: it legitimised the sacrifice of the now in the name of a then that never arrived. When that realm was revealed as a fable, the disillusionment was not only political, but ontological: the very meaning of waiting was lost. But there is, perhaps, a waiting that expects nothing. Gershom Scholem carefully distinguished between the messianic expectation of redemption and the mere anticipation of an event. The former is not oriented toward a specific content: the messiah is not a solution, but a transformation of the very field of possibility. In this sense, one of the deepest insights of our tradition—both in its Jewish dimension and in a certain Christian interpretation of parousia—is that salvation does not come to solve a problem, but to dissolve the framework in which the problem arose. What we can expect, then, is not a better future, but the end of the future as a category of governance.
Transforming our way of inhabiting the world is therefore neither a political program nor a moral slogan. It is, above all, a modification of the affective tone of our existence. Affects are not private psychological states: they are the vibrations through which a social body resonates with its own condition. When we speak of making affects reverberate, we are not invoking sentimental voluntarism, but a practice of attention. Paying attention to what affects us, to how it affects us, is the first act of resistance against the generalized anaesthesia that characterizes late-capitalist societies. This brings us closer to what we might call, following the path from Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze, an ethics of immanence. It is not a matter of rising above the passions to judge them from a supra-mundane tribunal, but of understanding them, of finding in their composition the point at which they transition from servitude to freedom. An affect is neither free nor enslaved in itself: it is so according to the disposition of the forces in which it is immersed. To resonate with emotions means to alter that disposition, to create the conditions so that sadness ceases to be passive resignation and becomes the starting point for a new configuration of desire. Desire, here, is not a lack: it is a positive force that expands the field of what a body can do.
The horizon that opens up from this transformation is not a horizon of destiny. The notion of destiny—destinare, to direct toward an end—implies a prefigured path, a route already laid out. But the horizon we are speaking of has no end. It is a horizon in the pictorial sense: the line where sky and earth seem to touch, knowing that such a meeting is an illusion of perspective. Approaching it is not approaching an end, but rather expanding the visible field. The political imagination that can emerge from this operation is not utopia: it does not design ideal cities. It is, rather, the capacity to see in what exists the cracks through which something unprecedented can erupt. This imagination, however, requires a precondition: the renunciation of security. Modern politics has been founded on the exchange between freedom and security, where the latter always prevailed. Hobbes saw this clearly: the Leviathan is justified because without it there is bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all]. But the price of security has been the surrender of the very power to act. The modern citizen is safe from the violence of others, but is also safe—protected, sheltered—from the very adventure of their existence. Security has revealed itself as the contemporary form of disempowerment.
Adventure, from its Latin root adventura, refers to what is yet to come, to what is to happen. It is not a calculated undertaking: it is a disposition toward the unexpected, an openness to the transformative encounter. The adventure of existence has no predetermined itinerary or established goal. It is more like a stroll than a journey, more like drifting than an expedition. And it is precisely in this drifting that life recovers its power, where the pure gesture—without productive end, without strategic objective—reveals the immanence of the political. The gesture, Agamben wrote, is what remains when the act has lost its support in the will to dominate. The world is not an object awaiting our action: it is the medium we inhabit, the atmosphere we breathe, the language we speak without having learned it. Transforming the way we inhabit it is the effect of active patience, of an attention that is sustained without demanding results. In a certain contemplative tradition—both Greek and Arab—seeing the world was already to transform it, because the way we see shapes what is visible.
Our generation, which has witnessed the end of grand narratives and the proliferation of small catastrophes, is perhaps uniquely positioned to rediscover this objectless contemplation. It is about understanding that all genuine action springs from a vision, and that all vision requires silence. Silence as the presence of language itself, in its pure, sonorous facticity.
Thus, the expectation of destruction without redemption that seemed to condemn us to passivity can be redirected into an active waiting, a vigil. A vigil of those who remain awake because they know the messiah arrives at midnight, but midnight can be any instant. The destruction announced in headlines, in weather reports, in images of ruins—that destruction is not the end, but the caesura, the interruption that allows us to begin again from another point. And that other point is not in tomorrow: it is here, in the density of this instant, in the force with which we make reverberate the affections that constitute us. Political imagination does not need a horizon of redemption to operate: it only needs the certainty that the present is always more powerful than any destiny assigned to it.