There are in French (and some other languages like my own, Slovene) two words for the “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for the future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already present, while avenir points toward a radical break, a discontinuity with the present — avenir is what is to come (à venir), not just what will be. If Trump were to win against Biden in the 2020 elections, he would have been (before the elections) the future president but not the president to come.

In the contemporary apocalyptic situation, the ultimate horizon of futur is what philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of nuclear war, ecological breakdown, global economic and social chaos, etc. Even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” toward which our reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts which interrupt our drifting toward this “fixed point.” We can see here how ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it designates not the impossibility of change but precisely what we should be striving for — to break the hold the catastrophic “future” has over us, and thereby to open up the space for something new “to come.”