Is Another World Possible?

Abstract

In a world that conceives itself as a permanent transformation, an unending change, the question of the break with such a world and a possibility of another world seems to be excluded from the start. Following Badiou’s conception of the world as a horizon of possibilities, the author discusses the impasses of contemporary politics of emancipation confronted with the transcendental horizon of our world that presents itself as one capable of covering the whole terrain of possibilities and the sole generator of novelties. What looks like a fundamental challenge to contemporary thought and politics of a break with the present world comes from a re-actualization of the Hegelian idea of the “end of history” insofar as it posits a future that can exhaust itself in the present, either leaving no more future (teleological interpretation of the end of history according to which the stopping point of history is also its goal) or an indefinitely long future (apocalyptical interpretation according to which we are living in a permanent state of emergency). In rejecting both versions of the end of history since for both the future is posited in temporal terms, as something that fundamentally no different from the present, the author aims at sketching the parameters of a new emancipatory thought that refuses to tie the possibility of changing the existing world to the limits imposed by its horizon of possibilities and provides an alternative to contemporary political realism, and a way out of the contemporary impasse in which the possibilities for a future radical change of the present state of affairs seem exhausted. Considering Benjamin’s and Agamben’s conception of the revolution of time, the author teases out the implications of an alternative thought in non-temporal terms.