There is a distinction in French between “avenir” (literally: “to-come” or “forthcoming”) and “futur”; the second one differs from the first in that the latter is more distant and indeterminate, designating an era that the livings of another era will not experience. To confuse the two in an anglicism, for the French linguistic authorities. “Avenir” is therefore a particularly close form of future: it is an imaginable, familiar future, structured on roles and trajectories that are already known or not very different from those we can observe. Thus we can imagine a student or a child as a fireman, lawyer, mathematician or mechanic. “Futur” is more indeterminate, and therefore difficult to imagine. The relative monotony of science fiction narratives illustrate this fact: always robots, flying cars, spaceships and obstacles similar to fairy tales or great classical literary works – a hero, a quest, obstacles, Good and Evil. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, for example, features a drug-addicted main character whose main quality is to be able to break through the firewalls of the digital matrix, like a burglar. This future is remote because it is bristling with unknown objects, resulting in exotic names and surprising possibilities, such as the regeneration of organs or the ability to replace them with robotic prostheses. The “futur” is also distinguished by its more narrowly temporal dimension; it designates what has not yet factually occurred. It has a finalised dimension: it designates what must have a history, because it is desirable, as opposed to what will not. Thus “Un futur sans avenir” (a future without future), by the group Oblomoff, which intends to show why the future promised by scientists is neither desirable, nor even possible, and therefore will shortly disappear; or the punks’ No Future. The nuance can also be heard in Bill Joy’s famous text, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us (2000), in which he explains that “Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology – are threatening to make humans an endangered species” (subtitle), and therefore, in essence, why they should have no future, which leads him to call for a moratorium. In contrast, the future is central to emancipatory thinking, insofar as, as thinkers as different as Bloch (1976) and Whitehead (1995) suggest, we aspire to harmony.