Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis: Political Disillusion, Democracy, and Utopia [1 ed.] 9781032411033, 9781032411040, 9781003356271

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“Confronting the catastrophes of the 21st century, Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis brilliantly illuminates how past defeats can stoke the imagination of emancipatory futures. Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin’s powerful essay collection explores the work of artists, activists, and intellectuals who have refused to accept injustice as fated. This is political thinking at its most vital”. Lawrie Balfour, James Hart Professor of Politics, University of Virginia, author of Imagining Freedom: Toni Morrison and the Work of Words “Despair and anxiety seem to be the presiding affects of our time, and for good reasons too. And yet, revolutionary love and hope have been the vectors of all great social changes. This collection of uniformly excellent essays revisits the meaning of political hope in our dark democratic times. Starting with the realization that hope presents paradoxical possibilities—of spurring revolutionary action, as well as being politically counterproductive—the contributors to this volume theorise hope in capacious and challenging ways. Through an exploration of political traditions that question the hegemony of western political thought—be they Afromodern, queer, Latinx, or feminist—the volume equally contributes to current decolonial imperatives to resignify key political theoretical concepts”. Srila Roy, Professor of Sociology, the University of the Witwatersrand, author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement “This thought-provoking collection of essays offers help on one of the most fundamental issues of our age. Essential reading for all those wanting to rethink hope and its importance”. Ann Rigney, Professor of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, co-editor of The Visual Memory of Protest “Rejecting simple narratives of either progress or decline, this exciting volume brings a multitude of voices to bear on the question of hope today. From a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives—including Marxist, Black, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and activist orientations—its contributors examine how past failure and present disappointment may be mined for a brighter future of emancipatory politics. At once erudite, challenging, and invigorating, the essays in Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis illuminate both the complexity and the ever-present actuality of utopian vision in the ongoing struggle for a more just and equitable world”. Loren Goldman, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Principle of Political Hope

Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis takes up the question of how to theorize and revive revolutionary hope in the present era of political disillusion. The collection consists of new cutting-edge research essays written by an interdisciplinary mix of established and emerging scholars, bringing together a wide range of intellectual traditions and perspectives. The contributors confront the challenge of relearning hope by exploring the politically transformative potential of past disappointments and defeats. They encourage us to acknowledge, come to terms with and learn from the complexities, failures, and losses entailed in resistance, and to consider them as an occasion for rethinking the established patterns of revolutionary thought. Specifically, the essays question how engagement with past disappointments, losses, and defeats can help us creatively respond to the difficulties and failures of resistance—and inspire our imagination of revolutionary possibilities in the present. Written in an accessible tone without theoretical density or academic jargon,  Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis provides theoretical and historical contexts to what it means to engage in left activism today. A vital resource for those interested in intellectual history, political history, radical politics, democracy, and contemporary political theory. Maša Mrovlje is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are located within contemporary political thought, with a specific emphasis on theories of resistance and resistance movements. She is the author of Rethinking Political Judgement: Arendt and Existentialism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Her articles appeared in leading international journals, including The Journal of Politics, Millennium, Philosophy & Social Criticism and Political Theory. Her current project, entitled Disappointment: Reclaiming the Unfulfilled Promise of Resistance, explores the political potentials of disappointment within the modern revolutionary tradition. Alex Zamalin is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is the author of six books, African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Palgrave, 2015), Struggle on their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), Antiracism: An Introduction (NYU Press, 2019), Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (Columbia University Press, 2019) which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Title by the American Library Association, and Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility (Beacon, 2021). His most recent book is All Is Not Lost: 20 Ways to Revolutionize Disaster (Beacon Press, spring 2022). Zamalin is also a co-editor for a collection of scholarly essays aimed at reinterpreting the American political tradition, American Political Thought: An Alternative View (New York: Routledge, 2017). His scholarly essays have appeared in various edited book collections and journals like  New Political Science,  Contemporary Political Theory and Political Theory. Zamalin has been a guest on NPR and MSNBC and his work has been featured in The Guardian, Literary Hub, Religion Dispatches, ESPN’s Undefeated, and YES! magazine.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

176 Radical Civility A Study in Utopia and Democracy Jason Caro 177 Science Meets Philosophy What Makes Science Divided but Still Significant Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen 178 Civilization, Modernity, and Critique Engaging Johann P. Arnason’s Macro-Social Theory Ľubomír Dunaj, Jeremy C.A. Smith and Kurt C.M. Mertel 179 Liberty, Governance and Resistance Competing Discourses in John Locke’s Political Philosophy John Tate 180 Revolution and Constitutionalism in Britain and the U.S. Burke and Madison and Their Contemporary Legacies David A. J. Richards 181 Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists Vasilis Grollios 182  Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis Political Disillusion, Democracy, and Utopia Edited by Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT

Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis Political Disillusion, Democracy, and Utopia Edited by Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-41103-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-41104-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35627-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsix Notes on Contributors x Introduction

1

MAŠA MROVLJE AND ALEX ZAMALIN

PART I

Rethinking the Relationship between Loss and ­Revolutionary Politics9 1

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism

11

LUKAS SLOTHUUS

2

The Promise of Solidarity: Learning from Failure with Rosa Luxemburg

25

MAŠA MROVLJE

3

Between Loss and Hope: Reflections on the Black ­Revolutionary Tradition

39

ALEX ZAMALIN

4

Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity in Latin American and African Narratives SARAH M. QUESADA

49

viii  Contents PART II

Negative Affect, Mobilization, and the Troubles of Democracy61 5

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past

63

BRIGITTE BARGETZ

6

Despair and Other Political Feelings

79

DEBORAH B. GOULD

7

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis: Politics as Breathwork

95

DAVID W. MCIVOR

PART III

Facing Failure and Pessimistic Seductions109 8

Responding to Failure: The Case of the US Disability Rights Movement

111

GISLI VOGLER

9

Beside(s) Hope: A Thought Experiment on (Black) Life, Death, and Literary Puncturing

125

JOSEPH WINTERS

Index139

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our editor, Natalja Mortenson, our colleagues, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. We would also like to thank the authors in the collection, whose essays provide inspiration for reimagining alternative futures. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant agreement no. 847693.

Contributors

Brigitte Bargetz is Senior Researcher in Political Theory, History of Ideas, and Political Culture, and the coordinator of the International Populism Research Network at Kiel University. She is also the principal investigator of the project New Charity Economy Through the Lens of Affective Statehood: Volunteering for Food Banks and Social Supermarkets in Austria (Vienna University of Economics and Business). Her current research engages with contemporary theories of democracy and (authoritarian) populism, transformations of the welfare state, as well as feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories on political feelings. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume The Complexity of Populism. New Approaches and Methods (Routledge, 2023, with Paula Diehl). Deborah B. Gould is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the role of emotions in social movements. She is currently working on her second book on political emotion, The Not-Yet of Politics. She was involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, and was a founding member of the research/art/activism collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed. David W. McIvor is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. His primary research interests are in critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and deliberative democratic theory and practice. In his book Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss (Cornell University Press, 2016), he has offered a framework for analysing the politics of mourning, with a specific focus on the ongoing activism surrounding racial injustice in the United States. Maša Mrovlje is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are located within contemporary political thought, with a specific emphasis on theories of resistance and resistance movements. She is the author of Rethinking Political Judgement: Arendt and Existentialism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Her articles appeared in leading

Contributors xi international journals, including The Journal of Politics, Millennium, Philosophy & Social Criticism and Political Theory. Her current project, entitled Disappointment: Reclaiming the Unfulfilled Promise of Resistance, explores the political potentials of disappointment within the modern revolutionary tradition. Sarah M. Quesada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her main interests are literatures of the Global South, specifically Latinx, Latin American, and African literatures. Her recent book, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines some of the most widely read Latinx and Latin American authors of the last 50 years and their connections to African writing, Black internationalism, and decolonization movements. Lukas Slothuus is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. His research interests include critical theory, social movements, and the climate crisis. He has published on these topics in leading international journals, including  Political Studies and Constellations. He co-hosts the Historical Materialism Podcast. Gisli Vogler is Head of Social Sciences at the Centre for Open Learning, University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on contemporary social and political thought, with an emphasis on conceptualizing and evaluating distinctly human responses to the problems of late modernity. His forthcoming book argues for a greater emphasis on people’s engagement with reality, alongside a concern with overcoming injustice, in debates on complicity in systemic injustice. His recent work has contributed to debates on power, judgement, and resistance and he currently works on responses to the utopian features of ableism within the disability rights movements. Joseph Winters is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies at Duke University. His interests lie at the intersection of Black religious thought, African-American literature, and critical theory. His first book,  Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press, 2016), examines how Black literature and aesthetic practices challenge post-racial fantasies and triumphant accounts of freedom. Alex Zamalin is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University. He has written extensively on the African American political thought, Black utopianism, the Black tradition of civic radicalism, and their role in the struggles for racial justice, historically, and in the present. His most recent book project, titled All Is Not Lost: 20 Ways of Revolutionising Disaster (Beacon Press, 2022), looks at how disasters and crises can be leveraged into new political opportunities for emancipatory politics.

Introduction Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin

For proponents of emancipatory social and political transformation, democratic politics is currently characterized by profound disappointment, even despair, over the lack of viable political alternatives (Brown 2015, 220–22; Corey 2005; Sokoloff 2017). The increasing influence of right-wing populist parties and factions, deep global socio-economic inequalities, the continued disenfranchisement of already marginalized groups, and the growing climate emergency leave little space for hope. While forces of political resistance are mobilizing for change, they seem unable to shake the status quo. In the wake of the failed 20th-century projects of revolutionary transformation, the affective landscape of progressive politics is characterized by a sapping of revolutionary energies and a narrowing of utopian possibilities. In the face of this despairing landscape, it has become more necessary than ever to relearn hope and rekindle our sense of freedom and revolutionary possibility in the absence of utopian visions that have sustained us in the past. This collection is a study of the meaning of political hope in dark times. Political hope has been a staple of political theory, from antiquity to modernity. From Plato’s narrative in the Republic of just city to St. Augustine’s promise of the Kingdom of Heaven; from liberalism’s unflinching belief in progress to socialism’s conviction in revolution. The centrality of hope in political thought and action makes sense. Hope is connected to questions of possibility, transformation, and world-building. As an affective orientation, hope motivates political actors to imagine alternative futures despite constraints in the present. And yet, hope has been subject to significant critique. Hope provides an image of a world beyond, which conjures images of the nonrational, the spiritual, and the teleological. Politics arguably demands hope, but hope can, as much as anything else, become a substitute, if not deterrent, for action. Investing in the faith that a better world is possible can lead to a feeling of complacency (e.g. “if we just wait, all will be set right, as the arc of history moves toward justice”). Or hope can, just as well, become so affectively overpowering that it cannot stand the reality of failure (e.g. “we believed in the possibility of a better world, but it never materialized; therefore, our faith was misguided”). Hope, in other words, DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-1

2  Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin presents political theorists with a conundrum. Hope is a powerful source of political behaviour, especially revolutionary action, as it is limiting and potentially counterproductive. Especially when hope is most necessary—in troubling, dark times, when the stakes are the highest—is when it can become inadequate, or be abandoned. How should we think about the meaning of political hope today? What might hope look like? How can we mine the past for insights? Is it possible to reformulate how we think about hope? The contributors to this volume aim to take up the question of how to theorize hope in times of crisis. They take up this challenge by exploring the politically transformative potential of past disappointments and defeats, through generative sources, perspectives, and frameworks often missing from the canon of Western political thought. These include Afromodern, queer, Latinx, and feminist perspectives. These traditions are by no means exhaustive in challenging mainstream political thought (there are also important indigenous, Islamic, Arab, and Buddhist perspectives, which reframe the hegemony of Western thought), but they offer a glimpse of the ideological plurality and global reach of political thought, as well as resources for engaging in comparative approaches that expand the meaning of the political. The authors in this particular volume join a growing body of scholarship, which tries to resignify key political theoretical concepts through alternative traditions, which challenge the idea of a universal subject and ground theory through the embodied experiences of subjects for whom resistance and critique were never an abstraction. In excavating the insights of these critical traditions, we see that hope remains a crucial and powerful concept, but that its utility depends upon the particular voices, histories, and experiences that give it meaning. Rather than trying to resurrect old narratives of universal human emancipation, the authors seek to revive hope through a sober reckoning with past losses and failures that cannot be harmoniously integrated into tropes of progress and redemption. Delving into the historicity and contingency of our affective attachments, they move beyond lamentation of failure. They encourage us to acknowledge, come to terms with and learn from the complexities, failures, and losses entailed in resistance, and to consider them as an occasion for rethinking the established patterns of revolutionary thought. Specifically, they ask how an engagement with past disappointments, losses, and defeats can help us creatively respond to the difficulties and failures of resistance—and inspire our imagination of revolutionary possibilities in the present. The purpose is to interrogate the hopes, disappointments, and unfulfilled promises engendered by past revolutionary projects and explore how they can help us face up to the challenges of freedom and political action in the present era of political disillusion. Now is the time for such a collection, especially in the wake of contemporary crises—­ environmental, racial, political, and socioeconomic. The collection consists of unpublished cutting-edge research essays written by a mix of established and emerging scholars. It is essentially interdisciplinary,

Introduction 3 bringing together perspectives from political and social theory, the history of political thought, sociology, cultural studies, and literature. The contributions address three interrelated sets of research objectives. Conceptually, they elucidate how an engagement with past disappointments, losses, and defeats can help us reinvigorate a form of hope, freedom, and collective action that can face up to the difficulties of resistance in the current climate of political disillusion. What do past failures tell us about the complexities and moral dilemmas of resistance in conditions of systemic oppression? How can they help us problematize received ideals of revolutionary action and rethink resistance beyond the confines of sovereign agency, unified subjects of resistance, and the necessity of progress? Normatively, they explore how an engagement with past defeats and failures bears upon our imagination of revolutionary possibility today. How can past losses encourage us to avoid the twofold danger of utopian hope and cynical despair? What are the risks associated with lingering on past failures? Empirically, the papers exemplify the political value of engaging with past losses on particular examples of protest movements and resistance politics. They delve into the grassroot knowledges about creatively responding to failure and examine how these practical insights can enrich our political imagination in the present moment. The volume’s first major contribution is that it moves beyond discourses of inevitable failure and fatalist resignation, and delineates a politically productive, mobilizing way of engaging with past defeats to elucidate ways of thinking about hope. A growing number of critical scholars and activists have engaged with past losses and failures as propitious sources for rethinking the forms of critique for the contemporary era (Winters 2016; Eng and Kazanjian 2003; McIvor 2016). However, narratives of loss, failure, and tragedy can have a stifling effect on our sense of political possibility, quenching any residual hopes for revolutionary societal transformation (Scott 2014). Against such tendencies, the contributions in this volume challenge the fatalist narratives of the futility of resistance and the impossibility of radical change. Their engagement with past losses dispenses with the idealized visions of resistance as immediately effective—visions that breed disenchantment at the first brush with the complexities, setbacks, and failures of resistant action. Yet they reveal creative ways of reviving hope in the present era of political disillusion and delineate alternative possibilities for individual and collective action within the strictures of the existing system. Scholars and students will find value in these essays for thinking through questions of resistance, political transformation, and revolution in contemporary politics in both canonical texts and historical examples. The volume’s second major contribution is that it significantly expands the focus, scope, and purchase of the debate. For a long time, the problem of shrinking horizons of hope and revolutionary possibility was limited to lively debates within the Marxist tradition of political thought, with a specific focus on the question of how to respond to the condition of left melancholia lingering in the

4  Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin wake of the failures of communism in the Soviet bloc (Brown 1999; Jonathan Dean 2015; Jodi Dean 2012; Wright 2010; Mrovlje 2023b). Recently, several important voices have broadened the debate to include previously neglected perspectives and forms of struggle. They have examined the political value of melancholia in feminist politics (Roy 2009); explored the potential of grief over a democracy lost to reinvigorate democratic sensibilities and commitments (Tambakaki 2021); looked to the Black tradition of political thinking and literature to revivify a hope tempered by memories of past suffering, yet capable of mobilizing collective struggles for freedom and justice (McIvor 2016; Winters 2016; Zamalin 2019); revealed the prospects of hope following the disappointments of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutionary uprisings (Allam 2020, 2018; Pearlman 2013; Wedeen 2019; Jumet 2017; Mrovlje 2023a); and inquired into the productive function of utopian and dystopian imagination in the face of the environmental collapse (Thaler 2021). This volume broadens and deepens the debate further by gathering in one place contributions from varied intellectual traditions and historical contexts. The contributors add novel, critical engagements with and re-readings of traditional Marxist arguments about failure and defeat; examine the political significance of loss in previously unexplored terrain, such as in relation to newly emerging forms of solidarity and radical politics; and disclose innovative affective registers through which to illuminate the contemporary crisis of hope, such as breathlessness, resilience, and terrestrial woundedness. The volume’s third major contribution is that it grounds critical analysis in concrete struggles for justice and equality. The contributors reject the stance of detached philosophical speculation, seeking to manage, control, or evaluate practical examples of resistance from an abstract, external viewpoint. Instead, they develop theoretical insights into the political value of past defeats “from and with” concrete struggles on the ground (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 20). The contributors explore the conjunction of high aspirations and deep disappointments within the modern revolutionary experience in conversation with a number of practical examples of resistance—from the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century to the multipronged struggles for justice and equality today. Staging a dialogue between theoretical and practical insights into the hopes and disappointments engendered by past revolutionary projects, the contributors explore how practical, grassroot engagements with loss can enrich our theoretical imagination in turn. The collection is structured as follows. The first part engages with several core concepts in revolutionary theory, such as hope, fatalism, solidarity, and Third World leftism, and aims to rethink them by engaging with losses and failures as constitutive parts of revolutionary politics. The second part addresses the prescient concern with how to revive democratic sensibilities given the current troubles of democracy, and specifically the profound disappointment with the emancipatory possibilities of contemporary democracies. And the third part takes up with the question of how we might be able to reorient and kindle the

