On the Eventual or a Question for the Present: If the Future Anterior is the Future in the Past, and the Past of the Future, wouldn’t it always already also be Past Perfect? - An Introduction

by
denise ferreira da silva 

What if what is to come, what is next, is not a point in the definite straight line of time?
What if the future is but that indefinite, uncountable and unnamed, undescribable and measurable possibilities gifted by every larger and minor practice of auto-defense and fugitivity that account for how black persons and populations still exist in this world after centuries under (threatened and unleashed) total violence?
What if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may (be coming) to an end?
What if we considered that this may well result from both ecological and social devastation as well as radical propositions and programs for another world, a better world, whatever that may look like?
We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come? How to imagine it collaboratively?

Habitual is probably the most appropriate word if the goal is to convey a sense of something that is done as a matter of course.

To be sure there may not be a more adequate word for conveying the sense of something that happens, repeatedly, and without deliberation or determination, to be more precise. There is a circularity to the habitual, which probably accounts for why it did not take on, in the 18th century, as a descriptor for that which is proper to the secular. The reasons are easily grasped. For one thing, there is no necessity in it, the force that renders it takes its own name from it, namely, force of habit, as we say (in Brazilian Portuguese, at least).

However, the fact that it is not an operator of necessity does not make the habitual any less of a problem for liberty or freedom.

Why?

Because of repetition.

That which repeats even if without the force of a law, if it is not ascertained as an effect of a will to which that happening brings pleasure or some other kind of satisfying effect, does not sit well with modern thinking.

For what it indicates is that something else may be at work which is neither an issue of freedom, nor an outcome of necessity. Something repeats just because it does or something is done over and over again because not doing so does not occur as a possibility or as something desirable.

Thinking with the past perfect and future perfect; or, more precisely, with the more-than-perfect, I find, returns the theme of the habitual under a different light — a black light!

Maybe.

(But these musings are still an effort to circumvent the holds of illuminism.)

Liberty and necessity, for one thing, do not immediately come to the fore. That which had happened before I did what I do as a matter of course, or, that which will have happened before I do something as a matter of course, is not expected to play any role in my doing. Because, as Hume insisted and Kant lamented, that which happens as a matter of course is not an expression of causality— be it either that of freedom or of necessity.

Habitual, if it weren’t for its association with conservation, tradition, lack of reflection, might have been a useful tool in the critical arsenal precisely because of how it renders time — in the sense of that on which something unfolds or happens — the background against which something occurs and not that which account for (explains) its occurrence.

For that which is a manifestation of the force of habit cannot be said, with certainty, to result from some other occurrence or existence (as an effect) or to be the actualization of a force that inheres in it or an essence.

When considering whether and how a sense of something that preceded something else without the attribution of efficient causality and that of something that is yet to occur and does not depend on that something else takes place before, I wondered about whether there is a term which, like habitual, would also obtain this sense of something that does not presuppose the form of succession and yet can be counted to occur nonetheless.

As I did so, I arrived at the eventual.

And that was not, of course, a straightforward road.

Perhaps, I wondered at first, there is no such a term. Or perhaps the very attempt at finding it militates against that which it would convey. In any case, habitual is definitely not, I soon realized, the term I was after.

For one thing, both for Hume and for Deleuze later, the considerations of habit were tied to an account of the subject as a thing in the world and not of the world. That has several consequences including the fact that the privileging of experience (the in-the-world) retains the privileged referent of the thing of freedom (and liberty) and its distinction from everything else, that is, from the referents of necessity.

By that I mean the habitual as something that refers to the subject, an always already a discrete I, something (but not a thing at all) which has permanence, even if given formally, that for whom experience itself becomes possible. For without something permanent, there is no way to ascertain an experience. And the same is the case for that to which the habitual refers, which is to a repetition. In any case, when permanence comes to the fore, certain metaphysical supports of the subject, such as substance, also enter the considerations, even if never directly engaged.

To be sure, the questions (that serve as epigraph) that guide the speculative practice more-than-perfect hopes to sustain target precisely that presumption of permanence that the habitual shares with what is of a causal (in the sense of being an effect of a cause) or an historical (in the sense of being an actualization of something that realizes in time) nature.

Future perfect and past perfect — both of which I would put under more-than-perfect — register, in my view, a lack of concern with permanence, and yet they presume that some of what is around at the moment of articulation had been (past perfect) and will be (future perfect) in place in the moment of occurrence.

