Evil Empire 115thus the global—economy in the 1980s, which transformed the world’s
principal source of liquidity to the world’s biggest debtor, the United States
has become utterly dependent on the rest of the world, including Russia
and especially China, to finance its deficits. The U.S. empire needs, but
does not fully control, neoliberal Empire—and the same is true of its rivals.
There has long been at the edge of the conquered world a curious
interweaving of empires and monsters, the production of one depending
on the production of the other. The periphery of the map always says
“Here be dragons,” or so we imagine. In reality, the 1510 Lenox Globe
is probably the only historical map actually to bear the warning “HC
SVNT DRACONES”—and even that might be less an intimation of
peril than a note of where in East Asia Komodo dragons can be found.
Nevertheless, cartographers have long doodled allegorical wyrms in the
margins of their charts, dotted the seas with mermaids and water-spouting
leviathans, and sketched strange beings in distant lands: asps, basilisks, can-
nibals, cynocephali, elephants, hippopotamuses, lions, scorpions, serpents,
walruses—even the occasional dragon. It seems that wherever an empire’s
reach finds its limit, whether on Earth or in space, monsters sneak in.
jacques derrida talks about two different notions of the future. There is
“the future” (le futur), the programmed, prescribed, predictable unrolling of
the present so as to perpetuate what already is, to extend the way things are.
This is the future in which capital relentlessly expands and empires cling on,
locking in and deepening existing relations of power. The immiseration of
the peripheries. The financialization of everything. The sixth mass extinction.
The carbon we have already burned, suspended in the air around us, and
that which is still in the ground but which we cannot avoid burning. And
then there is “the to come” (l ’avenir), the unpredictable future that cannot