Introduction 5 emancipatory politics of resistance, activism, and change in the face of defeat and pessimistic seductions. Part I: Rethinking the Relationship between Loss and Revolutionary Politics In “Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism”, Lukas Slothuus turns to the Italian political theorist, Antonio Gramsci, to consider him not as a theorist of disillusion but a critic of fatalism. Gramsci is usually read as an astute interpreter of the concept of hegemony, which is to say, how cultural domination reinforces economic domination. Slothuus, however, sees Gramsci as an innovator of resistance. Our moment is characterized by a profound sense of disappointment. Gramsci’s reflections, specifically on questions of affect and faith, offer a way forward. In “The Promise of Solidarity: Learning from Failure with Rosa Luxemburg”, Maša Mrovlje turns to Rosa Luxemburg to explore how solidarity can help revolutionaries face up to the fallibility of revolutionary politics. Long seen as the critic of a vanguard, elite-driven revolutionary politics (namely of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks), Luxemburg, in this essay, also emerges as an astute observer of the way failure is a productive space of engagement. Her democratic notion of solidarity, Mrovlje argues, can creatively engage with failure by nourishing a responsiveness to ever-changing reality, encouraging a rethinking of the relationship between means and ends, and confronting the complexities of what liberation might mean. To gain purchase on a recent example of this theoretical reframing, Mrovlje reassess the legacy of Occupy Wall Street. The experimental, creative, and prefigurative nature of the movement, Mrovlje explains, confirms the promise of Luxemburg’s democratic image of solidarity and its productive engagement with failure. In “Between Loss and Hope: Reflections on the Black Revolutionary Tradition”, Alex Zamalin extends the rethinking of hope and failure, through an engagement with the Black revolutionary tradition. The direct confrontation with the twin problems of racial domination and white supremacy in Black political thought has provided a novel framework through which to examine political strategy, temporality, and activism. Rather than imagine struggle through a progressive lens, revolutionary Black thinkers imagine the dialectical interconnectedness between loss and hope, where one informs and cannot exist without the other. In taking seriously this claim, contemporary democratic theorists can expand their thinking about the politics of agonistic struggle. In “Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity in Latin American and African Narratives”, Sarah M. Quesada offers a reconsideration of Third World leftism through textual memorials of south–south solidarities, their hopes, and disappointments. Focusing on the work of Cuban writer, Wendy Guerra, and Togolese writer, Sami Tchak, Quesada examines the ways in which these writers undo

6  Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin Eurocentric modes of memorialization and exemplify a path for renewed “Third World” solidarity. Guerra and Tchak interrogate the possibilities of African decolonization at the same time as they advance a south–south history of simultaneous disappointment and hope. Part II: Negative Affect, Mobilization, and the Troubles of Democracy In “Staying with melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past”, Brigitte Bargetz develops a theory of melancholic agency to think through the affective and temporal problems of democracy. By examining feminist, queer, and antiracist texts, Bargetz illuminates a theory of critique that is mindful of the troubling presence of the past—both for its potentiality for the future and for its limiting condition of that future. Melancholy, according to Bargetz, need not lead to a condition of resignation, but can actually create a new affective register for a reimagined political horizon. In “Despair and Other Political Feelings”, Deborah B. Gould analyses the varied political effects of despair in activist contexts, with a special focus on ACT UP, the direct-action AIDS movement in the United States. While despair is often considered to be a demobilizing feeling, Gould proposes that it does not need to connote the end of resistance and insists that its political effects depend on how activists contend with it. Rather than denying or trying to neutralize despair, according to Gould, we should acknowledge and address it as an inevitable part of activism. Collectivized and politicized, feelings of despair might reveal the political nature of senses of possibility and impossibility and even turn into a source of mobilization and active resistance. In “Resistance and/or Metamorphosis: Politics as Breathwork”, David W. McIvor challenges prevailing conceptions of resistance that are defensive in nature. Resistance is often seen as the correct standpoint for emancipatory politics because it cultivates a challenge and stands in opposition to power. McIvor questions whether such a posture facilitates growth; and how it might shut movements down to the new and emergent. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary sources—post-colonial theory, feminism, and neo-Freudianism—McIvor instead offers a model of emancipatory politics as breathwork, which offers a sensuous, embodied, erotic, and plastic framework. Part III: Facing Failure and Pessimistic Seductions In “Responding to Failure: The Case of the US Disability Rights Movement”, Gisli Vogler examines the question of disability activism after the passage of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) in 1990. By reinterpreting how the US courts offered a narrow interpretation of the act, much to the disappointment of the activists, Vogler uncovers how all resistance movements must be able to

Introduction 7 distinguish between two types of failure—inevitable failure and concrete failure. While inevitable failure is always part of any utopian struggle, concrete failure gives movements opportunities to reimagine their tactics. In “Beside(s) Hope: A Thought Experiment on (Black) Life, Death, and Literary Puncturing”, Joseph R. Winters theorizes how hope can be displaced from its progressive and optimistic moorings. Taking seriously the Afropessimist critique of hope, and the realization that all resistance movements, especially those anchored in racial liberation, require an image of a promise future, Winters finds a space for imagining indeterminacy and undecidability. Winters turns to the Black feminist work of Denise da Silva and Octavia Butler as a supplement to, rather than a critique of Afro-pessimism, which works from within, rather than transcends, alienation, and woundedness. Bibliography Allam, Nermin. 2018. “Activism Amid Disappointment: Women’s Groups and the Politics of Hope in Egypt.” Middle East Law and Governance 10 (3): 291–316. https://doi. org/10.1163/18763375-01003004. ———. 2020. “Affective Encounters: Women, Hope, and Activism in Egypt.” In Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity and Change, edited by Eid Mohamed and Dalia Fahmy, 135–55. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-030-24758-4_8. Brown, Wendy. 1999. “Resisting Left Melancholy.” Boundary 2 26 (3): 19–27. ———. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Corey, Robin. 2005. “The Fear of the Liberals.” The Nation, September 8, 2005. www. thenation.com/article/fear-liberals/. Dean, Jodi. 2012. The Communist Horizon. New York: Verso. Dean, Jonathan. 2015. “Radicalism Restored? Communism and the End of Left Melancholia.” Contemporary Political Theory 14 (3): 234–55. https://doi.org/10.1057/ cpt.2014.45. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. 2003. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Jumet, Kira D. 2017. Contesting the Repressive State: Why Ordinary Egyptians Protested during the Arab Spring: Oxford Scholarship Online. Political Science Module. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McIvor, David W. 2016. Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Mrovlje, Maša. 2023a. “Disappointed Hope: Reimagining Resistance in the Wake of the Egyptian Revolution.” The Journal of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1086/726935 ———. 2023b. “The Disappointment of Rosa Luxemburg: Rethinking Revolutionary Commitment in the Face of Failure.” Philosophy and Social Criticism. Online first June 19, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537231184406.

8  Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin Pearlman, Wendy. 2013. “Emotions and the Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings.” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2): 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592713001072. Roy, Srila. 2009. “Melancholic Politics and the Politics of Melancholia: The Indian Women’s Movement.” Feminist Theory 10 (3): 341–57. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700109343257. Scott, David. 2014. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sokoloff, William W. 2017. Confrontational Citizenship: Reflections on Hatred, Rage, Revolution, and Revolt. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tambakaki, Paulina. 2021. “Why Spontaneity Matters: Rosa Luxemburg and Democracies of Grief.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 47 (1): 83–101. https://doi. org/10.1177/0191453719876978. Thaler, Mathias. 2021. “What If: Multispecies Justice as the Expression of Utopian Desire.” Environmental Politics, March 22, 2021, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/0964 4016.2021.1899683. Wedeen, Lisa. 2019. Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Winters, Joseph R. 2016. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy and the Agony of Progress. Durham: Duke University Press. Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso. Zamalin, Alex. 2019. Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part I

Rethinking the Relationship between Loss and Revolutionary Politics

1 Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism Lukas Slothuus

Introduction We will help to dissipate the dark cloudbanks of heavy pessimism which are today oppressing even the most experienced and responsible militants, and which represent a great danger—perhaps the gravest at the present moment—because of the political passivity, the intellectual torpor and the scepticism towards the future which they produce. (Gramsci 1978, 213)

The disillusionment that can ensue from past political defeats is a major problem for emancipatory politics. In this chapter, I turn to Antonio Gramsci as a useful resource for theorizing the relationship between defeat and disillusion through his work on fatalism. A major feature of an absence of revolutionary hope is therefore political fatalism, i.e. a belief in the conviction that revolution, emancipation, or social transformation is not possible. This problem constitutes one of the morbid symptoms of the major crises today—in the face of climate catastrophe, a resurgence of far-right and neo-fascist movements, and spiralling global inequality and intensifying economic imperialism. Although Gramsci’s most famous quote, usually streamlined into the need for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”, gives a good distillation of his overall approach to the question of fatalism, theorists have called for departing from this soundbite. Anne Showstack Sassoon, for example, pleads for moving “beyond the pessimism of the intellect” (2000). In particular, during the heyday of the alter-globalization movement anarchists like Richard F. Day professed about the death of Gramscianism tout court (2005). In contrast to such claims, this chapter argues that it is precisely in the contemporary moment of widespread simultaneous revolutionary appetite and impasse that Gramsci’s thought can help push forward the emancipatory task of theory. I turn to Gramsci’s work to sketch an account of how fatalist resignation functions on a theoretical and practical level, as well as its implications for changing the world. Rather than providing solutions, I mainly focus on the diagnostic of DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-3

12  Lukas Slothuus fatalism. First, I reconstruct the context within which he can be considered a thinker of disillusion. Second, I then move specifically to his thoughts on fatalism, an aspect of his work that has not received sufficient attention in the literature yet has wide-ranging relevance for theorizing revolutionary hope in a time of crisis. Third, I turn to the possibility of excavating solutions within Gramsci’s own work, focusing in particular on his thinking around faith and affect, specifically for theorists and intellectuals. I then conclude with a brief recap of my argument and the challenges ahead. Two major concerns thus guide this chapter: what Gramsci can teach about the relationship between political disillusion and emancipatory politics, and what the role of theorists and intellectuals in combating such disillusion is. Gramsci and the Politics of Disillusion In 1924, just months before taking over the leadership of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci specified one of the key tasks of the revolutionary movement as the need to dispel pessimism. If pessimism indeed leads to passivity, torpor, and scepticism towards the future, then pessimism stands in the way of emancipation. Later, Gramsci turns specifically to the problem of fatalism, issuing a warning against the “danger of historical defeatism, i.e. of indifferentism, since the whole way of posing the question may induce a belief in some kind of fatalism” (1971, 114). Since a major part of Gramsci’s work deals with the complex relationship between motivation and action, as well as the affective and cognitive dimensions of emancipatory politics, he is an ideal starting point for concretizing more abstract discussions of fatalism. Indeed, Gramsci can be read as a theorist of revolutionary disappointment. There is a particular cypher through which to understand his relevance for theorizing past disappointment and how it bears on present emancipatory closure. The preceding claim of the famous pessimism line specifies that “the challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned”. This refers concretely to the difficulty of finding hope after the wave of secularization flooding Europe and the forward march of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Without religion, a crucial glue that holds together the social fabric of a community and society is gone. While the “illusions” of religion function as ideology, insofar as they maintain dominant social structures and institutions, they also bring comfort and meaning to a world characterized by domination and exploitation. They therefore function both as ideology and comfort. Gramsci continues: “the deterministic, fatalistic and mechanistic element has been a direct ideological ‘aroma’ emanating from the philosophy of praxis, rather like religion or drugs (in their stupefying effect)” (1971, 336). Religion is here considered a kind of tranquilizer that clouds the judgement of people by tying them to a comforting yet ultimately false belief. In a way, religion precludes a proper reckoning with the disappointment of the difficulty of emancipation because it might gradually

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism 13 crowd out a desire and demand for such emancipation altogether. Religion can thereby become a status quo-abetting force. Yet crude forms of the atheistic-idealist view that religion is what stands in the way of human emancipation come under strain upon closer materialist inspection. There are plenty of strands of religion enthusiastically committed to emancipation, e.g. liberation theology in Latin America. Today, secular forms of fatalism are a larger issue. Once secularism dominates both society writ large and revolutionary politics, disillusionment becomes a major problem for emancipatory politics. Fatalistic worldviews generated from past failures are a key reason for despair about the ability of revolutionary and emancipatory politics to radically reshape the world for the better. Consequently, gaining an understanding of how such past failures generate fatalism is crucial. Revolutionary politics of the organized communist party as well as the electoral route of representative politics seem unable to generate a clear path to emancipation today. While social movements stand as a promising necessary component for those committed to radically changing society, they, too, run up against limits of implementation, durability, and legitimacy. Because of the quotidian and quixotic character of many social movements, occasionally appearing only to disappear again at the blink of an eye, the problem of fatalism is all the more pressing. In a tightly organized revolutionary party organization, commitment can be more structured and grounded in a highly specific, explicit strategy that seeks a particular goal and is underpinned by both discipline and a strong theoretical political belief, which is better at weathering the storm of disappointment after defeats. The more spontaneous, horizontal, and leaderless social movements which have mostly overtaken communist and cognate parties over the past half-century do not have the institutional capacity to ground their disappointment in a longer vision unmoved by momentary defeats. While it is dangerous to reify disappointment and fatalism by romanticizing the long tendency of left-wing defeats or by seeking solace in a nostalgic commitment to long-gone modes of organizing and mobilizing, it is equally dangerous to seek recourse in the unbridled naive optimism of the politics of resistance as a panacea for the misery of the present. The rare but important sober cynicism of warning against uncritically embracing resistance and activism takes on an all the more important function in an age of performative digital activism. Adorno warned of such “actionism”, i.e. activism as an action for action’s sake (1982, 262). The weary warning calls of Adorno might be too strong even today, but must be reckoned with by those tempted to see a couple of shared infographics or donations separated from a meaningful praxis of solidarity as important to the cause of emancipation today. Even if theorists should generally applaud action and praxis, uncritically embracing any kind of action without sufficient judgement of its promise must be avoided: “The error of the primacy of praxis as it is exercised today appears clearly in the privilege accorded to tactics over everything else” (Adorno 1982,

14  Lukas Slothuus 268). A fixation on actionism presents a danger in its insurrectionism and immediatism and can lead to political inertia and hopelessness after major defeats. An important task for the theorist is therefore to warn against the dangers of actionism and cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), i.e. attachment to something that in fact is an impediment to a larger goal, without succumbing to a fatalistic strategy of action paralysis in which nothing can change. Rather than affirming a determinate conception of emancipation, the critical theorist can therefore rather warn against fatalism. Such a view then leads to the idea that the theorist is legitimating struggles as opposed to hatching, controlling, or restricting them. The relationship between theory and movement must instead be one of mutual reinforcement. Rather than choosing between a mutually exclusive duality of theory and practice, a philosophy of praxis can and must unify these in a politics that is simultaneously theoretical and practical, or “a philosophy which is also a politics and a politics which is also a philosophy” (Gramsci 1971, 45). A philosophy of praxis can reckon with fatalism by locating and understanding the origins of such despair about the future. Fatalism in Gramsci Fatalism refers to the conviction that the structure of society either precludes the possibility of emancipation or makes such emancipation inevitable. The former is the view of a particularly economistic Marxism, the latter is the view of the reformists and revisionists who turned to social democracy. Gramsci engages explicitly and directly with this problem, even if the Anglophone secondary literature has paid scant attention to this dimension of his thought. According to him, the most prominent iteration of it takes the character of the sweet illusion that events cannot fail to unfold according to a fixed line of development (the one foreseen by us [the party]), in which they [the working masses] will inevitably find the system of dykes and canals which we have prepared for them, be channelled by this system and take historical form and power in it. (Gramsci 1994, 256) He thus defines fatalism as “events unfold[ing] according to a fixed line of development”, in other words, a teleological view of history that eschews a central role of collective human agency. Gramsci is keen to point out that this is, in fact, merely an “illusion”, which underscores that he is writing against such fatalism. It is not an accurate reflection of the possibility of emancipation, rather, it obscures the real movement of history as in part directed by collective human agency. Yet by calling it a “sweet illusion”, he acknowledges the comforting character that such a conviction can hold, by providing cognitive and affective stability to a person’s worldview.