That lack of concern with permanence does not mean a lack of interest or investment in existence. Quite the opposite for the fact that, in spite of the many times over their ‘world’ have been destroyed by state capital in the long history of colonial extraction and expropriation, Europe’s “others,” indigenous, originary peoples — both those populations whose territories were occupied and those whose bodies were kidnapped — have not disappeared, neither through dissolution nor through extinction.

I.

It might be indeed that the habitual, the causal, and the historical do and do not render the sense of existing that anchors both past perfect and future perfect tenses, which here I am calling the future in the past or the eventual as in what comes to pass as well as what might come to pass. Because it carries both the sense of what does (of the order of the event) and might (as what has yet to occur) — and not that of what has to or ought to occur — whether that is gathered in a causal, historical, or habitual manner becomes irrelevant.

When I first encountered the responses to the call for papers for the fourth issue of the Living Commons Collective Magazine, I wondered whether and how the eventual could be a companion ‘reader’ as an analytical device, a reading tool, one which instead of substituting would add another layer to the considerations of time these pieces already offer. I also thought this was a good way of enacting the orientation of Undercommons as a publishing experiment.

What follows, as the pages that precede this sentence, is not then an usual introductory commentary on a special issue, which would seek to convey a unity, and justify its existence, as a collection. Instead, I am taking the opportunity given by the pieces included here to speculate on the eventual as a descriptor for that sense of existence both the past perfect and the future perfect invite us to anticipate. And that is precisely something crucial for making sense of that which unfolds under colonial and racial subjugation, and the total violence associated with these political modalities.

For the eventual refers to that which falls between the actual and the possible — what ultimately happened; to what was capable of happening; what was pending in a situation; what was available for actualization; what was not yet decided — that is, of what has, had, or will come to pass or not. And, yet, the eventual is precisely what for the most part escapes, eludes, the tools and strategies available in our critical arsenal, the ones that remain, for the most part held by the terms of the (illuminism’s) real and the probable. For this reason, the pieces in this issue are even more crucial as gestures that reach beyond these limits to give a glimpse of what becomes thinkable when what happens (and what exists) is appreciated without the habitual, the causal, and the historical, which is also when the attention to the eventual allows the anticipation of what escapes the given range of possibilities when the first three guides our thinking. In sum, the eventual is not a concept articulated and, as far as I can tell, even contemplated by the pieces composing this issue.

What I do in the following pages then is nothing more than an experiment in which I read them to track and gather analytical gestures that can support the formulation of the eventual I am introducing here.

II.

Each of the essays in the first section of the issue renders the eventual in terms that relocate memory from actuality to possibility, as it presents in respect the body (Braz), territory (Lezama and Silva), and identity (Adioha).

In reading Rosana Paulino’s Assentamento, Denise Braz invites us into a sense of existence that exceeds both archive and inheritance. At first glance, in “Assentamento, Bodies, and Memories” the work appears to concern memory: the marks of colonial violence carried by Black women’s bodies. Yet what emerges through assentamento is not merely the persistence of the past in the present. Rather, the body appears as a site where what had come to pass and what may yet come to pass coexist.

The essay asks us to attend to memory not as representation but as material inscription. The body carries traces, wounds, gestures, and capacities that cannot be reduced to historical explanation. It does so in a way that allows us to read in Paulino’s figures, roots and branches, blood and earth, a rendering of ancestry and futurity in which they do not occupy separate temporal domains. Instead, they compose a field in which existence unfolds without the guarantees of permanence.

In this reading of assentamento—a practice of grounding, consecration, and collective renewal— I find elements that allow me to image the eventual as neither the realization of a prior cause nor the fulfillment of a historical destiny. Instead, moving it closer to the signifying range of possibility, Braz’s analysis allows me to read Paulino’s assentamento as naming a condition in which Black existence persists despite repeated attempts at erasure. The rooted body becomes less a monument to survival than a figuration of countless eventualities: lives that had been possible, lives that remain possible, lives that continue to insist.

Through this mediation of Braz’s text, my reading of Paulino’s work through the eventual finds that it does not simply preserve memory. It activates a sense of existence in which the distinction between remembrance and anticipation loses its force. The body becomes the place where the past perfect and the future perfect touch: where what had been and what will have been remain equally present.

Territory is the key context in Paula Lezama’s essay, “Demonic Waterways,” which follows the waterways of Colombia’s Pacific coast, tracing the practices of Las Mujeres de Ríos Unidos and the forms of life sustained through rivers, mangroves, rituals, songs, cultivation, and collective labor. The essay is concerned with extraction, displacement, and racial capitalism, but its deepest preoccupation lies elsewhere: with the conditions under which Black existence continues to generate worlds.

