Imaginable Futures? : Temporality and Critique Now

Deals with the question of the im-possible and the political contingencies of hope and hopelessness.

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.