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism 15 This is a direct nod to Marx’s understanding of religion, in which religion is “at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” (Marx 1994, 57). Likewise, political fatalism can both be an expression and a protest against the status quo. Yet what frequently happens is that, if it is impossible to transform the world, fatalism offers a chance to make peace with the status quo and (even if reticently) accept it as a given. The danger of passivity that can emerge from fatalism is a major problem to reckon with. Broadly speaking, there are two types of fatalism: the fatalism of impossibility and of inevitability. Whereas the former holds that emancipation cannot come about and the latter holds that it will necessarily come about. Gramsci is concerned with both. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the possibility of communist revolutions to bring about human emancipation was real, and to some, it was inevitable. On the most economistic, mechanistic, and deterministic strands of Marxist thinking, even if often caricatured strawmen, the revolution was inevitable across the globe due to the internal contradictions of capitalism producing its own gravediggers. A key problem for Gramsci was he witnessed and grappled seriously with the dramatic failures of the German communist movement in the interwar period. Thus, the failures of the 1919 Spartacist Uprising and the 1921 March Action, both cases of revolutionary communists being crushed by the state, weakened the plausibility of revolution in the most industrially advanced parts of Europe, which were predicted to be the major locus of revolutionary potential. The March Action played a major role in Gramsci’s turn towards a broad united front strategy. This was a proletarian revolutionary uprising in Saxony, Germany, containing a large number of mine and factory workers. After the German state aggressively cracked down on strikes and protests by inserting police on the ground to crush the workers, the German Communist Party called for a general strike, using the suppression of striking workers as the launchpad. Quickly, the strike turned into a general rebellion against the state, with workers blowing up railway lines, robbing banks, torching buildings, and barricading inside factories. President Friedrich Ebert called a state of emergency, cracking down on the waning movement—yet the Communist Party nevertheless called for a renewed general strike, which failed spectacularly. The March Action marks a turning point and the beginning of the end for the German communist movement, a damning indictment of adventurist ultra-leftism compared to the more promising avenue of a united front with other leftist parties and forces such as the social democrats. This is precisely why Gramsci focused on the need for long-term and broad strategy of a war of position over the narrow spontaneist action by a small vanguard as a war of manoeuvre (Gramsci 1971, 120). The lessons of the failed March Action bear significantly on the problem of fatalism because it serves as a good example of how a weak movement can be

16  Lukas Slothuus tempted to turn to an over-simplified wanton spontaneism during times of weakness. For the contemporary moment, the fatalism of impossibility is a particular problem because the more mechanistic visions of inevitable change no longer have a firm grip on emancipatory social forces in the way they did in certain parts of the organized left in the first half of the 20th century. Instead, a major debilitating motivational problem confronting emancipatory political actors is that of the fatalism of impossibility. Given the real threat of impending climate catastrophe and the possibility of a mass extinction event, such fatalism may seem quite measured and reasonable. Yet the problem is its discouragement or even ruling out of political action, lending itself well to passivity, which in turn abets the status quo. To think that it is impossible to defeat the far right or to overthrow capitalism can become a sweet illusion that justifies inaction. Where does such fatalism emerge from? Gramsci offers ample resources for theorizing its origins. He is at pains to contextualize such fatalism, its position as contingent becoming abundantly clear from his writings: “One should emphasise how fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position” (Gramsci 1971, 337). Here, he emphasizes the centrality of political agency and claims that this is merely subdued during particular moments of perceived closure. Fatalism looms in the background of any movement or organization and surfaces at particular moments of weakness. If it really is a perennial danger, this means that emancipatory agents should develop strategies for coping with and dispelling it, even during times of success and victory. At the same time, fatalism can also come about through the lack of commitment on the part of emancipatory agents. Indeed, Gramsci claims that “very often optimism is nothing more than a defense of one’s laziness, one’s irresponsibility, the will to do nothing. It is also a form of fatalism and mechanicism” (Gramsci 1975, 12). Thus, optimism can be a naive complacency that wrongly legitimizes inaction because if change is coming about regardless of (in)action, then all that is left to do is sit back and wait for the world to perish and in its place a new one to emerge. This disregards the crucial role of concerted action, through collective organization, that will be required both to topple and replace dominant power. Occasionally it is through a sober-headed pessimism, the idea that redemption will never come without a long, hard, and arduous struggle, that people are impelled to resist. Such pessimism should be accompanied by “the only justifiable enthusiasm” possible, namely “intelligent will, intelligent activity, the inventive richness of concrete initiatives which change existing reality” (Gramsci 1975, 12). It is through concrete action, rather than merely discursive articulation or moralizing sermons, that transformation is attempted. Crucially, when “mechanical determinism . . . is adopted as a thought-out and coherent philosophy on the part of the intellectuals, it becomes a cause of passivity, of idiotic selfsufficiency” (Gramsci 1971, 337). This kind of self-reproduction of intellectuals can foster scholasticism or, worse, outright inaction. He objects to the “fatalistic

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism 17 and mechanistic conception of history” (Gramsci 1971, 224) that allowed fascism to flourish in Italy by virtue of the belief that the inevitability of a progressive, teleological course of history would obtain. Political progress is the result of arduous struggle, of tireless organization, and of resistance. This comes through in Gramsci’s discussion of Marx’s dual claim in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy that it is not until the forces of production are fettered by the relations of production that a social order perishes and that new relations of production do not appear until they have materially matured within the old set of relations. Gramsci demands that these two claims must be “purged of every residue of mechanicism and fatalism” (Gramsci 1971, 106–7). Rejecting the mechanistic economism of parts of the overly hopeful Second International and the pessimistic fatalism of the Austro-Marxists, he wants to expand the scope of thinking beyond a naive faith in the irresistible, unavoidable, and inevitable march of historical materialism. In this way, Gramsci seeks to eviscerate the teleology of “historical necessity”, substituting it with political action (Gramsci 1971, 249). Such departure from rigid teleology carves out a space for will, voluntarism, and activity by sowing doubts about the economism he has been at pains to reject. He likens this mechanistic determinism as akin to religious faith in redemption (Gramsci 1971, 337). Thus, it is clear that he does not pursue a wanton optimism but one rooted in a political and materialist account of society, centred on the practice of social relations. Instead, Gramsci claims, it is necessary to take a dialectical view of social transformation and emancipation (Gramsci 1971, 337). This is where intellectuals enter the picture, functioning to elaborate and clarify the conditions of struggle for the mass of people who, in his view, are likely to believe in impending redemption—because they rely on a crude optimism of the will without an associated pessimism. Gramscian Faith vis-à-vis Fatalism This provokes one of the central questions emanating from a Gramscian account of motivation: precisely how to navigate the fraught space of a pessimism that impels will against an optimism that breeds complacency. One of the keys to resolving this is by shifting attention to his formulation of faith, and the novel way in which he secularizes religious faith into a political conception of faith. Gramsci thereby liberates both Marx proper as well as pre-Gramscian Marxism from the straitjacket of an overly mechanistic philosophy of history. In this way, the interpretation and existence of fatalism are both crucial for a Gramscian account of resistance. Fatalism impairs action and fosters inertia and despair, either in the face of complacent determinism or hopeless pessimism. The solution for how to break out of these twin deadlocks is through a particular account of faith that can help overcome the dangers of fatalistic conceptions of the world and of political action.

18  Lukas Slothuus An account of political faith as an antidote to fatalism offers a promising conceptual inventory for pushing the political potential of action, and its necessary connection with thought. Gramsci juxtaposes faith with fatalism, understanding both as future-oriented conceptions of politics. The difficulty of maintaining faith in emancipation, given the proliferation of far-right and fascist politics and impending climate catastrophe, contributes to the difficulty of imagining alternate futures, and the central role faith plays in such imagination. Yet at the same time, the relationship of such faith to fatalism is fraught, tense, and crucial to theorize. Faith offers a solution to the problematic of fatalism whereby social agents either feel confronted with a debilitating paralysis of the pointlessness of political action or a complacency of the superfluous, overdetermined, or supererogatory status of political action. In other words, activists might think that action is not going to make a difference, either because change is closed off or because it is going to happen without the intervention of activists: for instance, through technological innovation, religious millenarian redemption, mechanistic economic determinism, or simply sheer chance. Faith is one way out of fatalism. Those concerned with affecting emancipation—both theorists and grassroots political actors—can learn a lot both from religious forms of faith and their political manifestations, as well as the secular forms of materialist faith found, e.g. in the Marxist tradition, chiefly Gramsci (Slothuus 2021). Such faith can engender practical engagement against the social forces that stand in the way of a better world—the exploitation and domination of the capitalist mode of production, in its various iterations. Needless to say, while faith can contribute to dispelling fatalism for social movements and political actors, it cannot serve as a panacea in this regard. Such faith must be anchored in a materialist analysis of society and channelled in a productive direction in order for it to have any bearing on the conditions of the real world. Thus, although faith can serve emancipatory functions, it can also be co-opted or even mobilized by reactionary forces, for instance, far-right movements. Finally, such faith as anti-fatalism is not just a hope but a strategy: by placing faith in the possibility rather than impossibility of emancipation, placing faith in change might in itself contribute to its possibility. Winning requires at least an attempt. Faith is crucial for sustaining the confidence in such emancipatory political action, against mechanistic visions of social change. A good example of such a mechanistic vision is found in Gramsci’s critique of the Italian maximalist faction of the communist movement, which he scorns for their fatalism of inevitability. Ventriloquizing such fatalists, Gramsci says “it would be pointless to act and struggle day after day” since the fatalist “is only waiting for the great day”: “The masses”, the fatalist insists, “cannot but come to us, because the objective situation is driving them to the revolution. And so let’s wait, without all these stories about tactical maneuvers and like expedients” (Gramsci [1925] 2008). In other words, because “the great day” is bound to come, there is no point in struggle. Indeed, Gramsci spends a significant portion

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism 19 of the Prison Notebooks attacking such mechanistic economism, which he sees as a pernicious and misguided interpretation and application of Marxism. Scorning the more insurrectionary and actionist Maximalists, Gramsci warns against an overly voluntarist Marxism. The problem here is that the Maximalists were merely passively waiting for the “great day” that would “naturally” be brought about by the evolution of capitalism. In the meantime, the issue was to avoid any compromise with the current order, directing all forces to radical and intransigent propaganda. (Coutinho 2012, 6) In the view of Gramsci, however, such ultra-leftism eschews the need for active participation in political processes through collective organizing and building alliances with broader forces. Theorists play a key role in avoiding wanton actionism because they can establish longer-term perspectives and assess from a grounded perspective the prospects for success. Gramsci outlines the reason for active involvement in politics by sardonically ridiculing the maximalists’ fatalism of inevitability: The red flag will triumph because it is fated and ineluctable that the proletariat will win. Marx said it, and he is our kind and gentle teacher. It is pointless for us to act: what is the good of acting and fighting if victory is fated and ineluctable? (Gramsci [1925] 2008) Thus, to him, “maximalism is a fatalistic and mechanical conception of Marx’s doctrine” (Gramsci [1925] 2008). This problem can be alleviated by the conscious efforts of theorists to know, understand, and feel the concerns of ordinary people. Importantly, Gramsci draws a parallel between the thought–action distinction and a distinction between propaganda and agitation (Gramsci 1971, 227). Given the central role of the party, and intellectuals within it, around which political struggle is centred, “thought” is primarily expressed in the form of propaganda whereas “action” is expressed through agitation. This calls for mediation between not just thought and action but organization and praxis, which is a key role for political theorists to play. Indeed, if it is true that parties are only the nomenclature for classes, it is also true that parties are not simply a mechanical and passive expression of those classes, but react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify, and universalise them. (Gramsci 1971, 227)

20  Lukas Slothuus The party gives voice to a particular section of society that it represents, and its role is to propagandize and agitate in the appropriate balance given the concrete context within which it finds itself. Even without a concrete revolutionary party, any kind of emancipatory social organization of collective action can contribute to such tasks. Most importantly, whatever the shape of the emancipatory vehicle, whether party or movement or otherwise, a major problem is a lack of momentum and the experience of defeats. A lack of momentum serves as a mental barrier to action and resistance. Coupled with the fatalism of the view that “I have been defeated for the moment, but the tide of history is working for me in the long term”, this is a dangerous cocktail of both complacency (because redemption is inevitable) and defeatism (because there is nothing to be done, nothing to act on). Indeed, when you don’t have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion and of patient and obstinate perseverance. (Gramsci 1971, 227) In such situations, real will takes on the garments of an act of faith in a certain rationality of history and in a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism which appears in the role of a substitute for the Predestination or Providence of confessional religions. (Gramsci 1971, 336) Echoing this, Gramsci further argues that the role of fatalism “could really be compared with that of the theory of predestination and grace for the beginnings of the modern world” (Gramsci 1971, 342). It should thus be clear that he sees a clear parallel between religious and secular forms of fatalism, insofar as both are committed to a kind of salvation beyond the present, and both rely on a teleological agent who will be responsible for bringing such salvation about—whether it be God or the proletariat. The problem with appealing solely to a logical reasoned defence of why fatalism is unwarranted is that this does not account for how affective commitments play a crucial role in the maintenance of fatalism. Just because “the man of the people . . . cannot impose himself in a bout of argument” (Gramsci 1971, 339) does not mean he or she will robotically adopt the viewpoint of the sophistically superior intellectual or theorist. Targeting the heart as much as the mind, employing a non-condescending morality instrumentally, and speaking to the traditions, histories, cultures, and practices of people are more significant in such opinion formation. Such a recalibration has important consequences for the kind of

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism 21 agitation and propaganda necessary and suitable for both theorists and intellectuals more broadly. Thus, once the “funeral oration” of the “fatalistic conception” of Marxism has been completed by philosophical labour and political agency, it is possible for the kind of political interventions that can give rise to radical social change and transformation to emerge (Gramsci 1971, 342). Drawing another parallel to religion for his secular argument, “the mechanicist conception has been a religion of the subaltern” (Gramsci 1971, 337), and “the fading away of ‘fatalism’ and ‘mechanicism’ marks a great historical turning-point” (Gramsci 1971, 343n). What is needed instead is propagating and instilling a political faith that motivates people to act, in short, a praxis of resistance. The challenge is to find ways to activate this latent social force. Hence, the debilitating function of fatalism is intimately bound up with a problematic perspective on time, the future, and urgency. Although spontaneous action is both understandable and possibly politically efficacious, the danger of immediatism obscures the often invisible legwork of foot soldiers. Otto Bauer famously claimed: It is not the grand geological catastrophes that have changed the world but the small revolutions in the unnoticeable, the atoms that cannot even be studied with a microscope, that change the world, they amass the power with which they one day release in a geological catastrophe. The small, the unnoticeable, that which we call legwork [Kleinarbeit], that is the truly revolutionary. (Bauer 1980) This revolutionary legwork—the arduous-yet-subterranean struggle of teachers, social workers, pastors, mothers, community organizers, and countless others—paves the way for eruptions of mass political action of resistance. By forgetting this legwork, the fetishism of violence, confrontation, and ­spectacle— often embodied in forms of masculine domination—risks overpowering a plausible and strategic account of future emancipation. Thus, it becomes crucial to negotiate the space between a cataclysmic eschatology such as the new millenarianism of insurrectionary anarchism or ultra-leftism and a debilitating resignation of social democracy that began with the Second International’s reformist and revisionist sections. By not relying on the debilitating fatalism of mechanistic economism, carefully organized resistance offers a register to prefigure the kinds of social transformation its participants want to effectuate. While John Berger warns that “the delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long” (Berger 1968), just like how James Scott emphasizes the “quiet prehistory of revolt” (Scott 1992), Gramsci reminds us that “there is a deep gulf between peacetime preparation and wartime reality” (Gramsci 1971, 218). Yet theorists should be better attuned not just to the event, the spectacle, acts of disobedience, or the eruption of divine violence in the mass strike, but the vast amount of legwork,

22  Lukas Slothuus footwork, and manoeuvring that makes the possible social transformation. In other words, such action can “express political ambitions before the political means to realise them have been created” (Berger 1968). The nexus between faith, hope, and action is crucial for understanding how to dispel fatalism and drive forward the potential of emancipatory movements. Conclusion I have used the intellectual resources of Gramsci to develop an argument for the need for an emancipatory imperative to combat the problem of fatalistic inclinations in non-revolutionary situations. Gramsci traces how fatalism emerges after repeated defeats and thus is an affective response to adversity—this implies that concerted political organizational work can help combat such a response, since it is not necessarily rooted in the given objective and material conditions at hand. Collective politics play a key role in dispelling fatalism, and importance must be afforded to reckoning with the affective-material dimension of such collective politics. In short, fatalism is a deterministic, closed interpretation of the possibility of human political action that sees such agency as either non-existent or futile. Fatalism of impossibility is of the defeatist kind, whereby action is impotent because the future is marked by total closure: impending apocalypse or catastrophe becomes so unavoidable that it is pointless to try to do anything. Such fatalism is a form of political paralysis and defeatism that not only forecloses any action but does so in the shape of resignation because little or nothing can be done to avert it. An alternative variant of this fatalism is one that does not depend on an eschatology of catastrophe but either a past or a present of catastrophe. Overcoming this debilitating fatalism, as Gramsci warns, is a key task for critical theorists even, or perhaps especially, today. Political theory and political theorists can play an active role in dispelling fatalism, helping to break the hegemonic conditions which work hard to proliferate such fatalistic visions of the impossibility of change. This can be done while circumventing the allure of an “economism, syndicalism, [and] spontaneism”, which lends theorists to a cruel optimism whereby change is inevitable and therefore the most radical and extreme short-term actions can be justified in order to speed up the process (Gramsci 1971, 123). Crucially, therefore, it is insufficient to know and understand what stands in the way of emancipation; these components must be complemented with a connection to the feelings of people and the real motivations and worries on the ground. In the contemporary moment, where revolutionary forces are weak and reactionary forces strong across most of the globe, fatalism is a major problem to be dispelled. Yet one of the challenges with achieving this is the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, such that—as Gramsci teaches us—the successive failures of action can imprint themselves on the minds of radicals and become theoretically lodged. If movements keep failing, they can internalize

Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Fatalism 23 defeat and turn it into a fatalistic worldview in which there is no possibility of victory—the fatalism of impossibility. Yet by not even attempting to win, e.g. by passivity and inaction, fatalism of inevitability can creep in instead, convincing radicals that their action is superfluous because eventually the movement will triumph. Through careful consideration of the particular contexts in which movements find themselves, fatalism can be dispelled by theorists and intellectuals, without these succumbing to delusion or naive optimism. This is one of the prime tasks of emancipatory theory today. Andreas Malm emphasizes that it is “better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively—but we shall hope, of course, that it never comes to this. If we resist fatalism, it might not” (Malm 2021, 151). Fatalism is thus a crucial problem to defeat for emancipatory forces. Gramsci reminds us that Marxists cannot simply sit around and wait for the contradictions of capitalism to play themselves out. He reminds us that in order to defeat our class enemy, who is strong, who has many means and reserves at his disposal, we must exploit every crack in his front and must use every possible ally, even if he is uncertain, vacillating or provisional. (Gramsci [1925] 2008) The best way to do that is to chip away with small emboldening victories and to keep faith in the struggle. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1982. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press. Bauer, Otto. 1980. Otto Bauer Werkausgabe. Vol. 3. Vienna: Europa Verlag. Berger, John. 1968. “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations.” International Socialism 34: 11–12. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Coutinho, Carlos Nelson. 2012. Gramsci’s Political Thought. Leiden: Brill. Day, Richard F. 2005. Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the New Social Movements. London: Pluto. Gramsci, Antonio. (1925) 2008. “Maximalism and Extremism.” L’Unità, updated July 2, (1925) 2008. Accessed May 28, 2022. www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1925/07/ maximalism.htm. ———. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. ———. 1975. Prison Notebooks. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1978. Selections from Political Writings 1921–1926. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1994. Pre-Prison Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malm, Andreas. 2021. How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. London: Verso.