A crucial analytical displacement here is that the elemental, in this case water, guides the approach to memory. Not simply as environment or resource, but as a mode of existence, water is the essay’s central figure. It connects places without reducing them to continuity. It sustains movement without requiring destination. In this sense, water becomes an image of the eventual itself.

Precisely because of how water refigures possibility by rendering it impossible to read it in the signifying range of the effectual, Lezama can read the practices of the women not merely as resistance to dispossession but as affirmations of another way of inhabiting existence. Their rituals, subsistence practices, stories, and forms of collective organization do not simply oppose colonial extraction. They enact worlds that exceed its terms. The essay’s engagement with Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the demonic is crucial here. The demonic names those spaces where new genres of being emerge outside the normative (whether scientifically or historically rendered) scripts of modernity.

Read through the eventual, the rivers of the Pacific are not only records of historical struggle. They are carriers of what is to come but is already present in everyday life — the future in the past. Every tide, every song, every communal practice contains possibilities that have not yet been exhausted. The waterways become archives not of what happened but of what remains capable of happening. No longer under the shadow of scientific (effectual) or historical (essential) determination, futurity is not something awaiting realization. It is already moving through the present, the same as a current. The task is not to predict it but to learn how to travel with it.

Taking the thinking of memory to a distinct territory, Aquiles Coelho Silva’s essay “A Linha de Fronteira se Rompeu: a terra e a palavra” begins with a question about the city but quickly becomes something else: an inquiry into the relation between land, cultivation, Black existence, and the possibility of writing otherwise. Refusing the modern separation between humanity and space, subject and object, city and earth, the essay moves through poetry, hip-hop, philosophy, memory, and personal narrative to ask how one might cultivate life against the devastations of colonial development.

The text’s central figure is cultivation. Yet cultivation here does not signify productivity, improvement, or progress. Rather, it names a practice of care that exceeds ownership and utility. Drawing on my reflections on energy, value, and existence, as well as Indigenous, quilombola, and black teachings, Silva proposes cultivation as a form of rebelry: a sustained commitment to preserving and nourishing conditions of existence.

Read through the lens of the eventual, the essay is less concerned with recovering a lost past than with attending to forms of life that continue to insist despite coloniality’s repeated attempts at destruction. The city appears not as a completed geography but as a contested field composed by countless acts of labor, care, migration, memory, and refusal. The essay’s movement through music, family histories, neighborhood life, and ancestral practices enacts this very insight. The text itself becomes a cultivated space where voices, times, and experiences gather without being reduced to a single narrative.

What emerges is a profound meditation on existence as continuation. The essay repeatedly returns to those who did not disappear, who cultivated despite expropriation, who cared despite violence, who remained despite every demand for extinction. Cultivation therefore becomes an image of the eventual: not what ought to happen, nor what history guarantees, but what continues to come to pass through collective acts of care, memory, and persistence. The text invites us to imagine the future not as a destination but as a field continuously nourished by practices that sustain existence against the forces that seek to consume it.

Next, Chimee Adịọha’s essay, “Filming Same-Sex: Queer Film Subcultures and the Disruption of Surveillance in Nigeria,” examines queer filmmaking in Nigeria under the shadow of legal prohibition, public surveillance, and institutional censorship. Beginning with the emergence of the web series Boys Like Us, the essay traces how queer filmmakers create visual spaces for existence despite a social and legal landscape structured by the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act and the broader culture of anti-queer violence it has intensified.

Instead of focusing solely on repression, however, the essay turns its attention to what queer cinema makes possible. Through discussions of films such as Hell or High Water, Complicated, and Beyond the Closet, Adịọha identifies a growing constellation of practices that insist on representing queer Nigerian lives ethically, truthfully, and publicly. These films challenge what he calls a climate of “visual phobia” in which queer existence is rendered invisible, distorted, or criminalized.

The essay’s most significant contribution lies in its understanding of visibility. Visibility is not treated as mere representation. It becomes a struggle over who is permitted to appear, who may tell their story, and under what conditions existence can be publicly acknowledged. Drawing on Evelynn Hammonds, Jennifer DeClue, and Michelle Parkerson, the essay positions queer filmmaking as a practice of articulation against imposed silence.

Read through the eventual, these films do more than document queer lives. They create conditions for futures that have not yet fully arrived. The images, stories, and communities they assemble occupy the space between the actual and the possible. They are records of lives already being lived and rehearsals for worlds still struggling to emerge.

The essay therefore invites us to understand queer cinema not simply as representation but as a repository of eventualities. Each film opens a visual and affective space in which existence becomes imaginable otherwise. Against surveillance, censorship, and erasure, these cinematic practices insist that other forms of life have already begun to come to pass.

