Juliane Rebentisch on Living with the Ghosts of Tomorrow: Imaginaries of the Future in a Time of Ecological Crisis

FORART Lecture 2026

For the 2026 FORART lecture, Juliane Rebentisch will discuss imaginaries of the future in a time of ecological crisis.

How can we imagine the future in a time of crisis? What if the future no longer appears as a placeholder for the unforeseen? From an ecological perspective, the future today does not appear as an open space of possibilities, but rather as a space stripped of its broad horizons, colonized by the present. The lecture will shed light on the challenges this poses for both utopian and dystopian imagination and will discuss some of the humanist and posthumanist endgames of our time. Against this backdrop, I want to advocate for a conception of the future that is neither utopian nor dystopian but instead reformulates the project Jacques Derrida coined as “hauntology” in the 1990s. The concept offers a way to think through the multifaceted interconnections of past, present, and future in a way that can be made productive to understand our relation towards those not yet born, human and non-human, and productively confront the structural uncanniness of our own time, a time out of joint indeed.

Juliane Rebentisch is a professor of philosophy at Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, a regular visiting professor at Princeton’s German Department, and a permanent fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. From 2015-2018, she was President of the German Society of Aesthetics. In 2017, she was awarded the Lessing Prize of the City of Hamburg.

She is the author of Ästhetik der Installation [Suhrkamp, 2003; 9th edition 2024, with translations in English (Sternberg), Spanish (Caja Negra), and Brazilian (Esfera Pública Editorial/Ateliê Editorial, forthcoming)], Die Kunst der Freiheit [Suhrkamp 2012, 3rd edition 2019, with translations in English (Polity), Spanish (Ubu) and – of the part on Hegel – in Italian (Inschibboleth Edizioni)], Theorien der Gegenwartskunst [Junius, 2013, 5th edition 2021, with translations in Danish (Informations Forlag) and Spanish (Publicacions de la Universitat de València (PUV)], and Der Streit um Pluralität. Auseinandersetzungen mit Hannah Arendt [Suhrkamp 2022].

She edited a number of volumes on subjects that range from queer subculture and the philosophy of language to negativity and the effects of capitalism, from the problem of progress in contemporary art and the (non-)discipline of aesthetics to the epistemology of irrationality and paradoxes of equality. Currently, she is thinking about questions of perception, imagination, and representation in a time of ecological crisis.

Time and place: Sept. 10, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, Amalie Skram-salen, Litteraturhuset, Oslo