24  Lukas Slothuus Marx, Karl. 1994. Marx: Early Political Writings. Edited by Joseph J. O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, James C. 1992. “Dominating, Acting, Fantasy.” In The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror, edited by Caroline Nordstrom and Joann Martin, 55–84. Berkeley: University of California Press. Showstack Sassoon, Anne. 2000. Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect. London: Routledge. Slothuus, Lukas. 2021. “Faith between Reason and Affect: Thinking with Antonio Gramsci.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 22 (3): 340–57.

2 The Promise of Solidarity Learning from Failure with Rosa Luxemburg Maša Mrovlje

Introduction Recent efforts to reinvigorate the sense of revolutionary possibility—most notably, Jodi Dean’s—have evoked the promise of solidarity as one of the most important bulwarks against the widespread melancholy over the failures of revolutionary politics. Solidarity sustains the revolutionaries in their commitment and helps them withstand the challenges of revolutionary politics without lapsing into despair and defeatism. Dean’s elaboration of the political promise of solidarity, however, rests on a specific conception of revolutionary solidarity— one grounded upon the universalist ethos of comradeship and stabilized in the hierarchical form of the party—which risks betraying the plural and democratic character of revolutionary politics. This chapter draws on Rosa Luxemburg to unearth an alternative understanding of solidarity and its relationship to failure, which, I argue, is better suited to account for and support the plural struggles for freedom and justice today. Like Dean, Luxemburg appeals to solidarity as the crucial experience that can sustain revolutionary commitment in the face of failure. However, her grounding of revolutionary transformation in democratic collective action—rather than adherence to pre-given prescriptions enacted by the party leadership—leads Luxemburg to lay her hopes on a democratic notion of solidarity. I tease out how Luxemburg’s alternative notion of solidarity can help revolutionaries face up to the uncertain and fallible character of revolutionary politics—not by trying to offset it with pre-given formulas and anti-democratic measures but by productively engaging with it and kindling adaptability and creativity in the face of the new. I use Luxemburg’s understanding of revolutionary solidarity as a lens through which to illuminate the achievements of the Occupy movement. Famously, the Occupy movement adopted a horizontal and directly democratic organizational and decision-making structure which opposed the traditional model of representational electoral politics as much as the vanguardist party model. In Dean’s vision of proper revolutionary solidarity, the Occupy movement’s rejection of the hierarchical party model represents the cause of its ultimate failure. Yet DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-4

26  Maša Mrovlje Luxemburg’s vision of democratic solidarity—and its productive engagement with failure—allows us to reclaim the political promise of Occupy’s experiments in horizontal organizational models and democratic decision-making practices. Before proceeding with the argument, two important caveats are in order. First, I do not interpret Luxemburg’s democratic sensibility as an argument for the pure spontaneity of revolutionary action that would downplay the importance of leadership or organization (Hutchings 2021, 63). In many respects, Luxemburg remained deeply indebted to the Marxist mode of analysis and did not challenge the organizational form of the party per se (Hutchings 2021, 53; Hudis 2011). The distinguishing marks of her account of solidarity that I wish to reclaim are the insistence on the centrality of democratic participation in revolutionary transformation and a creative embrace of failure. The chapter is structured as follows. The first section reviews Dean’s hierarchical conception of revolutionary solidarity and points to its politically troubling implications. The second section delves into Luxemburg’s democratic notion of solidarity and analyses its relationship to failure. The third section discusses the Occupy movement as an example of how democratic practices of solidarity can help revolutionaries productively engage with failure. The Conception of Solidarity in the Recent Return to Communism The perhaps most notable recent pronouncement on the importance of solidarity in revolutionary politics can be found in calls for a (re)turn to communism as the primary horizon of left politics. For Jodi Dean, a prominent representative of new communism,1 the proper response to the despair and melancholia characterizing contemporary left is not a revision of the established frames of revolutionary thought, but the resurrection of the past revolutionary model of militant anti-capitalism (Dean 2012, 178). This model includes a specific conception of revolutionary solidarity that is grounded upon the ethos of comradeship and stabilized in the organizational form of the vanguard party. The comradely, partybased form of solidarity, for Dean, can reaffirm the necessary commitment to radical transformation against the background of past and present failures of revolutionary politics. Let us first unpack the ethos of comradeship. Dean defines comradeship as “the political relation between those on the same side of a political struggle” (Dean 2019a, 14). Comrades are “those who tie themselves together instrumentally, for a common purpose,” establishing “a set of expectations for action towards a common goal” and collectivizing individual actions “in light of a shared vision for the future” (Dean 2019a, 13–14). This tying of individuals together for a common purpose is what contrasts the comradely vision of solidarity from “mere” allyship. Allyship, for Dean, often takes the form of “mini lifestyle manuals” for what those with a privileged identity can do to act in solidarity with the oppressed (Dean 2019a, 33). It resembles a “disposition” or “technique” of

The Promise of Solidarity 27 decentring oneself and listening to difference and is oriented to helping individuals navigate “the neoliberal environment of privilege and oppression” rather than inspiring them to engage in “organised political struggle” (Dean 2019a, 35, 33). What allyship does not enable is solidarity. Allyship is anchored in one’s identity, which is perceived to be fixed and insurmountable and which allows for only “most cautious and self-interested” coalition building (Dean 2019a, 38). The “ally” thus precludes the bridging of separate identities, experiences, and practices in favour of a collectivity that is necessary for revolutionary politics and refuses to accept “the discipline that comes from collective work” (Dean 2019a, 38–39). In contrast, comradely solidarity starts from a claim of equality and sameness. The comrade represents “a generic figure” that is based on abstracting from “socially given and naturalised identities” to affirm a “shared commitment to a common struggle” (Dean 2019a, 16, 43). The proper political form for this kind of comradely solidarity is the vanguard party. The party determines collective action in light of the posited end, the communist future (Dean 2019b, 336), and is necessary because the world cannot be changed “without taking political power” (Jodi Dean 2015, 340). Dean’s argument for the party form is based on distinguishing the party from a democratic, cooperative, and horizontal network model (proposed by for instance Hardt and Negri). The network is inadequate to the task of furthering a revolution, Dean claims, because it mirrors the networked form of communicative capitalism and reproduces its hierarchical mode of governance (Dean 2019b, 336). The network structure encourages competition, “for attention, resources, money, jobs”, and induces hierarchies, “where those at the top have vastly more than those at the bottom” (Dean 2019b, 328–29). In distinguishing the party from the network, Dean underplays the hierarchical, top-down model of decision-making that is usually associated with the type of Leninist vanguard party (Dean 2019b, 336) and emphasizes the adaptability of its structure and practice to the needs of the revolution (Dean 2019b, 338–39). Nevertheless, it is clear that the party is supposed to provide the organizational leadership capable of “strategizing, generating and executing political power” in line with the ends of the revolution (Dean 2019b, 337). We can observe how Dean envisions the desired form of solidarity to be able to ward off failure and despair in her assessment of recent instances of democratic mobilization and resistance, specifically the Occupy Wall Street movement. Dean begins by praising the emancipatory potential of the innovative tactics of occupation that allowed diverse groups to say “we”, to “rupture” the sense of the inevitability of the status quo and revive the “fragmented, melancholic, depressive” left (Dean 2012, 212). However, she considers their plural, diverse character, and their insistence of horizontal, non-hierarchical organization as a cause of their ultimate failure. As she writes, the practices of autonomy and horizontality that galvanized people at the beginning “came later to be faulted for conflicts and disillusionment within the movement” (Dean 2012, 210). The ideal of autonomy

28  Maša Mrovlje encouraged people “to pursue multiple, separate, and even conflicting goals rather than work toward common ones”, while the insistence on horizontality induced a “scepticism” and “paranoia” towards organizing structures and leaders (Dean 2012, 210). In adopting the plural and horizontal organizational tactics, Dean believes, Occupy has fallen prey to the very tendencies within the contemporary left organizing that are the cause of left melancholia: the abandonment of the past ideal of radical politics and accommodation to the capitalist vision of the world (Dean 2012, 160, 176). The solution Dean proposes is for Occupy to develop into “a new kind of communist party”, thus tempering “autonomy with solidarity”, “adding vertical and diagonal strength to the force of horizontality”, and attuning itself “to the facts of leadership” (Dean 2012, 211). This assessment of Occupy’s failure shows two problems with Dean’s model of solidarity. First, her criticism of the plural, diverse character of the protesters calls for a return to a one-directional struggle that risks eliding the importance of feminist, anti-racist, and queer concerns. Comradeship, to be sure, is based on a strict equality regardless of such markers as race, gender, or ability. Dean also makes it clear that comradeship “does not eliminate difference,” but “merely” “provides a container indifferent to its contents” (Dean 2019a, 55). Comrades’ principled commitment to gender or racial equality seems to suffice, regardless of the fact (of which Dean is aware) that comrades have historically been less than “vigilant” in combating sexist or racist stereotypes (Dean 2019a, 48). This form of equality not only neglects the persistence of gendered hierarchy, racial privilege, and heteronormativity within the communist discourse and practice (Jonathan Dean 2015, 243–48) but also fails to account for the fact that forms of gender or racial oppression may require of comrades to target intersectional dynamics of oppression that cannot be reduced to a one-directional struggle and that may raise difficult dilemmas about which interests to prioritize within the struggle. Dean’s response to such questions is somewhat dismissive. She attributes the concerns about the masculine, white imaginary operating behind the figure of the comrade to “a fear about the loss of individual specificity”, “the fear of a political relation that does not prioritize difference and individuality . . . but that is focused on common work toward a common goal” (Dean 2019a, 54–55). In this move, as Jonathan Dean writes, Dean’s comradeship risks confusing certain problematic identity-based ways of grounding political claims, and feminist, anti-racist, and queer concerns as such (Jonathan Dean 2015, 242). Second, within Dean’s perspective, the centrist, vanguard model of the party is not one of the possible means of organizing revolutionary solidarity, but the only proper way of doing so. As Dean proclaims, “anyone who wants to talk about the revolution, has to talk about the party” (Dean 2019b, 333). Any other form of resistance short of the old model of revolutionary struggle is depicted as “futile”, “a term of defeat”, rendering “maintenance of the status quo as a political victory” (Dean 2019b, 331).

The Promise of Solidarity 29 The hierarchical mode of party organization is supposed to serve as a remedy for the uncertain and fallible character of revolutionary action, keeping the protesters on “the ‘right’ path in terms of their aims and tactics” (Cidam 2021, 21–22). However, what emerges is a stark binary between authentic left radicalism and those cases of resistance that are seen as complicit with the existing capitalist order. Such binary thinking may easily end up marginalizing “a number of potentially significant recent and ongoing forms of political protest, activism and resistance” (Jonathan Dean 2015, 248; Cidam 2021, 21–22). The desire to avoid failure, in other words, risks disregarding the significance of innovative on-the-ground efforts of political actors, such as the Occupy movement, that “demonstrated, if for a fleeting moment, that another way of being and relating to one another is possible” (Cidam 2021, 4). Jodi Dean’s example demonstrates how a conception of solidarity oriented by a desire to avoid failure unwittingly risks betraying the plural and democratic character of revolutionary politics. The next section turns to Luxemburg to unearth the political significance of an alternative understanding of revolutionary solidarity that does not seek to offset but creatively engages with failure. Luxemburg on the Relationship between Solidarity and Failure Similar to Dean, Luxemburg’s understanding of solidarity entails “a shared sense of being in commonality”, a standing and acting together among or with the exploited and the oppressed (Nixon 2018, 89). It encompasses workers’ solidarity across national boundaries, solidarity with the oppressed women from the Global South and with colonized peoples in general, and even extended to the non-human world (Cornell 2019, 24). In this section, I focus primarily on the form rather than the content of that solidarity and analyse its relationship to failure. Luxemburg’s views on solidarity come forth in her criticism of the authoritarian tendencies she discerned in the revolutionary politics of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Luxemburg expresses this criticism most clearly in her famous 1918 manuscript The Russian Revolution. As she writes, Lenin’s fallacy lay in trying to eliminate the possibility of failure by grounding “proper” revolutionary solidarity in hierarchical (vanguard) party leadership and elimination of dissent (Luxemburg 2004e, 305). But he thus perverted the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat to mean the rule of “a little leading minority” in the name of the proletariat, rather than the rule of “the mass of the people” (Luxemburg 2004e, 308). This fallacy, according to Luxemburg, stemmed from the Bolsheviks’ “tacit assumption” that “the socialist transformation is something for which a readymade formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice” (Luxemburg 2004e, 305). For Luxemburg, in contrast, socialist transformation cannot be brought about through any “party program or textbook”, but relies on the people’s democratic

30  Maša Mrovlje collective action—including the experience of error and failure that it necessarily entails (Luxemburg 2004e, 305–6). Luxemburg’s insistence on locating the mainspring of revolutionary politics in experiences of democratic collective action translated into a democratic ethos of solidarity, which includes three interrelated dimensions. First, solidarity is founded upon collective, bottom-up action, rather than obedience, and involves individuals committing themselves to a shared purpose, which is shaped by those engaged in the action rather than externally determined and imposed (Nixon 2018, 100, 105). As Luxemburg argued throughout her writing, the source of true revolutionary commitment and solidarity is the experience of collective action and self-rule, rather than a set of prescribed rules, enacted by the party leadership (Luxemburg 2004b, 2004a, 2013, 657–58). Second, Luxemburg’s practice-based perspective led her to insist that the organization of the revolutionary action must remain loyal to the people’s ­on-the-ground experience. Luxemburg powerfully articulates this position in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. As she argues, the direction of collective action cannot be determined by “issuing commands” from some external vantage point, but can only emerge from, and should stay in “the closest possible contact with, the mood of the masses” (Luxemburg 2004d, 198). This means that revolutionary solidarity should be decentralized and structured around local units or councils that are flexible and responsive to the changing circumstances of the collective action (Nixon 2018, 108, 160). Third, revolutionary solidarity should be inclusive and plural. As Luxemburg writes in her essay on Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, solidarity should not be based on party affiliation, but open to “all the progressive interests in society” and “all the oppressed victims of the bourgeois social order”, paying due attention to the “differential impact” of the intersecting axes of oppression on particular groups (Luxemburg 2004a, 262–63; Nixon 2018, 89). It is a site of neither a homogenous mass nor individualist assertion, but of debate and disagreement: it stems from and is kindled a “free struggle of opinion”, a confrontation between plural perspectives that are not reflections of sameness (Luxemburg 2004e, 308). This conception of solidarity can help revolutionaries withstand the challenges of revolutionary politics without lapsing into despair and face up to failure in the following ways.2 First, Luxemburg’s notion of solidarity rests on an understanding of the interconnectedness of means and ends, and a rethinking of the effectiveness of political action beyond the criterion of success. For Luxemburg, the socialist transformation of society did not represent a distant goal that could be separated from the actions used to bring it about, which led her to emphasize the interconnectedness of democracy and the socialist struggle. To be sure, as Luxemburg writes in The Russian Revolution, a socialist transformation of society will require “resolute attacks” upon the remnants of bourgeois society, including the

