THE END OF THE PROJECT: futurity in the culture of catastrophe

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.

Keywords:

• messianism
• extinction
• death drive
• disaster
• Agamben

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.