Profesja i profecja. Czy przyszłość musi być przeszła?
Profession and Prophecy: Must the Future Be Past?

Summary/Abstract: The text considers the possibility of shaping a future that would not replicate pastpatterns. Sławek asks how to “think” the future so as not to fall into the trap of repeatingthe same mistakes. Human appears in this dis-orderly production-consumption orderas a knight-errant outmaneuvered by ideological endeavors that constantly re-establishand effectively sustain the errant order. This results in injustice, violence, and (as Isaiahsays) “sorrows.” Here is the lesson of Christianity: the effort of creating future, if it is notto be errant (or mad), must consist in detecting and deciphering the “errors” into whichwe have been maneuvered, thus the effort begins with a careful and vigilant observationand reading of signs so that they cannot “deceive” us. The frequently cited necessityto “watch” (“Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come;” Matthew24:42) equals this vigilant reading of the political text of the world. Sławek interprets thefuture described in the famous passage of Isaiah 11 as a result of thinking about whichwe could say after Adorno that it is an “act of negation, of resistance to that which isforced upon it,” which the philosopher also calls “unreconciled” thinking. This thinkingis unconquerable by that which strives for hegemonic and thus demonic power, henceretaining the predisposition for utopian thinking.

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