The Promise of Solidarity 31 relationship of economic inequality. But this transformation must “proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses”, “under their direct influence” and “subjected to the control of complete public activity” (Luxemburg 2004e, 308). As she argued, socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. (Luxemburg 2004e, 308) Democratizing revolutionary solidarity certainly entailed a risk of failure. But in Luxemburg’s view, the remedy to the fallibility of the revolutionary process— which in the Bolshevik case amounted to “the elimination of democracy”—“is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure” (Luxemburg 2004e, 302). Dictatorial rule, by decree and terror, will not be able to effect the required “spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule” and inspire “social instincts in place of egotistical ones” (Luxemburg 2004e, 306). To the contrary, any attempt to orchestrate revolutionary action from above risks reducing “the militant workers to a docile instrument of a ‘committee’ ” and ensues in a brutalization of public life (Luxemburg 2004a, 261, 2004e, 307). The interconnectedness of means and ends foregrounds how democratic practices of solidarity can prefigure the contours of the future socialist society (Luxemburg 2004b, 159). Even though revolutionary action within an oppressive system will necessarily be antagonistic, democratic participation, decision-­ making, and debate simultaneously already point beyond the existing order (Luxemburg 2004e, 308) and anticipate “the free praxis of an egalitarian society” (Blättler and Marti 2005, 91). On this account, the meaning of a revolutionary action or an uprising cannot be reduced to whether or not it achieved a desired goal. Rather, even an action that failed, as Luxemburg writes in Social Reform or Revolution, can provoke and determine the point of the final victory” (Luxemburg 2004b, 159). This is because it contains a prefigurative element, of people acting in freedom across social and political divides, engaging in debate across difference, and enacting a different way or relating to one another. On the one hand, this shift contains a refusal to rely on assurances of success and only limit revolutionary pursuits to actions that are considered to be realistic or feasible. It allows revolutionaries to seize the possibilities for action in the present, rather than proclaiming them unrealizable in advance. On the other hand, recognizing the prefigurative value of democratic solidarity reconceptualizes failure as a site of radical possibility residing within the break with the status quo (even if it remains unrealized) that can inspire future projects of

32  Maša Mrovlje radical social transformation (Gabay 2022, 288). For it reveals that even failed projects of social transformation can effect a change in what is deemed possible and prepare the “conditions for something new to emerge” in the future (Gordon 2021, 78). Second, Luxemburg’s democratic vision of solidarity not only helps revolutionaries engage in political action despite the possibility of failure but also reinterprets failure as a productive site of learning and creativity. Within a democratic vision of solidarity, failure is not to be taken as a sign that the people’s collective actions are misguided or unruly, in need of correction or guidance by the party leadership. As Luxemburg emphasizes in the Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, “the mistakes that are made by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are, historically speaking, immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best possible ‘Central Committee’ ” (Luxemburg 2004a, 265). This is because it is through failures and defeats that the people can gain the awareness of themselves as political actors, build collective consciousness and thereby create “the political conditions of the final victory” (Luxemburg 2004b, 159). Iron discipline and party directions, in Luxemburg’s view, will not be able to ward off “wrong” courses of action (such as the danger that the revolutionary movement will come under the control of bourgeois intellectuals and their tendency towards opportunism that Lenin feared). If anything, it is “forcing the movement into the straitjacket of a bureaucratic centralism” that will “deliver the still young proletarian movement to the power-hungry intellectuals” (Luxemburg 2004a, 261). A proper, revolutionary direction can only be kept if revolutionary action remains grounded in democratic practices of solidarity, which entails a broadening of the “freedom to make mistakes” (Hutchings 2021, 64). As Luxemburg writes in The Russian Revolution: “Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts” (Luxemburg 2004e, 306). The freedom to make mistakes ensures that the proletariat will assume responsibility for itself and its history—and recognize that socialism will not “fall as manna from heaven”, but will emerge only as a result of people’s actions and struggles (Luxemburg 2004c, 321). Further, Luxemburg’s embrace of a democratic ethos of solidarity views failure as an opportunity to develop the adaptability and responsiveness to the situation at hand, resilience in the face of adversity, and creativity in the face of the new. The uncertainty of revolutionary politics, she avers in her 1904 letter to her comrade Alexandr Potresov, requires “broadness and flexibility of thought” rather than “a Lenin-style narrow-mindedness of theoretical views” (Luxemburg 2013, 354). Thus, the lesson that she draws from the “failure” of the 1905 Russian Revolution was not that “the masses of people needed strong leaders to tell them what to do”, but that “the people needed to think through how they might seize power differently” (Gordon and Cornell 2021, 22).

The Promise of Solidarity 33 Third, a democratic conception of solidarity that incorporates uncertainty and the possibility of failure as inevitable aspects of the revolutionary process responds to the complexities of “liberation for”. Luxemburg is well-aware that, in contrast to liberation from, “liberation for” cannot be pre-defined, but is “the rallying of creative resources of possibility” (Gordon 2018, 21). She recognizes that it is impossible to know what socialism is in advance (Luxemburg 2004e, 305). As she states in The Russian Revolution, “socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed” (Luxemburg 2004e, 306). Only “the negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive cannot” (Luxemburg 2004e, 306). The difficulties of revolution attuned her to the fact that we are all embedded in and conditioned by exploitative relationships and that we cannot simply step outside and imagine a sure way out (Gordon and Cornell 2021, 22). For this reason, democratic practices of solidarity do not become “superfluous” after liberation, but constitute “the necessary presupposition of a neverending process of self-understanding among interacting equal and free human beings” (Blättler and Marti 2005, 91). Defence of freedom “for the one who thinks differently”, for Luxemburg, did not stem from “any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ ” (Luxemburg 2004e, 305) but from her awareness that it constituted the essential condition of creativity and of bringing into being different, nonexploitative relations between people. This is because “the active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people” enables “public control”, correcting in the course of public participation “the innate shortcomings of social institutions” (Luxemburg 2004e, 306–7, 302). Moreover, it is only through “a free struggle of opinion” and “the exchange of experiences” between a plurality of equals that “something other and new can emerge” (Blättler and Marti 2005, 91). A democratic ethos of solidarity thus shifts the focus of concern from transforming the revolutionary moment into political power (Dean 2016, 22) and towards carrying “the unpredictable moment of revolutionary process . . . into the future” (Rose 2015, 41). It incorporates specific democratic social forms or institutions, such as general elections, unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, or participation-based councils or assemblies, into the very process of revolutionary transformation of society. Such institutions, as Hudis argues, enable democratic deliberation and spontaneity “to continue and deepen” also after any given revolution (Hudis 2011). In this way, they make it possible to face up to the contingencies of liberation for—rather than submerging them under pre-given formulas and anti-democratic measures. A Reassessment of the Occupy Movement This section draws on Luxemburg’s insights into how a democratic notion of solidarity can help revolutionaries deal with failure to unveil the political promise of Occupy’s horizontal, democratic practices of solidarity.

34  Maša Mrovlje First, I discuss how Luxemburg’s notion of solidarity and her understanding of the interconnectedness of means and ends can help us rethink the effectiveness of Occupy beyond the criterion of success. Even though the Occupy protests were short-lived and failed to develop into a permanent movement, the enactment of democratic solidarity contained a powerful prefigurative dimension. Against the intersecting axes of capitalist, racial, and gender oppression, the protesters practiced an ethos of cooperation and mutual aid, strove towards inclusivity and centred marginalized voices in their revolutionary politics (Markoff, Lazar, and Smith 2021, 13). Occupy did not embrace a democratic model of solidarity out of concern with preserving individual specificity or because they would think that solidarity across divisions of identity is impossible or undesirable. They did so because they recognized how the structures of power in which they were embedded shaped and were reproduced in their interactions. In this respect, the political significance of the movement cannot be reduced to any specific results it achieved or failed to achieve. The movement’s democratic practices of solidarity, such as the creation of horizontal networks and decision-making structures as well as communal use of property, turned equality into “a present, if fragile and always contested, fact, a lived experience, rather than a distant goal or a future agenda” (Cidam 2021, 35). Further, even though Occupy did not bring about the desired transformation of society, its experiments in equality were tied to “the disruption of the status quo” (Wood 2020, 63) and changed the conditions of possibility for future activists. For instance, the practices of Occupy were seen to inspire the forms of organization adopted by the Gezi Park protests in 2013 in Turkey (Assy and Ertür 2014) and by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States (Wood 2020, 60–61). Second, I elaborate on how democratic solidarity practiced by Occupy translated into creative engagements with and powerful examples of learning from failure. Jodi Dean relates how the activists’ disenchantment with the Occupy movement emerged from the horizontal organization and the failure to attune themselves to “the facts of leadership”. But, as Markoff, Lazar, and Smith note, the activists expressed their disappointment with the “colonial, white supremacist and heteronormative dynamics” within the Movement as well as “an underlying current of classism and unequal power in decision-making processes” (Markoff, Lazar, and Smith 2021, 12–13). Many felt that the movement’s emphasis on challenging economic inequality marginalized other forms of systemic oppression, such as those based on race, gender, sexuality, and ability, and how they interlink with capitalist exploitation (Markoff, Lazar, and Smith 2021, 13). An appropriate response to the activists’ disappointment, then, was not a return to the vanguard party model, but an attempt to counter the various ways in which Occupy’s practices ended up reproducing the hierarchies of gender and racial inequality. Heeding Luxemburg’s argument about the importance of democratizing freedom to make mistakes, the protesters’ disappointment further energized their efforts to develop innovative “democracy-enhancing” procedures or channel their energies to new projects that reflected participatory organizational

The Promise of Solidarity 35 models (Markoff, Lazar, and Smith 2021, 13–15). For instance, the democratic character of the protesters’ solidarity was employed to challenge the language of “occupy” tainted by its association with the colonial history and ongoing occupation of the ancestral lands of the Chochenyo Ohlone people (the original inhabitants of Oakland) as well as with the occupations of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan (Kinna, Prichard, and Swann 2019, 373–74). In response, Occupy Oakland developed into Decolonise Oakland, following the passing of the proposal “Decolonise Oakland: Creating a More Radical Movement”, at the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on 4 December 2011. Another instance of creative engagement with the protesters’ disappointment was the establishment of specialized groups and caucuses that were meant to address hierarchies of gender, racial, and other inequality within the movement and empower individuals who felt silenced by the decision-making process in the General Assembly. Rotating representatives from each of such groups then came together to form a “spokescouncil”, where decision-making would take place (Markoff, Lazar, and Smith 2021, 14). The Occupy movement’s model of solidarity thus echoed Luxemburg’s understanding that a radical transformation of society could not be achieved through existing institutions and understandings of power, but required creative efforts to construct new forms of relating to one another (Hudis 2021, 44). Third, I reflect on how Occupy’s democratic conception of solidarity—and its ability to incorporates uncertainty and the possibility of failure—could respond to the complexities of “liberation for”. The challenge facing Occupy and other contemporary grassroots movements is their ephemeral nature—the fact that they have not been able “to coalesce into an ongoing, self-conscious movement that can bring down capitalism” (Hudis 2021, 43) and build more permanent democratic institutions that would be able to face the uncertainties of liberation for. Even proponents of the anti-vanguardist left, such as Hardt and Negri, have bemoaned these movements’ tendency to refuse “sustained political organisation and institution, to banish verticality only to make a fetish of horizontality and ignore the need for durable social structures” (Hardt and Negri 2017, xiv). The problem that the contemporary horizontal movements have brought to light, Hardt and Negri write, is “how to construct organization without hierarchy” and “how to create institutions without centralization” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 14). And yet, given how Occupy’s democratic solidarity managed to creatively confront failure, it is perhaps too quick to reduce it to a mere instance of “spontaneous revolt” without a guiding “vision of the future that can point the way to a viable alternative to capitalism” (Hudis 2021, 43). As Kinna, Prichard, and Swann argue, the Occupy movement did offer an alternative organizational and decision-making arrangement—what they call Occupy’s anarchist constitutional politics. This arrangement was based on a “broad commitment to anti-state and anti-capitalist non-domination, manifest in explicit adherence to real democracy and principles of horizontality, solidarity, mutual aid, and leaderlessness/

36  Maša Mrovlje leaderfulness” (Kinna, Prichard, and Swann 2019, 385). Its combination of council-based structures and consensus decision-making practices sought to institutionalize democratic practices of solidarity and offer spaces for democratic deliberation between plural equals to determine the shape of “liberation for”. This is not to deny that the Occupy model certainly raises difficult questions about viability and robustness (Kinna, Prichard, and Swann 2019, 384). The democratic model of solidarity at its base has been confronted with several internal and external conflicts and pressures. The consensus decision-making model resulted in much frustration over its slowness, lack of results, and its conservative nature. For instance, the initiative Decolonise Occupy did not reach a consensus vote and ended up splintering from the rest of the movement. Occupy’s council-based organizational model also failed to develop into a solid political structure capable of persevering against the oppressive structures and bringing into being an alternative economic model. Nevertheless, Occupy provided a flawed example of how democratic solidarity can be developed into an institutional f­ ramework—and thus pointed to possibilities to translate these into more permanent community and institution-building practices oriented to challenging systemic oppressions in society at large.3 As Kinna, Prichard, and Swann note, Occupy’s institutional framework may not lend itself to being “scaled up”. But it would be open to the possibility of “linking across”, of informing other communities and movements to mimic the model and connecting different local experiments in a proto-federal structure, such as the confederate council system developed in Rojava (Kinna, Prichard, and Swann 2019, 384). Conclusion This chapter sought to reclaim the political promise of a democratic model of solidarity, focusing specifically on its ability to help the resisters face up to the fallibility and uncertainty of revolutionary politics. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, it outlined how a democratic ethos of solidarity can: (1) rethink instances of protest beyond the criterion of success, recognizing the prefigurative significance of democratic solidaristic practices regardless of their outcome; (2) reinterpret failure as a productive site of learning and creativity; and (3) foreground the need to institutionalize practices of democratic solidarity as a crucial part of the revolutionary process, before and after the revolution, and thus face up to the uncertainties of liberation for. This articulation of the relationship between democratic solidarity and failure shed new light on experiments in democratic, horizontal organization, such as the Occupy movement, which have often been criticized for their fragile and ephemeral nature. Luxemburg’s insights revealed how democratic models of solidarity have helped the revolutionaries productively engage with failure and develop new models of revolutionary politics that can constitute a powerful challenge to entrenched hierarchies of power and inequality.

The Promise of Solidarity 37 Notes 1 Other prominent representatives of this strand of critical theorising include Alan Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. 2 This analysis builds on my previous work on Luxemburg’s distinct way of engaging with failure as an inevitable part of revolutionary politics (Mrovlje 2023) but focuses specifically on the relationship between Luxemburg’s democratic notion of solidarity and failure. 3 For instance, Occupy’s democratic solidarity channelled into longer-lasting projects such as Occupy the Hood (a national racial justice network), Occupy Our Homes (an eviction defence network), or Occupy University (an experiment in horizontal, participatory education) (Markoff, Lazar, and Smith 2021, 14–15).

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3 Between Loss and Hope Reflections on the Black Revolutionary Tradition Alex Zamalin

Political loss and hope are imagined to be in opposition to much of mainstream political thought. Emancipatory politics is rendered as a matter of linear progress, or as a matter of decisive coalition building in the face of pragmatic constraints. When emancipatory politics fails—or political projects fail to materialize—­ resignation becomes the dominant response. But this conception of politics, loss, and hope is much too narrow. And it must be reimagined. Drawing upon insights from the Black revolutionary tradition in the United States, this essay argues that the dialectic between loss and hope is a necessary precondition in advancing a revolutionary politics, and expanding prevailing conceptions of community and freedom. Black revolutionary thought reframes our meaning of temporality, strategy, and the epistemology of activism and resistance. It is this conception of political life that is sorely missing from contemporary conversations around confronting crisis but is nonetheless crucial to nourish for radical democracy. Hope has been a recurring theme of American political discourse over the past decade. The election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black President in 2008 and again in 2012, whose campaign centred on the promise of post-racialism. The rise of the new social movements like Occupy Wall Street; Black Lives Matter, #Metoo, Fight for $15, Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in the 2010s, which called for an egalitarian future. The turn to hope made sense, especially given the need for a new political discourse in the aftermath of the War in Iraq, the Great Recession of 2008, and decades of racial neoliberal devastation, which destroyed cities and eviscerated working-class communities. Hope is a powerful theme of political mobilization because it conjures the future, a sense of possibility. Citizens feel hope when they believe that history can be ruptured, that collective power can be summoned, and that institutional reconstruction is within reach. With hope, however, there is always the prospect of disappointment. Imagining the future differently raises the stakes so much about the meaning and possibilities of transformative action that a sense of resignation, when things sour or fail to meet expectations, becomes more intense. In the same decade that hope became the subject of so many conversations, a radical pessimism also began to pervade. The failure of the Obama administration over the 2010s to DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-5

