Theory, Culture & Society 2015, Vol. 32(2) 107–129 ! The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276414560416 tcs.sagepub.com Special Issue: Governing Emergencies Future Emergencies: Temporal Politics in Law and Economy Sven Opitz and Ute Tellmann University of Hamburg Abstract This article develops a notion of the ‘politics of time’ in order to analyse the effects that imaginations of future emergencies have in the fields of law and economy. Building on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social time, it focuses on the multiplex temporalities in contemporary society, which are shown to interact differently with the ‘emergency imaginary’. We demonstrate that the apprehension of the future in terms of sudden, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events rein- forces current modes of producing financial futurity, while it undermines the pro- cedural rhythm and retroactive sentencing of liberal law. As a whole, the article supplements the analysis of the ‘politics of truth’ prevalent in the current debate about precaution and pre-emption with a theoretical perspective on social temporality. Keywords derivative, emergency, Luhmann, money, pre-emption, risk, ticking bomb, time Our temporal frames of the future have shifted towards an ‘emergency imaginary’. It depicts the future in terms ‘of sudden, unpredictable and short-term phenomena’ (Calhoun, 2004: 376, 392). By calling this form of futurity an ‘imaginary’, Craig Calhoun highlights that we are dealing with a widely shared and affectively charged discursive structure, which frames our comportment towards what is given and what is ahead in a very specific way. It presents the future in a particular format: as a dis- ruptive, potentially catastrophic event. This imaginary of the future pro- liferates. It can be found in different fields such as climate change, terrorism, financial crises or epidemiology. In all these domains, we expect catastrophes that we need to survive (Anderson, 2010a; Aradau and van Munster, 2011; Cooper, 2006; de Goede, 2008; Guyer, 2007). We are faced with a transversal threat-form that ‘operates analogously Corresponding author: Sven Opitz. Email: sven.opitz@wiso.uni-hamburg.de Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/ by guest on March 17, 2015 tcs.sagepub.com Downloaded from