Community-Based Proleptic Environmentalism: Zero-Waste and Kafka’s ‘Weg-von-hier’

This chapter analyses Ouni, a zero-waste community-run ethical shop in Luxembourg, which offers a novel way into theorising the prefigurative politics of present transformation. It develops and mobilises the concept of a ‘proleptic event’—the way environmental communities imagine and perform a near-future event to inspire action and mobilisation. For Ouni, their proleptic event was a future world shorn of fecund harvests, which they then rhetorically brought into the present or immediate future, and then reacted to, or away from. The chapter outlines the initiative, Ouni’s context, aims, and orientations, attending to what actors want to transform and how. Such groups can be seen as moving away from potential futures, reacting to a proleptic event. The chapter uses a short story from Kafka to develop a frame to understand this aspect of community-based prefigurative transformation. Adopting a proleptic framing centres the way intersubjective bonds of togetherness are often formed through journeying together: a more active, collective, and deconstructive vision of transformation than ‘being the change one wishes to see in the world’.