40  Alex Zamalin confront American neoliberalism—in addition to maintaining, if not continuing, many of the deregulatory goals of prior Republican administration—contributed to feelings of doubt that we were living in a new era. If anything, the period immediately after Obama’s presidency came to be defined by existential threats to democracy, human rights, and liberalism itself: the election of an openly racist, white nationalist, with authoritarian aspirations in 2016—Donald Trump was just the most visible example of right-wing resurgence; the US Supreme Court evisceration of reproductive rights, environmental regulations and labour protections, the large-scale deportations of immigrants, and continued anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism and xenophobia. In this context, a spate of theorizing centred on pessimism, crisis, nihilism, debilitation began to emerge, offering a clear-eyed view of reality and a rejoinder to narratives around hope (Sharpe 2016; Wilderson 2020). Criticisms of hope, especially building a politics around the concept, are astute. Hope is laden with the baggage of linear progress, its spiritual undertones conjure images of earthly transcendence, and its messianic underpinning can encourage a kind of political complacency. Even worse, it’s possible to see how hope can be a form of bad faith. One can summon hope for the sake of moral grandstanding (as if having hope marks the character of good citizens, who refuse to be bitter) or for deflecting attention from the messy and impure modes of struggle and engagement. Setting aside the normative political question—is hope a useful or helpful concept?—it’s undeniable that hope has historically had a galvanizing effect on social movements in US history. A survey of the labour (1890–1950), Civil Rights (1955–1968), feminist (1960–1973), and environmental movements (1970–present) reveals that hope creates an extrarational and affective vocabulary and motivation that rational argumentation, juridical codes, or material incentives cannot easily provide. Hope is not a monolithic concept. It’s a malleable idea. One can speak of liberal or religious hope, or modify its meaning—think, for instance, Cornel West’s idea of a “tragicomic” hope (1999) or Jonathan Lear’s radical hope (2008). Moreover, rather than begin with an abstract conception of hope that centres on questions of ontology (what is it?) or function (what can it achieve?), it’s more useful, I contend, to theorize what forms, constellations, and contours of hope are most useful in given moments and contexts. Once we conceptualize hope as a crucial strategic and political tool for imagination, coalition building, and organization, there’s no need to make totalizing assertions about the concept. Not only is the best way to theorize hope as a practice but to assess its efficacy in movements where it’s most visible, pronounced, and impactful. The movements where hope plays the greatest role are precisely in those that seek to reimagine everything—revolutionary movements—rather than those who seek incremental reform. Examining the role of hope in revolutionary thought gives us a clearer picture of how it might and should work for the sake of contemporary political

Between Loss and Hope 41 theory and practice. Just as there are many concepts of hope, so too are there multiple concepts of revolutionary praxis. In this essay, I will focus on one such iteration: hope in the Black revolutionary tradition. By Black revolutionary tradition, I mean a movement among Black activists that imagines a revolutionary change in political, social, and economic relationships in order to produce a vision of Black liberation. Black revolutionary thought is not defined by a singular ideological structure (it runs the gamut of socialism, anarchism, nationalism, feminism, and Afrofuturism). But Black revolutionary thought is marked by critique (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) of liberalism and gestures towards a worldview that, broadly construed, is on the political left. Hope in Black revolutionary thought, I argue, is unique because it is more attuned to the dialectical interconnectedness between loss, disappointment, and struggle—in ways that are powerful and productive for reinvigorating contemporary politics. A few traditions in the American context have had such a profound meditation on the relationship between hope, loss, and politics; and even fewer have tried to resignify and complicate ideas of pessimism and optimism in ways that are productive for action. A distinguishing characteristic of hope in Black revolutionary thought is its understanding of the way loss is incorporated into action. In his Appeal (1829), one of the earliest exponents of the tradition, David Walker, describes racial slavery as a totalizing force, to induce the feeling that transformation is unlikely, only to then argue for the necessity of resistance. A decade after the 1820 Compromise, which prohibited the spread of slavery above the Mason-Dixon line, incremental reforms have done little to attack the vicious institution that traffics human flesh for profit. At the same time as Walker summons a prophetic rhetoric that seems to suggest hopelessness, he describes—almost in messianic terms— the necessity of antiracism and its iterations through militant, collective action by any means necessary. I hope that the Americans may hear, but I am afraid that they have done us so much injury, and are so firm in the belief that our Creator made us to be an inheritance to them for ever, that their hearts will be hardened . . . Americans!! I warn you in the name of the Lord, (whether you will hear, or forbear,) to repent and reform, or you are ruined!!! (Walker 2008) Walker’s language is searing and evocative; his aim is to push white citizens, basking in their innocence, refusing responsibility, to acknowledge their complicity in oppression, and to revolutionize society according to a vision of equality and freedom. No doubt, Walker’s notion of hope is religiously infused—there is the sense that, in the end, right will prevail and slavery will be abolished—but it isn’t

42  Alex Zamalin governed by an ethos of piety, or orthodoxy. Walker’s vivid depiction of the strength and violence of white supremacy suggests that political responses to it must be pragmatic and malleable. The potential for antislavery politics as a revolutionary politics, in other words, doesn’t rest on a purity test. White citizens, for Walker, must be seen as capable of reformation, Black citizens, for their part, must resist even in conditions of impossibility, and normative questions (is violence justified, or is nonviolence the only way to attack slavery?) must be, at least temporarily, suspended or put to the side. A condition of revolutionary struggle, Walker suggests, requires a conception of hope juxtaposed against the reality of loss—the loss of binary thinking, irredeemable villains, and easy ethical answers and moral choices. Two decades after Walker’s Appeal, the Black nationalist, Martin Delany, in his The Condition, Elevation, Immigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (2003 [1852]), also defends Black revolutionary politics, but takes an approach that is different from Walker’s. Rather than propose direct struggle against bondage in the United States, Delany proposes a kind of fugitive politics—Black migration to Central America and Canada. Despite the difference between the two approaches—the first is assimilationist and the second is nationalist—Delany shares Walker’s realism regarding the durability of US white supremacy. The Condition was published only two years after, and in response to, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed for fugitive slaved to be hunted and recaptured, even if they fled north. Just like Walker, however, Delany agrees that Black political precariousness opens up novel modes of revolutionary action. He conceptualizes racial domination not as a permanent state, but one that is defined by a historical reality, and relations of power. Acknowledging, describing, and theorizing Black precariousness create not only the opening for a sense of possibility—which is to say, a sense of hope—but also the sense of new relations and solidarities. As Delany conceptualizes racial domination, he recognizes the crucial role of Black citizens in creating the world in which they live—the built environment and society itself. “The Blacks themselves”, he writes, “are the only skillful cultivators—the proprietor knowing little or nothing about the art” (Delany 2003, 64). Black freedom is denied through political institutions, but, according to Delany, it is expressed through everyday life and work; for Delany, this creates hope for a political refounding. Even if cannot happen in the United States, it can happen abroad. And such a refounding has ramifications for the world, as the work of revolution fundamentally changes how power is understood and shared, not driven by the law of exploitation—but by a robust sense of justice. “We shall make common cause with the people”, writes Delany, and shall hope, by one judicious and signal effort, to assemble one day—and a glorious day it will be—in a great representative convention . . . the colored race is called upon by all the ties of common humanity, and all the claims of

Between Loss and Hope 43 consummate justice, to go forward and take their position, and do battle in the struggle now being made for the redemption of the world. (Delany 2003, 183) This is a common theme in Black revolutionary thought: that political solidarity can emerge from despair and disrepair. Consider the work of the radical journalist T. Thomas Fortune, writing in the post-Reconstruction era of the 1880s. Fortune was active when lynching was on the rise and the Gilded Age had created massive economic inequality and dispossession. Fortune argues for interracial solidarity between white and Black workers, to combat unbridled capitalism, anti-Black racism, and the psychological wage of whiteness. The solution, for Fortune, is to engage in anticapitalist, antiracist politics. The reconstruction of white supremacy—away from a centralized system of enslavement towards a more varied one of sharecropping, vigilante violence, terrorism, the chain gang—forces a reconsideration of resistance politics away from a centralized form of antiracist resistance to something more decentralized, localized, and contextual. The rise of capitalism across the globe, Fortune implies, makes Delany’s position of a geographic fix for Black freedom untenable. What’s necessary, argues Fortune, is a movement capable of reconstructing the nation from within. As he writes in Black & White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (2002 [1884]), the interests of the white and the interests of the colored people are one and the same; that the legislation which affects the one will affect the other; that the good which comes to the one should come to the other, and that, as one people, the evils which blight the hopes of the one blight the hopes of the other. (Fortune 2022, 71) Fortune, like Delany, locates hope in the process of Black world-making, but insists that the changing nature of white supremacy and racial capitalism require a rethinking of collective action away from racial particularism and across the colour line. Fortune dramatizes the tragic recognition that only a power base that is broad and coalitional can confront domination. Read alongside Fortune’s argument, Delany’s dream of Black separatism appears to be too optimistic; it invests faith in racial sovereignty, without appreciating the importance of racial solidarity based on shared interests—that which is vulnerable, uneasy, and shifting. A friend and contemporary of Fortune, the antilynching activist and feminist, Ida B. Wells, also fashioned an image of hope based on a condition of radical constraint. In the late 1890s, Wells’s prophetic journalism laid bare how the crime of lynching was based in racist myths (of Black sexuality) and aimed to cement the bounds of patriarchy. Wells’s intervention as a Black woman in a sphere that was white and male-dominated was itself a form of hope to dramatize

44  Alex Zamalin a new civic sphere in which gender and racial hierarchy were abolished. If indeed “the pen is mightier than the sword”, she explained, “the time has come as never before that the wielders of the pen belonging to the race which is so tortured and outraged, should take serious thought and purposeful action” (Wells 2014, 89). Wells’s politics came from direct involvement in political institutions; she lectured widely in the United States and the United Kingdom, ran for political office in Illinois, organized civic associations in Chicago and women’s political action committees. But like Walker before her, Wells’s politics was partly rhetorical—to dramatize how lynching invalidated aspirations to American democracy. Americans who are, devoted to principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outcry. They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country. (Wells 2014, 74) As a Black woman, Wells’s precariousness in a racist-patriarchal society was different than her male counterparts—her writings were often dismissed as too emotional, her office in Memphis was firebombed, and her authorial legitimacy was questioned. Yet Wells’s political visibility and no-holds-barred rhetoric was, as much as anything, an attempt to fashion political hope through a heightened state of vulnerability. By bearing witness to the Black body in pain (Wells would meticulously detail the gruesome images of lynching victims), Wells sought to provoke outrage and shame in her audience. Doing this as a woman—where women’s work was imagined to be nonconfrontational—undid the public–­ private distinction that relegated women to apolitical spaces and men in politics. During the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, hope was most clearly associated with the religiously infused and liberal wing of the Black church, and figures such as Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Less appreciated, however, is the role of hope in Black radicalism of the Black Panther Party. Founded in 1966 as a response to anti-Black violence and police brutality, the Panthers gave a theoretical voice to Black rebellion and a philosophy of intercommunalism that embraced collective action. Playing on images of death and destruction, one of its ­co-­founders, Huey Newton, makes negativity into a form of insurrectionary critique: “By rejecting the love of one/I received the love of all/By surrendering my life to the revolution, I found eternal life, Revolutionary Suicide” (Newton 2002, xxi). By fighting white supremacy, Newton’s image of Black revolution undoes individualism, and its attendant virtues—upward mobility, instrumentalism, and sovereignty. The uprisings that Newton has in mind—whether rebellion in the city, self-defense, socialist politics, or mutual aid—remake ideas of national belonging

Between Loss and Hope 45 and citizenship. Newton finds hope through creative destruction of hegemonic American values. Newton dissolves national boundaries and traditions in highlighting a pan-African ethos, which puts forth a global orientation: “Our hopes for freedom then lie in the future . . . a future which may hold a positive elimination of national boundaries and ties”. In this image of the future, Newton articulates a conception of love and hospitality that isn’t governed by ideas of possession and ownership. “In revolutionary love,” he writes, “we must make common cause with these oppressed communities” (Newton and Blake 2009, 236). Black feminists known as the Combahee River Collective took it upon themselves to politicize an issue—the domination of Black women—that was being marginalized in mainstream feminist and Black radical organizing in the 1960s. The Combahee Collective’s fusion of class, race, gender, and sexuality in their political critique offered a new standpoint for theorizing not based in abstractions, but in lived, intersectional experience. As they wrote, We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. (Combahee River Collective 2015, 213) In doing this, the Combahee Collective incorporated loss into their method of ­critique—the loss of grand narratives around identity, the fracturing of universals, and the end of abstractions and universals. At the same time, it was through lived experience, which captured the ambivalence and centrality of political interests, that the Combahee Collective articulated an idea of hope. Hope, for the Combahee Collective, would need to be negotiated through, not outside, difference and conditions of embodied experience, and through coalitions and solidarities whose interests may not always align. But in this sense, hope itself would be generated through negotiation, contest, and conflict in ways that would remake categories of political life—the meaning of freedom, justice, and equality. Over the past few decades, Black feminist and radical visions have combined around the overarching idea of abolition. As a counterpoint to the right-wing and neoliberal success of building up coercive, antidemocratic practices since the 1970s (the free market, the national security and surveillance state, the war machine, and the prison industrial complex), Black revolutionary praxis has organized its vision around dismantling hierarchy—not only dismantling of prisons, decarceration, or defunding the police but also in cancelling debt, demilitarizing schools, divesting from fascist global alliances, ending the housing crisis, and the rule of insatiable capitalism. Abolition is evident in a wide range of movements—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Dakota Access

46  Alex Zamalin Pipeline Protests, and Feminism for the 99%. And despite the way abolition centralizes critique, it is a movement based in hope because it is centred on the idea that transformed imagination requires the destruction of the old, that only through the destruction of entrenched orders of domination and inequality can new orders begin to rise. As Angela Davis puts it, An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison [and other coercive practices] from the social and ideological landscapes of our society . . . Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. (Davis 2003, 107) A brief survey of the Black revolutionary tradition across US history reveals a resignified meaning of hope. In this way, Black revolutionary thought challenges recent theorizing around Afropesssimism, which rejects theories of liberation, precisely because these theories are founded on the premise that, as Frank Wilderson puts it, “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures” (Wilderson 2020, 15). And yet, the Black revolutionary tradition isn’t nihilistic, which is to say, it doesn’t adopt a fatalistic approach to action. Indeed, hope is found through processes of struggle; it changes and evolves as conditions change; it modifies its meaning as movements on the ground form, and reform. Hope, in this tradition, is directly connected to struggle, action, and collective movements, rather than simply the depth or intensity of one’s commitment. Hope is a form of praxis whose meaning and possibilities depend on collaborative, episodic, and ephemeral practices and spaces that challenge easy notions of progress and reconciliation. This image of hope in the Black revolutionary tradition shares affinities with what scholar Joseph R. Winters suggests is a crucial strain of Black culture, what he describes as melancholic hope .  .  . which, “undercuts familiar affirmations of hope, or hopefulness, to gesture toward a different kind of hope, future, and set of possibilities . . . Melancholy . . . is one way to register death, tragedy, and loss, including the losses, exclusions, and alienating effects of social existence.” (Winters 2016, 20) Hope, in this sense, is fugitive, escaping institutionalization and containment, and always surrounded by the spectre of loss. In this way, it connects to what

Between Loss and Hope 47 political theorist Neil Roberts insists is part of the body of thought that reimagines “freedom as marronage” (Roberts 2015)—a theory of freedom which he finds in the process of enslaved citizens escaping bondage. The Black revolutionary tradition’s conception of hope stems from a theory of power in which transcendence of structural constraint cannot be done through individualism; that progress is a fantasy, that struggle is a mainstay of politics. Democratic theorists invested in radical conceptions of democracy have much to learn from the Black revolutionary tradition. Radical democrats have long championed the role of an oppositional disruptive politics, which resists rational consensus, and instead foregrounds the competition of affects and interests. For radical democrats, rage is a productive and mobilizing affect for resistance, while counterhegemonic conceptions of politics must be embraced by social movements (Marion Young 2002). But radical democrats have spent insufficient attention on the nuances of political hope. Perhaps this is because hope is too interwoven with the kind of messianism that they critique; or because it is difficult to assess the materiality of hope. And yet, hope is a powerful force for democratic politics; it provides movements with a feeling that inspires commitment and resolve in the face of constraint and anchors them in times of crisis. The Black revolutionary conception of hope teaches us that democracy requires working from within and through a sense of melancholy and disappointment. Bibliography Combahee River Collective. 2015. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Morago and Gloria Anzaldúa, 210–19. New York: State University Press of New York. Davis, Angela Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories. Delany, Martin R. 2003. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fortune, T. Thomas. 2022. Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South. New York: Atria Books. Lear, Jonathan. 2008. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Newton, Huey P. 2002. The Huey P. Newton Reader. Edited by David Hilliard. New York: Seven Stories. Newton, Huey P., and J. Herman Blake. 2009. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Penguin. Roberts, Neil. 2015. Freedom as Marronage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Walker, David. 2008 [1829]. “Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America.” In Documenting the American South. Chapel Hill: University Library of the University of North Carolina. http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html. Wells, Ida B. 2014. The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. Edited by Mia Bay. New York: Penguin.

