As I read it, Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus exhibits the temporality Kodwo Eshun calls the “futurepast.” In this temporal orientation, “the futuristic and the archaic reverse polarities” (0[010]). More precisely, switching perspective from white to black existence also flips the polarities between past and future. From the perspective of enslaved populations, the apocalyptic collapse of life on Earth that, for whites, seems like a future dystopia, that apocalypse has already happened (e.g., in middle passage). Eshun also describes something similar in his notion of a past potential future. Past potential futures are, effectively, inoperative futures, futures that in some way were halted or shut down. My feeling is that we are haunted by these unrealized futures; that these futures that did not come to pass are nonetheless with us.
Living out a past potential future is a way of practicing “non-alignment” with the so-called present. It might be a very productive way of imagining alternatives to “there-is-no-alternative” capitalist realisms: it may be difficult to imagine alternative futures in this timeline/articulation of the multiverse, but we can imagine plenty of past potential futures. (This is what I take Weheliye to mean by “the desire to create alternatives rather than an indeterminate future” (84).) In its anachronism, non-alignment is a way of living out of synch with Man’s present.