III.

The two conversations — Coletiva Gira’s with Conceição Evaristo, Natália Alves da Silva’s with Katherine McKittrick, and Lívia Lima da Silva’s interview with Tula Pilar Ferreira — that compose the second section of this issue also include treatments of memory, which invite further speculation of how a thinking of what happens guided by the eventual is not held by the (historical and theoretical) determination that haunts the actual and the possible when held by the effectual.

The conversation between Conceição Evaristo and Coletiva Gira revolves around silence, memory, invention, writing, and the remarkable semantic density of the Portuguese verb vingar. As Evaristo reminds us, vingar means both to avenge and to flourish, to take revenge and to survive, to answer violence and to continue living:

vingar = existência ÷ violência as well as violência ÷ existência

It is impossible for me not to find here a precise figure for the eventual.

Throughout the interview, memory is presented not as the recovery of a complete past but as movement through a zone between remembrance and forgetting. Silence is not absence. It is a dwelling place of memory, invention, and possibility. The space between what is remembered and what is forgotten becomes the site where stories emerge.

This understanding of memory aligns closely with the eventual. What matters is not the reconstruction of what happened. Nor is it the projection of what should happen. Instead, Evaristo attends to what remains active in the interval between them. Her account of Black literature insists that every death can become a demand for life; every silence can become a reservoir of speech; every act of erasure can become the condition for another form of emergence.

If the eventual names what comes to pass and what might come to pass, then vingar offers one of its most compelling expressions. It names neither victory nor redemption. It names persistence. A plant that flourishes. A story that survives. A population that remains. The interview therefore invites us to think of existence not as the realization of a predetermined future (as something of the order of the effectual) but as an ongoing practice of making life possible despite everything that would render it impossible (the horizon of the eventual).

Natália Alves da Silva’s conversation with Katherine McKittrick, “An Afro-Diasporic Conversation with Katherine McKittrick,” unfolds as an extended reflection on Black geography, memory, imagination, interdisciplinarity, and liberation. Throughout the conversation, McKittrick returns to a central concern: how Black people inhabit, transform, and imagine space. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s concept of “demonic grounds,” she argues that Black communities occupy positions simultaneously inside and outside dominant systems of knowledge allowing them to perceive the limitations of existing arrangements while generating alternative ways of living, belonging, and world-making.

Reflecting on Toni Morrison’s notion of the “site of memory” and Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “living memory of slavery,” McKittrick resists any simple equation between past and present. Memory is not a static archive. Nor is it a source of nostalgia. Rather, it is a layered and shifting geography through which communities engage loss, survival, and possibility.

Read through the eventual, the conversation becomes a meditation on how Black existence exceeds historical determination. The “living memory of slavery” does not mean that the past repeats itself unchanged. It means that the past remains active without dictating what must come next. Likewise, the site of memory is not a return to what was. It is a field in which imagination and memory work together to open new possibilities.

In this conversation I find several clues for the thinking of the eventual. For in McKittrick’s thinking black geographies are neither historical residues nor utopian projections. They are ongoing practices through which existence continually exceeds the limits imposed upon it. Memory, imagination, and place become modes of gathering what had been, what is, and what may yet come to pass. Through this gathering, liberation appears not as a final destination but as a continuous practice of world-making.

Lívia Lima da Silva’s interview with Tula Pilar Ferreira unfolds as a remarkable account of the making of poetry through domestic labor, migration, poverty, collective cultural practice, and an unwavering commitment to writing. Throughout the conversation, literature appears not as an individual vocation separated from ordinary existence but as a practice inseparable from work, friendship, motherhood, political struggle, and the shared infrastructures of the periphery. Rather than presenting artistic achievement as the realization of an exceptional talent, Tula insists that her trajectory was sustained by networks of mutual support, community organizations, libraries, magazines, and the saraus that allowed words to circulate, gather audiences, and gradually become a means of living.

Read through the eventual, this conversation offers another way of thinking what comes to pass without subordinating existence to either historical necessity or teleological fulfillment. Nothing in her account unfolds according to the logic of cause and effect that governs the effectual. The repeated insistence that literature changes lives should not to be read as an instrumental claim about the efficacy of art, but in terms of modes of existence that cannot be predicted from prior conditions yet remain inseparable from them. In short, Tula Pilar Ferreira’s account exemplifies the eventual through description of a mode of existence continually exceeds the limits imposed upon it, and does so not by overcoming them once and for all, but by composing, again and again, new conditions under which life, writing, and collective transformation may come to pass.

IV.