48  Alex Zamalin West, Cornel. 1999. “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization.” In The Cornel West Reader, 87–118. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Wilderson, Frank B. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright. Winters, Joseph R. 2016. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy and the Agony of Racial Progress. Durham: Duke University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

4 Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity in Latin American and African Narratives Sarah M. Quesada

Introduction Over the last decade, scholarship worldwide has been attempting to assess the memory of the alleged 1989 failure of the leftist revolution and decolonization. As early as 1966, when Marxist critics complained that Western philosophy lacked political action, Jacques Derrida famously quipped “history is already over”. But far from being over, the termed “Third World” disappointment and the trend of authoritarian regimes rising throughout the Global South have generated debates regarding how to construct a future of solidarities based on these internationalist histories. This is especially true in light of the ways in which anti-colonial lenses have been critiqued for their deemed uncritical support of literary texts conjuring this decolonial era, on the one hand, and postcolonial theory snubbing contemporary texts that are deemed too critical of Third Worldism, on the other.1 Yet, these discursive viewpoints set up a dichotomy between postcolonial resistance critique and its reparative counterpart, leaving out any other possibilities for assessing an ideological recovery of this leftist era. This happens even in light of contemporary works in Latin America and Africa speaking to each other. Because these works reflect on the Third World left era from the vantage point of the present, they also tend to be pessimistic, and therefore dismissed by anticolonial critique or misunderstood by postcolonial studies. But one of the main issues at hand is that comparative studies still categorize literature according to colonial languages, rarely considering the south–south interaction, for instance, between Francophone African and Latin American texts and the possible ways this engagement might challenge the resistance versus reparative paradigm for Cold war era temporalities. This chapter proposes a different strategy to assess the dichotomy between hope and disillusionment when a Cold War era is conjured in contemporary fiction in both the Latin American and African examples. It does so with a particular attention to texts that present avenues for considering Third World leftism along a south–south relation through the use of what I term “textual memorials”. To begin discussing strategies that better assess a contemporary vantage point DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-6

50  Sarah M. Quesada for Cold War era hopes and disappointments between Latin America and Africa, I propose we look first at the sites of memory from these antipodes. In The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Quesada 2022), I offered the notion of the “textual memorial” as a device meant to promote a rereading of literary history. Textual memorials are representations of sites of trauma conjured in the literary which I compare to prominent sites of memory, specifically, the UNESCO Slave Route. To think of the literary as the experiential (e.g. the heritage trail of the Slave Route) offers potentialities for mediating memories of south–south alliance. After all, the Slave Route became a prominent destination for heritage tourism at the turn of the millennium in nation-states like Senegal and Benin, where these historical points of slave departure also conjured moments of African historiography, including the Cold war era decolonial wars. This subjective experience of moving along a heritage trail and absorbing these microhistories ignites what Maurice Halbwachs (1992) terms, “emotional relationship”, or a subjective attachment to a charged site of memory. Affect reconstitutes visualizations of events as they unfolded throughout time, even if speculative, thus reinforcing the mutually constitutive effects of symbolic spaces and fiction. That is, the physical site of memory—the UNESCO memorial—and the speculative stories told (whether written or recounted by guides)—open up the closed ways in which memorials crystalize the history that statues, memorials, or monuments represent. Textual memorials represent the site of memory, or in Pierre Nora’s terms, the lieu de mémoire (Nora 1989, 24) that amplifies the site’s events—a zooming in, focalization, or aggrandizement—and therefore challenges the crystallization of Eurocentric frameworks of storytelling. In an era in which we would necessitate Global South solidarities, especially in light of movements like Rhodes Must Fall or Black Lives Matter, I am interested in the role that memorialization can play not only in “reimagining a future of resistance” to cite the subject-matter of this volume but also in questioning the liminal ways this resistance emerges at the interstices of south–south engagement. In which ways is resistance not offered as a strategy, to cite Ato Quayson (2000). This notion breaks away from dichotomies we have grown accustomed to, namely, the Hegelian track of the “master versus slave” narrative. It is precisely this lens that allows to read a refusal to resist or to eschew the damning realities of a failed African decolonization in contemporary stories about LatinAfrican engagement. Instead, textual memorials, as I will show, become routes of an always-nostalgic, all-but-untenable south–south history of simultaneous disappointment and hope. I first discuss the textual memorials in Cuban novelist Wendy Guerra’s Todos se van (Everyone Leaves 2006, 2012) set in a Cuba from the 1970s Third World solidarity era to its fall, right before the soviet collapse. The novel fictionalizes the author’s own experience of this period, projected in the protagonist Nieve Guerra, who recounts daily events from childhood to adulthood in her diary. But the diary is a testament to Nieve surviving domestic abuse and state control

Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity 51 with a backdrop to Cuban internationalism in the 1970s. In presenting this context, the novel offers a steep critique of revolutionary patriotism, as the protagonist’s friends flee the island and don the novel its title. It is also in this context of internationalism that the memorialization of Cuban intervention in Angola’s independence emerges. Although it is mentioned only a handful of times, Guerra’s novel joins the ranks of various others conjuring the Cuban internationalist campaign in Angola, among them, Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Cuban-American Achy Obejas, and Cuban exile Eliseo Alberto. In these narratives, the reaction to the Cuban intervention runs the gamut from trumpeted glory to staunch disappointment. García Márquez’s essays on Angola, as I have mentioned elsewhere, fall into the former category and oppose those of Alberto’s Caracol Beach (1998) or Obejas’s Ruins (2009), in which Angola emerges as a site of trauma. But while all these narratives remain curious about their transatlantic other, Guerra’s protagonist seeks no relation with Angola and remains a site of distress. While we might be tempted to conclude that the remaining textual memorials to Angola in Todos se van do little to uphold the continuation of leftist politics that Third Worldism championed, I explore the feelings of alienation that might alter this initial perception. Guerra’s critique of Latin-African memorials is reciprocated by Togolese writer Sami Tchak. Writing around the same time as Guerra, Tchak’s Les filles de Mexico (2008) also uses sites of memory in Africa for the same purpose. Tchak’s site hurls a critique at south–south decolonial failure. Yet this time, the critique is focused more on the effects of failed revolutionary accomplishments in Mexico, which Tchak’s protagonist then relates back to his native Togo. One of various African novels with a Latin American setting as of late, Tchak’s novel features a fictional Togolese intellectual, Djibril Nawo, visiting El Colegio de México to deliver a series of lectures. During this time, he nostalgically seeks out the progressive remnants of Mexico, walking aimlessly through the city and uncertain if he is encountering the living or the dead. In this Rulfean quest for hope, Djibril finds alienation instead. When he arrives in Tepito, a neighbourhood formerly known for its social insurgency, he finds that Mexico’s revolution has only left decomposure in its wake, reminiscent of Togo’s capital, Lomé. Conjuring the phantom land of Mexican canonical author Juan Rulfo, Tchak encounters the ghosts of sadist sexual exploitation and devastating poverty, producing sites of alienation that nevertheless lead to solidarity with the Global South. I place these texts together because both generate a renewed “theory from the South”, undoing tenants of Eurocentric memorialization. And yet, this network between Guerra and Tchak offers a simultaneous solidarity and critique often missed in both geographical scopes of Atlantic studies—for Latin American and African studies could still be brought together in comparative work more often— but also in terms of literary history. Perhaps these textual sites could bring these south–south histories into the open and consequently produce a renewal of their politics in the contemporary period. In the process, they might also help us

52  Sarah M. Quesada rethink modes of comparison and what is lost when comparative studies operate in the image of the West. Sites of African Disappointment in a Latin American Example Guerra’s bildungsroman Todos se van (2006) centres the protagonist Nieve Guerra’s mostly painful experience living on an island run by Marxist patriarchal mechanisms of state control. The ideals that set Cuba apart on the world stage in the early Cold War era ultimately lead the character towards an alienation from her nation-state and leftist ideals that Fidel Castro and especially Ernesto “Che” Guevara both championed. One of the protagonist’s early encounters with this disappointment dovetails with Cuba’s program of African decolonization, specifically the 1975 mission in Angola. The Cuban-Angolan crucible begins just a few years before the opening of the novel and, by this time, a rhetoric of south–south solidarity has solidified in Cuba, justifying the involvement of the Cuban people. If García Márquez’s essays on the matter characterize the mission as voluntary in “Ninguno se fue por la fuerza” (“No one went against his will”, 131, 129), historian Christine Hatzky claims the exact opposite, and that Cubans were forced to enlist, suffering later from post-traumatic stress and a general sense of alienation while in Angola (216). In Guerra’s narrative, the experience of a foreign war seems just as forceful as it is confounding. When the narrative opens with ­eight-year-old Nieve in 1978 through the intimate voice of her diary, she announces that the Cuban state has threatened to draft her mother in “La amenazan con mandarla para Angola” (“They threaten to send her to Angola”, 18, 7). But a young Nieves also reports that “Mi madre dice que esa guerra no tiene explicación. Pero me pide que no lo repita” (“My mother says there’s no reason for that war. But then she asks me to not repeat that to anyone”). This passing utterance carries a great deal of weight: it is at once indicative of how little Cubans believe a south–south rhetoric as the justification for war—one that is so geographically remote relative to Cuba—and a marker of the island’s lack of tolerance for Cuban opinion levelled against the state. Coupled with this society of control is the spatiotemporal site of Angola as fearful. For Nieve, the mention of Angola, far from conjuring a triumphant Marxist solidarity with the Global South, evokes imagined scenes of war and, consequentially, feelings of debilitating fear: “Me da miedo de que mi madre vaya a la guerra” (“I’m afraid that they will send my mother to the war”, 18). A frightful Angola in the imaginary of young Nieves contradicts the strong south–south alliances, contrasting strongly with García Márquez’s rendition of this moment, in which Cubans are passionate about serving in the war: “incontables los casos de voluntarios que lograron burlar los filtros de selección” (“there were countless cases of volunteers who managed to slip through the selective filters”, 130, 128). García Márquez’s war trumpeting opposes the protagonist’s fear that the war will annihilate the mother’s health, both mental and physical, repeating versions of “Mi madre no va

Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity 53 a aguantar una guerra completica” (“My mother’s not going to be able to survive a real war”, 18–19, 7–8). In her diary, Angola becomes textualized as a memorial that evokes feelings of pain, dejection, and alienation. In fact, when the state does indeed draft her mother, Nieves protests, with Angola featuring centrally: “Estoy en huelga de Diario porque se llevaron a mi madre a la guerra de Angola. Esta página está en blanco en su honor” (“I’m on a Diary strike because they sent my mother to war in Angola. This page is blank in her honor”, 20, 9). This figurative statue of Angola in the novel, far from memorializing feelings of revolutionary solidarity for the putative Third World—or of “revolutionary love” as Che ­Guevara famously championed—produces alienation. Another memorial to this Cold War junction in the novel is in fact that of Che Guevara, who makes several appearances but not in the solemn ways the Cuban government reproduces. For example, the narrator remarks on the chance encounter between the legendary revolutionary and her mother while she was sketching bare-chested. Her mother remains indifferent to his many questions, never turning away from her painting while she answers. The narrator even boasts that her mother never bothered to cover up for the comandante. When everyone asks her mother if the man was impressive, she denies this simply and offers that he was “un hombre normal” (“a normal man”) who wandered alone (131–32). While the novel either offers as a contradiction or as irony that Che is easily categorized as a memorialized “martyr” alongside Camilo Cienfuegos, the fallen in Angola, or the mambí who fought for the Cuban Republic (125), Che’s memorial is both almost humanized and certainly demystified in this instance. But Che’s image in Cuba soon becomes one reviled and contested. “Alguien pisó la imagen del Che en una exposición . . .” (“Someone stepped on an image of Che at a show . . .” 219, 207) Nieves announces one day. “Alguien fue llevado preso por pisar una imagen del Che en el suelo de una galería de arte”, Nieves then elaborates making it clear that expressions of political dissent—like the one her mother offered earlier about Angola—are deemed subversive and punishable. Nieves then enters a rhetorical argument with the state: todos los días miles de personas pisan las obras de Wifredo Lam y Martínez Pedro, pero no es lo mismo. Mienten. El arte y la política son diferentes. Nadie puede pisar la imagen de un héroe . . . . El Che es lo cotidiano, como de todos los días en todas las casas de este país. Su asma y su locura, su alma suicida. Todo lo que dijo y todo lo que rompió con su irreverencia no significa ni la milésima parte de pisar su imagen. ¿Cuántas cosas transgredió él?. . . la galería está cerrada. Claro, está de moda cerrar las galerías. . . Hoy voy a mirar por el cristal, pegar mi nariz al vidrio a ver si en el suelo sigue el Che (219–20). every day thousands of people step on the work of Wifredo Lam and Martínez Pedro, but it’s not the same. They lie. Art and politics are very different. No one can step on the image of a hero. . . . Che is every day, every day in every

54  Sarah M. Quesada home in this country. His asthma and his madness, his suicidal soul. Everything he said and all he broke through because of his irreverence don’t compare in the slightest way with stepping on his image. How many things did he transgress? . . . The gallery is closed. Of course, it’s become fashionable to close the galleries . . . Today I’m going to look through the glass, put my nose right up to it, and see if Che is still on the floor (207–8). Far from the mythological figure the state has created, Che becomes once again a mere mortal. Nieves’ depiction of Che as a victim of his asthma attacks transgresses the sanitized versions of his perfection. The same happens with the notions of his staunch revolutionary ideology—“su locura, su alma suicida”— that drove him to the failed missions in the Congo and Bolivia, with a highly improbable chance of success and with the latter experiment ending his life. But because memorials are contested sites, the Che can either remain the state’s legendary hero of the Cuban revolution—as the narrator sardonically mocks “Nadie puede pisar la imagen de un héroe”—or a trampled image lying irreverently on the sullen, trodden floor of a closed-up gallery. Over a decade later, Nieves is majoring in the arts and produces a thesis project that consists of setting a tower of books ablaze, much to her mother’s dismay. As everyone watches literature burn, the phrase “Un libro de Marx ardía junto a uno de Milan Kundera” (“A book by Marx was in flames next to one by Milan Kundera”, 224, 211) masterfully crystallizes the culmination of Marxist defeat. I present this and the examples above because although the novel performatively sets these mythologies ablaze—the Angolan mission, Che, and the Marxist literature that inspires it—these memorials live on in the sardonic tone of the novel’s plot. They exist, in other words, to revisit the ways the Global South intersected Cuban national history, contesting the colonial ways in which linguistic divides have siloed Latin American and African literature. As the narrator reflects on how her book-burning metaphorically burns “naves”—“bridges” in Obejas’s translation of Guerra (“As the books burned, I realized that my bridges were burning too”, 220)—Guerra’s novel memorializes this moment. Even though the novel is pessimistic and seeks to burn this failure’s ideological underpinnings— its ­literature—the new literature on this era, Todos se van, presents a textual memorial to this era, nonetheless. This memorial encapsulates the disillusionment of the Cold War era in the examples of Che’s failure in the Global South as well as the Cuban state obliging Cubans into an ill relationship with Angola through a forced war. But, at the same time, as the novel reflects on this period, it also elicits glimmers of hope for a south–south history moving forward. Sites of Latin America Disappointment in an African Example The failures of Third Worldism also surface in African writing in the example of Tchak’s Les filles de Mexico. While I will centre Tchak’s novel, it is also

Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity 55 worth noting a trend in the African francophone literary world: namely, the interest in Latin American settings of the African novel for which the recent Goncourt-prize-winner is the most notable example. After all, Senegalese ­ Mohamed Mbougar Sarr features a failing global sixties that includes Argentina in La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021, 339). In the bolañesque search for a lost and defamed African writer, Buenos Aires features prominently in the novel’s setting. In the reference “L’Argentine était de nouveau plongée dans la nuit d’une dictature militaire depuis 1966. Des révoltes populaires avaient commencé depuis 1969 et ce qu’on a appelé le Cordobazo” (“Argentina was again plunged into a night of military dictatorship since 1966. Popular revolts had recommenced since 1969 in what had become known as the Cordobazo”),2 for example, the novel shows signs of decolonial strain. While the novel connects this leftist failure to Senegal, what is central in this contemporary moment of African writing is the turn towards what we might term narratives of disappointment that also unveil forms of hope in the very south–south configurations of this writing. I discuss Tchak because Les filles de Mexico becomes one of the most critical Francophone African novels on Latin American revolutionary movements. While it is my contention that Les filles de Mexico is passed up due to this overwhelming disillusionment of anti-colonial movements—it has not been translated into any language and is virtually unknown in Mexico and Colombia in which it is set—it becomes a major work that registers south–south possibilities in the 21st century through its particular sites of memory. Thus, while Guerra’s novel translates the multifaceted meaning of textual memorials like Angola or Che’s failed Congo, Les filles de Mexico translates the unsuccessful Mexican revolutionary movement for a francophone audience. Les filles de Mexico focuses in part on the insurgency of el ’68 that has left a morally depraved Mexico City in its wake. Tchak’s novel features a fictional Togolese writer, Djibril Nawo, visiting El Colegio de México while becoming an aimless flâneur, seeking the most progressive times of the city. During Tchak’s surreal pilgrimage through Mexico City’s entrails, Djibril winds up in the dangerous barrio bravo of Tepito. A formerly insurgent neighbourhood, Tepito fails to rise to its decolonial promise and is reminiscent of Djibril’s native Lomé, the capital of Togo. A Tepito that offers “tentes multicolores” or “des montagnes de CD et de DVD pirates, des armes et de la drogue” (“multicoloured tents”; “mountains of bootleg CDs and DVDs, weapons, and drugs”), this chaotic site offers the “impression” to Djibril that the scene “described the quotidian of Lomé”, or, as the original text states: “J’avais l’impression qu’on me décrivait un pain quotidien de Lomé” (51). Using Tepito as a site of memory to draw a transatlantic relation to Lomé, Tepito also conjures the textual site of American anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s Los hijos de Sánchez (The Children of Sánchez 1961). Lewis’s infamous text—a severe critique of Mexico’s failed revolutionary promises and the culture of poverty in Tepito—immediately comes into focus when Djibril arrives, decades later, to that neighbourhood.3 Laying

