Chiasma Issue 3: Philosophy and The Future

Philosophy, being untimely, is inexorably embedded in time, dedicated to the future. For Chiasma’s third issue, we will look for essays engaging with the future – as an object for philosophy, as a hermeneutic of philosophy, and also in terms of the future of philosophy – from an interdisciplinary background.

As Nietzsche writes in Untimely Meditations, philosophy is always “acting counter to our time, and thereby acting on our time, and, let us hope, to the benefit of a time to come.” Essays should focus on, first and foremost, the “time to come,” but also the various ways in which this “to come” affects the now. The future is not merely an ever-receding horizon, but also an immanent object of thought that is itself conditioned by past and present. We invite submissions that explore these and other modes of thinking the future.

Some possible topics include:

• Philosophies of becoming and event: Badiou, Deleuze, Malabou, Nietzsche, Whitehead
• Futures of the human: transhumanism, posthumanism, hyperobjects, extinction
• Ecology and eco-criticism
• Rhetorics of the future: futurity in capitalist rhetoric, critique of the future as figure, the cultural role of futurity (Marx, Edelman, Zizek)
• Messianism and non-messianism: Benjamin, Butler, Derrida, Laruelle
• Utopianism and utopian studies
• Speculative fiction, science fiction, Meillassoux’s extro-science fiction, future histories
• Missed futures and lost causes
• Contemporary divergent futures: intersectionality in critical theory, ontological difference in ethnography and ethnology
• Revolution and new forms of social action: Occupy, Zapatista, etc.
• Future of the university: corporatization of the university, crisis of the humanities (Eileen Joy, Henry A. Giroux), alternative academic programs and modes (European Graduate School, New School, Global Centre)

Essays should be 5,000-7,000 words long and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Please send papers with abstracts of no more than 150 words to chiasma.asiteforthought@gmail.com by December 15.