Post- and Proto-: Constructions of the Future
Stefan Herbrechter

“Post-age”, or the age of the “post-” is probably best understood as the increasing cultural awareness of untimeliness. As such, the feeling of being “post-this” or post-that” is of course nothing new. It is part of the normal process of making sense of time, of narrativisation, historicisation, of “transforming time” and “timing transformations” – or, of constructing (a) future(s). The post is supposed to provide an “articulation” between a reconstructed past and an anticipated future. However, there is a much more complex and ambivalent logic at work in any “posting” process: the desire of situating oneself “after” (superseding something or someone) and at the same time “before” (in the sense of “being at the forefront of”, “following on from”) ends up subverting the neat chronological order which it presupposes. Philosophical postmodernism is probably the movement which has “played” out most rigorously notions like
belatedness, deja-vu, avant-garde, re-present-ation, (r)event, haunting, aporia, apocalypse, heterology, sequelisation, utopia, prolepsis  and so on. This talk will attempt to provide an overview of recent critical investigations of causality, chronology, teleology and metaphysics. It will perform a critical (re)reading of the “post-” and some of its implications for “our”  present and “future”; and it will do so in particular in the light of the latest, maybe last “post-” – the “posthuman” and “posthumanism”. More specifically, it will ask, “how did ‘we’ become post-?” and “what is the future of the post-?” by analysing the dialectic between “proto-” and “post-”, or between the future as to-come and as “always already” past.