Imaginable Futures?
Temporality and Critique Now
Deals with the question of the im-possible and the political contingencies of hope and hopelessness
- Delves into the question of critical temporalities, while reckoning with the antinomies of the im-possible
- Explores agonistic performativity and the aporias of utopia in light of racialized, gendered and classed injustice
- Takes critical theory towards new horizons for engagement, aesthetics, poetics and politics
Athena Athanasiou attends to the differential conditions of the im-possible as a way to map out discontinuous and fragile trails of critical and agonistic articulations despite the post-critical realism that organises the present.
How might we reclaim multiple contingencies, resonances and afterlives of hope and hopelessness for shifting the authorised terms of im-possibility when our present curtails the possibility of imagining differently? How to make way for sites of refuge and passages for critical temporalities?
Athanasiou seeks out ways in which the present has yet to occur in these critical times. She does this by putting forth the articulations of critical theory with the social poetics of loss, longing, despair, dissension and resurgent lifeworlds. Drawing on situated knowledges and counter-histories that have taken critical theory towards unfulfilled emancipatory visions for politics, poetics and aesthetics, she repositions future as a provisional, spectral and fugitive figure of critical thought and collective poesis.
Acknowledgements
1. Making way for critical futurities
2. At odds with the temporalities of the im-possible
or, what critical theory can (still) do
3. Im-possible breathing: On courage and criticality in the ghostly historical present
4. Counterpublic performativity, or instituting otherwise
5. Avowing the unfoundedness of hope
Athena Athanasiou elaborates a critical theory of hope in the most unhopeful of times. Discovering possibility at the site of contingency, vulnerability, impasse, even impossibility, this work addresses political struggles from the fight for a free Palestine to gender emancipation and a postcapitalist order. Athanasiou gathers and lifts us!
Rising fascism, war, genocidal violence, economic devastation, and climate collapse all breed an intense sense of foreclosed futures and an inability to imagine a shared world. In these probing exercises in critical thinking, Athena Athanasiou shows us how to rethink the possibilities of emancipation — of projecting and working toward shared futures and shared worlds that require moving beyond the optimism-pessimism binary.
