Future Anterior is the name of a journal founded by Antonio Negri, Jean-Marie Vincent and others, the archives of which are online here. It’s also a grammatical tense that I don’t actually understand (je ne parle pas le francais) and which I’d love to have explained to me.
Althusser uses the term in his 1960 essay “On the Young Marx,” included in For Marx. Althusser footnotes an essay by Adam Schaff, who writes that “[t]he history of philosophy is written in the future anterior” (54). Althusser hates this idea, not least because Schaff uses it to argue for an wholeness to the body of Marx’s work such that the early Marx is still Marx, so to speak. This is not compatible with Althusser’s idea at the time of a break between early and mature Marx.
None of this is a problem for Alain Badiou. Badiou writes in his Metapolitics, in an essay on Althusser, that “Marxism doesn’t exist.” For Badiou, the series Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao-Althusser (and presumably any or every other series stretching back to Marx, including much less odious figures) is not one continuity but of continual ruptures. This is in a way a deepening of Althusser’s thesis of a break. There are so many ruptures - and “all of these ruptures are themselves different in kind” - that there is nothing but rupture in Marx and Marxism. “All of which makes ‘Marxism’ the (void) name of an absolutely inconsistent set, once it is referred back, as it must be, to the history of political singularities” (58). The same can be said of Marx. As Badiou writes, “There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself” (x). There is an infinity of infinities, or inconsistent multiplicities such that there is no (self)identity. (This is rather close to the Adornian dialectics of John Holloway.) Thus any consistency or one carved out of Marx(ism) is a product, something made rather than something found. The periodizations of future anterior and of young-mature Marx are no more valid than each other or any other.
Hi Nate - the future anterior is something we have in English to - it is the “will have been”. In philosophy, I suppose, it is the imagination of a future in which the present social relationships will have come to pass.
Comment by Barry — November 9, 2006 @ 5:29 pm
Thanks Barry.
Comment by Nate — November 11, 2006 @ 3:06 am
A friend of mine just sent me something he wrote about the IWW and multitude, in which he refers to looking backward in order to look forward. That struck me as relevant.
On some grammar web sites I found the following examples.
“By this time next month, Jose will have made his first million dollars.”
“By the time I see you at Christmas I will have graduated.”
“How long will you have lived in France by the end of next year?”
and an explanation that the point is “to express what will have happened or how long something will have happened up to a certain point in the future.”
Speech at the present posits two moments in the future, one succeeding the other. The perspective of the second, succeeding moment is adopted and then imaginatively looks back upon the first future moment.
A speaker in the present says that at some time two units of time (defined loosely) from now, the event one unit of time from now will be past.
1.
T(x+0) —- T(x+a) —– T(x+b)
2.
##### ————T(x+b)####
#####|#########|####
*T(x+0)###T(x+a)——####
where b is greater than a and * indicates the point at which the utterance using the future perfect occurs, in the present. (Ignore the #s, those are just to fill space. Formatting difficulties derived from my technincompoopery.)
“By this time next month, Jose will have made his first million dollars.”
“By the time I see you at Christmas” and “By this time next month” are T(x+b) while “I will have graduated” “Jose will have made his first million dollars” are T(x+a).
So, one imaginatively looks forward. Then imagines looking back from that future moment on another moment. That moment is still in the future from the point of the present. But from the point of view of the imaginatively occupied moment, the moment considered is in the past and is completed. By time I figure out how to phrase this clearly I will have forgotten why I started.
By the time there is a communist society, there will have been many more failed and successful revolutionary projects.
The second moment doesn’t have to be just in the future, I think. For instance:
By the time you find the truth, I will have been right for 40 years. If the moment of truth finding is 45 years hence and the moment of by be(com)ing right is five years from now then the times involved in this utterance are represented by diagrams 1 and 2 above (albeit crudely due to the poorness of the diagrams).
But say the moment if truth-finding is 20 years hence and my having been right began 20 years ago. In that case, the second of the three temporal moment, T(x+a) is prior to the present.
3.
T(x+a) —- *T(x+0) —– T(x+b)
4.
##########—-T(x+b)####
##########|#####|####
#####*T(x+0)######|####
T(x+a)—————————–#####
where b is greater than a and * indicates the point at which the utterance using the future perfect occurs, in the present. In this case, a is a negative number, because (x+0) is greater than (x+a)
Think more about this for later, and think about references to Benjamin on history (the proletariats power is its hatred, derived from memory) and the novels Looking Backward and Looking Forward and the Iron Heel.
Comment by Nate — April 28, 2007 @ 11:05 pm