We usually think of hauntings as traces from the past; but the future also haunts us with its hints of hope and danger, and its promises or threats of transformation. Especially in times of great social and technological change, we feel the imminence of the future in the form of gaps and leaps in temporal progression, and shifts in the horizon of what is unthinkable. Of course it is impossible to know what changes the future will bring; but the signs of this impossibility - the intimations of instability, the shifts of perspective, and the incipient breaks in continuity - are themselves altogether real. They are part of the conjuncture, part of what shapes the present. If the past persists in the present, then futurity insists in the present, defamiliarizing what we take for granted.