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 reinforces current modes of producing financial futurity, while it undermines the procedural 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.

This article argues that Foucault's account of the intersection between population, liberal economy, and biopolitics needs to be reconstructed in light of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population. Taking Malthus into account brings to the fore how deeply the question of population is tied to a colonial hierarchy that differentiates between dangerous 'savage' and economic 'civilized' life. 'Savage life' is depicted as a catastrophic form of life, which uses resources in a non-economic way due to its forgetfulness of the future. The article shows how this notion of 'savage life' broadens the concept of liberal economic governmentality. Most importantly, it highlights the role of passions and futurity for liberal governmentality. As the discussion of Malthus' texts demonstrates, the passions of hope and fear assume a crucial role for engendering futurity in the economic subject. As will be shown, while the more 'savage life' is considered to be made governable through fear, the more civilized life is supposed to be allured by hope. The article points out the implication of this analysis for Foucault's notion of biopolitics in relation to liberal economy.

This article analyzes how infrastructures take part in constituting Europe as a material collectivity. To that end, it modifies Bruno Latour’s sociology of associations in two respects: In order to theorize the relation between connectivity and collectivity, we consider the political rationalities that infrastructures embody and the political spatiality that they configure. This theoretical perspective is put to a test in exploring the “infrastructuralism” that lies at the core of the European project. After tracing both the operative and imaginary significance of infrastructure policy historically, the analysis concentrates on the most recent initiative to build trans-European energy networks. We demonstrate that the neoliberal configuration of infrastructural collectivity manifests itself in a specific spatial configuration of the market. Europe’s infrastructuralism defines the common as a topological space of corridors and high-voltage lines, which align territorial cohesion with fragmentation.

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