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Abstract
Departing from the transformation of everyday life into “projects,” this article explores the notion of a future that is radically open, yet foreclosed by catastrophe, notably in relation to climate change. Drawing on Agamben's The Time that Remains, it explores an alternative futurity that interpolates a Pauline messianism with recent thinking on cosmological extinction and capitalism read through the Freudian death drive. In seeking to cheat an economic regime of a violence that paradoxically feeds off the failure to prevent its own destruction, the suggestion is that “the time of the project” itself must be brought to an end.
Notes
My thanks to the journal's anonymous reviewer for a perceptive and engaged response to earlier drafts of this paper.
The OED offers up an archaic usage of “projector” to describe someone as a “promoter of bogus or unsound business adventures,” a meaning which perhaps continues to haunt every self-designated “project” today.