An open project enfolds future modifications, so catastrophe feels fated rather than surprising

Evidence

For the future to have a future, and because God himself remains still to come, should not his death, if it has ever taken place, be purely accidental? Absolutely unpredictable and never re-appropriable, never re-essentializable, not even by some endless work of mourning, not even, and above all, by God himself? A God who would have, without ever seeing it come, let an infinite bomb explode in his hands, a God dead by some hopeless accident, hopeless of any salvation or redemption, without essentializing sublation, without any work of mourning and without any possible return or refund, would that be the condition of a future, if there must be such a thing called the future? The very condition for something to come, and even that of another God, of an absolute other God? — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 171 (#expands, via linked claim)

The accumulation of books like Future Shock, the incorporation of habits of “futurology” into our everyday life, the modification of our perception of things to include their “tendency” and of our reading of time to approximate a scanning of complex probabilities — this new relationship to our own present both includes elements formerly incorporated in the experience of the “future” and blocks or forestalls any global vision of the latter as a radically transformed and different system. If catastrophic “near-future” visions of, say, overpopulation, famine, and anarchic violence are no longer as effective as they were a few years ago, the weakening of those effects and of the narrative forms that were designed to produce them is not necessarily due only to overfamiliarity and overexposure; or rather, this last is perhaps also to be seen as a modification in our relationship to those imaginary near futures, which no longer strike us with the horror of otherness and radical difference. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 624 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: More planning expands future possibilities and creates new insecurity — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 129; A foreshortened temporal perspective blinds people to accumulating catastrophe; A truly open future requires an accidental, non-appropriable event. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 171 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• A truly open future requires an accidental, non-appropriable event. #expands (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 171
• Enframing the present with futures-forecasting habits defuses the shock of imagined catastrophe #complicates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 624
• The future is neither fully visible nor invisible but frustrates anticipation by surprise #expands (0.82)
• More planning expands future possibilities and creates new insecurity #expands (0.78) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 129
• A foreshortened temporal perspective blinds people to accumulating catastrophe #qualifies (0.72)