If with McKittrick it is possible to speculate the eventual in considerations of memory in spatial terms, the last three pieces in the issue invite us to consider how it puts pressure on its articulation as a representation of time by tackling what comes to constitute the colonial archive (Fernández), what is recalled under the guise of traditions (Ekeogu), and what images of the future guard in plain sight (Nathan).

Nohora Arrieta Fernández’s essay, “The Performance of Total Time”, begins with a classroom and a performance, but it also is a meditation on plantation time, memory, fugitivity, and refusal. Moving between student encampments in California, Renata Felinto’s performance Axexê da Negra, photographs of wet nurses, Brazilian modernism, and the afterlives of slavery, the essay asks how Black artistic practices interrupt the temporal order through which colonial violence reproduces itself. In it, Felinto’s burial of photographs and iconic images does not erase the archive. Instead, it alters its temporal status. The images cease to function as evidence of what happened and become participants in a ritual through which other possibilities emerge. What appears throughout the essay is a struggle between two temporalities: the long durée of colonial violence, the repetitive production of Black life as labor and the fugue—a movement that creates a gap, a suspension, a space in which another future may become imaginable.

When I read it through the lens of the eventual, I find an exploration of what remains undecided within the colonial archive. The buried image is both what had happened and what might yet happen differently. The gestures of Black women performers, artists, and students open a temporal field in which the future appears neither as destiny nor projection, but as something already active within acts of refusal. The essay therefore offers a powerful meditation on how Black aesthetic practices transform the archive from a record of violence into a repository of eventualities.

In the poem, “The Sacred Networks of the Black Radical Tradition: A Tapestry of Justice”, Onyekachi Ekeogu meditates on Black radical traditions as living networks of relation, memory, resistance, and world-making. By repeatedly returning to the labor of those whose names are absent from official histories — the enslaved, the displaced, the workers, the fugitives, and the dreamers — it renders their actions not as isolated acts of resistance but as contributions to a vast fabric that extends across time and space. The sacred, in this formulation, is not located in institutions, doctrines, or transcendence. And it is neither mystical nor metaphysical in a conventional sense. It is the dense web of connections through which Black life continues despite centuries of violence and dispossession.

Read through the lens of the eventual, the poem’s most striking gesture is its refusal to separate past, present, and future. Ancestors do not remain behind us; they rise through us. Liberation is not a deferred destination but an activity taking place now through every act of resistance, remembrance, and imagination. The future itself appears not as a horizon waiting to be reached but as something woven in the present through collective practice. What matters is neither what history promises nor what necessity demands. Rather, the poem attends to those possibilities continually generated within Black radical tradition. The tapestry remains unfinished — not because it lacks completion but because existence itself remains open to what may yet come to pass.

In Cynthia Nathan’s MFA thesis Exhibition, “The Space that Holds Us: Build from Memory, Fear, and the Hope of Something Softer,” hypervisibility, selective opacity, and Afrofuturism figure as conceptual and artistic tools for understanding how Black women navigate racialized systems of representation, surveillance, and exclusion. The text explores how Black visual artists create spaces in which Black existence can be encountered beyond the constraints imposed by dominant ways of seeing. At its center is the tension between visibility and invisibility. Hypervisibility names the condition in which Black bodies are constantly seen, scrutinized, and interpreted through inherited stereotypes, while simultaneously being denied complexity, interiority, and full personhood.

From the perspective of the eventual, the thesis is fundamentally concerned with the creation of futures. Afrofuturism functions here not as prediction but as a practice of world-building. The installations materialize possibilities that do not yet fully exist while demonstrating that they are already present as imaginative, affective, and aesthetic realities. The spaces described are not utopias located elsewhere. They are provisional enactments of what might come to pass. It therefore offers a compelling account of the eventual as a mode of existence between actuality and possibility. By constructing environments where different forms of seeing, feeling, and belonging become available, the work refuses the inevitability of existing arrangements. It treats imagination not as escape from reality but as a practice through which other worlds become sensible, inhabitable, and perhaps eventuate.

****

What if what is to come, what is next, is not a point in the definite straight line of time?
What if the future is but that indefinite, uncountable and unnamed, undescribable and measurable possibilities gifted by every larger and minor practice of auto-defense and fugitivity that account for how black and indigenous persons and populations still exist in this world after centuries under threatened and/or unleashed total violence?

QUOTE AS:
Denise Ferreira da Silva. On the Eventual or a Question for the Present: If the Future Anterior is the Future in the Past, and the Past of the Future, wouldn’t it always already also be Past Perfect? - An Introduction. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.4, July 2026. p. 1-17