56  Sarah M. Quesada eyes on Tepito residents, Djibril recalls the testimony he read earlier that day in Lewis. The testimony of informant Martha, a daughter of Sánchez, becomes translated into French in Tchak’s novel: Les mots de Marta, une des Enfants de Sánchez, me revinrent: Chaque jour quelqu’un était volé, ou assassiné, ou violé. Il y a une histoire à propos d’une fille de Tepito qui avait un petit ami. C’était un salaud de la pire espèce. Une fois il l’avait invitée au cinéma. Il avait combiné avec d’autres garçons de la raccompagner en passant par le marché; et là, ils l’ont saisie, l’ont entraînée dans l’une des boutiques et l’ont tous violée. . .; et puis ils l’ont tuée (67). The words of Marta, one of the Children of Sánchez, came back to me: Every day someone was robbed, or murdered, or raped. There is a story about a girl of Tepito who had a boyfriend. He was a bastard of the worst kind. Once he had invited her to the cinema. He had agreed with other boys to accompany her through the market; and there they seized her, dragged her into one of the shops and all raped her. . .; and then they killed her (67). The details a young girl’s gang rape in Lewis’s text that now Djibril recalls over the site of Tepito suggest that Martha’s pre-1968 lifetime is just as relevant then as it is to Djibril’s post-1968 revolutionary reality. Djibril’s transcription and translation of Lewis in 2008 when his novel is published thus suggests that, far from radical change for the better, the opposite is true. This contemporaneity is all the more heart-breaking considering that the 1960s of Sánchez’s text (and that of Martha’s lifetime) coincided with Mexico’s prolific alignment with Africa.4 During the presidency of López Mateos (1958–64), an African embassy in Egypt was opened and diplomatic relations were established with prominent leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Senegal’s Leopold Sédar Senghor. Mexico would even observe the Non-Aligned Conference in Cairo, Egypt, in 1964. Nevertheless, the ghosts of Sánchez in Tepito offer a debilitating reminder of this failure, one that is forgotten about in his native Togo until Tchak translated it. Thus, the gesture of relating Lomé to Tepito becomes legible to the Francophone world, even if it is through disappointment. A more pointed and even amusingly ironic reminder of this failure is when Djibril wanders down “Avenida Insurgentes”. The use of Djibril’s aimless walking along one of the city’s main arteries, suggestively termed “insurgent,” is an open allegorical critique of the ways in which the ghosts of failure haunt the memory of insurgency. This is especially true when, along this path, the Aztec earth goddess Cuatlicue reminds Djibril of the ways the otherworldly inhabit the living: quand Coatlicue s’était mise me parler des fantômes qui prenaient la forme humaine pour faire l’amour avec des vivantes, je m’étais trouvé soudain à Lomé, dans la capitale de mon pays, où circulaient les mêmes histories de

Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity 57 fantômes (sur ce plan, Juan Rulfo et García Márquez avaient très peu de choses à m’apprendre). (25) (. . . when Coatlicue had begun to tell me about the ghosts that took the human form to make love with the living, I had suddenly found myself in Lomé, in the capital of my country, where the same ghost stories circulated (in this context, Juan Rulfo and García Márquez had very little to teach me). (25) While there is a lot to unpack here, it becomes evident that Djibril sought to escape postcolonial Lomé for Mexico City due to the same kinds of hauntings happening there. But, instead, Djibril finds a Mexico mired in the same tragic decolonial fate or “les mêmes histories de fantômes” (“the same haunting stories”) that trouble his native Lomé. Moreover, Djibril’s reality in Mexico uses Mexican canonical writer Juan Rulfo as a textual memorial of disillusionment. After all, Rulfo’s phantasmagorical Pedro Páramo features a protagonist like Djibril, who finds himself living among ghosts after Mexico’s failed revolutionary period. But Djibril pushes Pedro Páramo aside just like Nieve in Todos se van distances herself from Angola or el Che. After all, Djibril announces that Rulfo’s ghosts do not compare to the abysmal state of affairs present now in both Lomé and Mexico City: Rulfo’s revolutionary writing, like Che’s revolution in the Congo or Bolivia, has failed. It is crucial to emphasize here the ways these textual memorials in Tchak— Tepito, Lewis, Avenida Insurgentes, Rulfo—convey forms of alienation that are most productive to comparative studies. Although Third Worldist disappointment is hardly a model that anti-colonial scholarship would champion, Tchak, like Guerra, finds the same alienation abroad he did at home, haunted by memorials of disillusionment. But far from concluding that this similarity across the Atlantic is proof positive of Derrida’s derision, I propose that what is at play is instead a form of relation that Ignacio Sánchez Prado terms “strategic” comparativisms. If for Sánchez Prado, this strategy—which borrows from Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism”—envisions semiperipheral writers “adopt[ing] a cosmopolitan stance to acquire cultural capital within their national tradition” (Sánchez Prado 2018, 19), here cultural capital is acquired from a relation with the Global South. This notion is in line with what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o considered to be a bypassing of cultural centres to promote south–south autonomy and political strength.5 The textual memorials I have been discussing revive the conversations of south–south alliance, even if through alienation. That is, even if it might seem contradictory to theories of solidarity and alliance, alienation becomes the common denominator that bypasses occidental centres. As such, the textual memorials of both Guerra and Tchak conjure Third World networks instead, breaking away from the Western expectations of engagement—namely, agreement or connection—to find instead an alliance through alienation. The textual memorial of Tepito in Tchak’s novel best exemplifies this move away

58  Sarah M. Quesada from Hegelian dialectic. At a moment in which Djibril becomes exhausted from seeking countless moments of relation, he also affirms a feeling of misplacement: “Loin de chez moi, mais comme me préparant à me replonger dans les ambiances de chez moi! . . . je n’allais pas à Tepito pour me retrouver mais pour me perdre” (“Far from home, but like feeling replunged into the spaces of home! . . . I  did not go to Tepito to find myself but to be lost”, 51). Rather than finding oneself in the world, Djibril goes to Mexico only to be lost. Like Nieve who performs the burning of bridges, Djibril finds relation only in uncertainty that leads to a feeling of being lost in the world. But the memorials of Angola like those of Lomé or Tepito are sites of enunciation that, to cite Ngũgĩ wa’ Thiong’o, are “moving the centre” that replace Pascale Casanova’s centrality of Paris as the Greenwich meridian of the cosmopolitan. I would like to conclude by pointing out the ways in which the textual memorials in Guerra and Tchak “resolve” this conjecture of disillusionment versus hope beyond the Cold War thematic. While Guerra and Tchak set the plot of their novels in the Global South, the locations they fictionalize are not legible to the communities they write about. Tchak in particular is not translated into Spanish nor much less circulated in Mexico. Moreover, the frameworks of Third World solidarity through alienation that they offer remain illegible in the Global North where their works are circulated, diluting the true possibilities of a renewed comparativism. In this regard, I am reminded of Joseph Slaughter’s address to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in 2017, “Locations of Comparison”. In his explanation of how the African Studies Association attempted to “legitimize” African literature in the mid-1960s, Slaughter bemoans that African authors became legible “to the American literature student by analogy with its own culture” (223). This strategy dismissed the ways in which comparison can be aligned with poles outside of the hegemonic north: a Third World framework. Nearly 50 years later, Guerra and Tchak shift that praxis, bypassing the United States for a Latin-African framework, and rendering intelligible previously obscured analogies of comparison. They do so through a revitalization of the global sixties and its afterlives. After all, as Ngũgĩ writes, the 1960s featured countries in Asia and Africa “demanding and asserting their right to define themselves and their relationship to the universe from their own centres in Africa and Asia” (Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms 1992, 20), and would thus function as the memorial platform from which to reflect from a healthy temporal remove. What Guerra and Tchak reveal is not only a south–south network that is obscured in the fields that engage these authors, from Black Atlantic studies, to the postcolonial, to areas studies, but also a strategy that exemplifies a path for renewed “Third World” solidarity. This Latin-African literature promotes the conjuring of Third World networks through sites of memory that speak to alienation and nuance. In this way, both Tchak and Guerra present

Memorials of “Third World” Solidarity 59 the potentialities of this revival in the 21st century. Arguing that a nostalgia for the 1960s Third Worldism is still critical and realistic—and not ideological or simplistic—these novels also inspire a return to the notions of solidarity even if through realistic disappointment. That is, they break away from easy comparativisms and free a path forward to empathize with failure across the Atlantic in the 21st century. Notes 1 I am thinking especially of the critique of anti-colonial lenses who take issue with how anti-colonial approaches render post-1960s writing “apolitical” to the Third World insurgency. Then, on the other, scholars like Patricia Stuelke have criticized reparative modes of critique that look away from the postcolonial, seeming to convey an obliviousness to the very forms of social justice that built these movements in the first place. 2 As published English translations remain unavailable, all translations from French to English are my own. 3 The founder of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexican-Argentine Marxist Arnaldo Orfila Reynal published the infamous Los hijos de Sánchez (1964), which later cost Orfila Reynal his position during the presidency of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. According to many accounts, many Mexican intellectuals, including Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, break with Fondo after the expulsion of Orfina Reynal to support Siglo XXI, founded by Elena Poniatowska and directed later by Orfila Reynal. 4 In 1961, Senate Majority Leader Manuel Moreno Sánchez and Ambassador to Egypt Alejandro Carrillo sent public officials from the public and private sectors to various African countries. These are: Secretary and Industry and Trade and the National Secretary of Finance (Nacional Financiera Secretaría de Industria y Comercio, Nacional Financiera). 5 “The spread of European cultural exports, central to the structure of the lord’s education of the colonial bondsman. Domination and resistance traditions were largely expressed and negotiated in European languages” (Ngũgĩ, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing 2012, 52).

Bibliography Alberto, Eliseo. 1998. Caracol Beach. Madrid: Alfaguara. Brouillette, Sarah. 2019. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Casanova, Pascale, and M. B. DeBevoise. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Descombs, Vincent. 1979. 1983. Modern French Philosophy. Translated by L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1994. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York, NY: Grove Press. Guerra, Wendy. 2006. Todos se van. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama. ———. 2012. Everyone Leaves. Translated by Achy Obejas. Las Vegas, NV: Amazon Crossing.

60  Sarah M. Quesada Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hatzky, Christine. 2015. Cubans in Angola: South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Lewis, Oscar. 1961. The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York, NY: Random House. Mbougar Sarr, Mohamed. 2021. La plus secrète mémoire des hommes. Paris: Éditions Philippe Rey, Jimsaan. Ngũgĩ, wa Thiong’o. 1992. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: Currey. ———. 2012. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. Obejas, Achy. 2009. Ruins. Brooklyn, NY: Akashic Books. Quayson, Ato. 2000. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Quesada, Sarah M. 2022. The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rulfo, Juan. 2014. Pedro Páramo. Translated by Margaret S. Peden. London: Serpent’s Tail. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2018. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Slaughter, Joseph. 2018. “Locations of Comparison.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary 5 (2): 209–26. Stuelke, Patricia R. 2021. The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tchak, Sami. 2008. Les filles de Mexico. Paris: Mercure de France. Waters, Mary-Alice, ed. 2013. Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own. New York, NY: Pathfinder.

Part II

Negative Affect, Mobilization, and the Troubles of Democracy

5 Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past Brigitte Bargetz

Introduction Over the last few years, feelings such as despair, hopelessness, paranoia, and depression have become characteristic political moods and have only been intensifying. The phenomena these moods draw on are multiple and often deeply connected: the financial crisis; the rise of right-wing populism and authoritarianism; enduring structural racism; the further construction of walls and fences around the so-called Fortress Europe and beyond; increasing anti-feminism, ­re-­masculinization, femonationalism, and homo- and transphobia; the global growing gap between the rich and poor; incessant climate change; or the recent wars.1 Against the background of this “affective landscape” (Bargetz 2019, 182), one might wonder how to respond to the fact that Western modern struggles for liberty, equality, and solidarity have not only revealed that democracy is yet “to come” (Derrida 1994) but also contributed to provoking the contemporary political condition in all its brutality (e.g. Lowe 2015). How to engage with this loss of past political promises? Should an emancipatory and democratic longing be kept open while suspending ties to those violent modes of the political that do not work? And, if so, how? What kind of imaginaries can help in doing so? In this chapter, I develop the notion of melancholic agency as a way of thinking through the troubles of democracy, both affectively and temporally. I elaborate on political melancholy as an ambivalent political feeling which allows for a critique of the historical present in order to identify splinters of the past as well as political potentialities of a haunting future. In so doing, the chapter takes two directions. First, it adds to discussions about the political possibilities of affective politics by bringing to the fore and making use of critical, feminist, queer, and anti-racist archives. Second, it contributes to debates about the so-called contemporary age of critique by challenging voices that have recently called for affirmation instead of critique in contemporary theory. Questioning these appeals, I propose embracing critique and seemingly negative affect in order to reimagine the current political impasses and the future of resistance. DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-8

64  Brigitte Bargetz The Affective Landscape of Political Depression and the Crisis of Imagination “All modern political revolutions, while remaining political revolutions, also function as revolutions ‘in philosophy,’ enabling new thought to happen”, notes Bill Schwarz (2017, 93), and he illustrates how “this was emphatically so in the [Haitian] revolution in Saint Domingue”. Broadly speaking, theories are part of social practices and contribute to analysing, criticizing, and transforming the political. Theory is, as Stuart Hall (1992, 286) has pointedly claimed, “a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges . . . a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference”. This means, as I would further emphasize following Mona Singer (2005, 211, my translation), not only that “the world as we know it could look different, but that we also have to take responsibility for how it looks”—precisely “because it could look different”. As “performative visualizations”, critical theories help to “imagine the impossible” (Meißner 2015, 200, my translation). However, to emphasize theory as practice does not imply that theories do or even should outline specific policies or develop blueprints for emancipation. Rather, as historically specific knowledge, theories constitute horizons as well as creative spaces for invention and intervention. This perception of critical theories as horizons for political invention has been problematized lately. At least since the end of state socialism, the capacity of critical theories to imagine transformative political action and political alternatives has been widely scrutinized (e.g. Brown 1999; Harvey 2000; Gibson-Graham 2006; Bargetz 2019; Bargetz and Sanos 2020; Mrovlje and Zamalin this volume). Instead, a loss and lack of political vision within contemporary critical theories has been acknowledged, echoing the “pervasive . . . political despair—that is, feelings of political inefficacy and hopelessness, the sense that nothing will ever change, no matter what some imagined collective ‘we’ does to try to bring change”, as Deborah B. Gould (2012, 95) has put it. Jonathan Dean’s (2015, 234) observation that in recent decades “[g]loom, despair and melancholia” have become “the default affective settings for much of the Anglo-American left”, then, also applies more broadly to a wide range of Western modern critical theories. A passivizing mourning over the loss of past political promises and visions seems to have taken over, hinting, as some claim, at a contemporary “futureless ontology” (Tlostanova 2018). Hence, the affective political landscape of despair and paranoia also haunts contemporary critical theories, making them seemingly bereft of visions of political transformation. The contemporary economic, political, ecological, and care crisis, thus, manifests itself also as a “crisis of imagination” (Vrasti 2016, 249) and, most of all, as a crisis of the democratic imaginary (Bargetz 2019). Opposing the Lack of Imagination: Reimagining Resistance beyond Critique For a growing number of scholars, this lack of political vision and notions of transformation in contemporary critical theories closely connects to the ongoing

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 65 ubiquity of critique in the humanities and social sciences. The crisis of imagination, these scholars maintain, is a crisis of critique that becomes apparent in critical theories’ mainly negative critique—for example, in Marxism, poststructuralism, literary critique, critical theory, or psychoanalysis. While these “critiques of critique” (Barnwell 2015, 907) are far from constituting a coherent field, one common claim is that conventional modes of critique are “exhausted” (Bargetz and Sanos 2020, 507) and fail as an analysis of the contemporary condition and as a mode of emancipatory knowledge production. Here, the crisis of imagination meets a “longing for agency” (Bargetz 2019, 181), which is why many scholars have been eager to mobilize other ways of doing critique (e.g. Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Anker and Felski 2017). One aspect these critiques of critique address is critique’s confinement to negative affects such as melancholy and paranoia. Critique seems to enforce two particular, yet equally unsatisfactory, temporal political modes: on the one hand, it is too invested in an unimaginable future; on the other hand, critique’s negative structure of affect proves inadequate for its orientation towards the past. Regarding the latter, Wendy Brown’s (1999) critique of “left melancholy” has been influential. In view of the collapse of state socialism and the inheritance of Marxism, she criticizes a backward-looking, self-pitying melancholic left, whose dwelling in a lost past and desire for “past political attachments” (Brown 1999, 20) stands in the way of any “critical and visionary spirit” (26). Mourning the loss of political promises is ultimately passivizing since it obstructs the way towards political agency. While Brown criticizes an “almost fairy-tale like belief”, as David Harvey (2000, 11) would frame it, “of what once was” (Brown 1999, 23), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ([1997] 2003, 146) criticizes paranoia as an affective temporal mode of critique for being “at once anticipatory and retroactive”. “The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia”, she explains (Sedgwick 2003, 130), generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known. Critique in the guise of paranoia can only reveal what has already been assumed and suspected beforehand, and, in doing so, it rejects the ability to think of something else that may happen. This makes emancipatory change not only impossible but even unthinkable. After all, such a “paranoid reading” (Sedgwick 2003, 123) comes across as “hermeneutics of suspicion”—an expression Sedgwick borrows from Paul Ricœur: it is limited to a critique of power and domination that relies on “exposure” and “unveiling hidden” truths (Sedgwick 2003, 138–39) and is thus incapable of acknowledging positive affects. For Sedgwick, such a paranoid reading appears in much Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist approaches, and most of all in her own academic writing and thinking at the time—during the 1990s AIDS/HIV crisis when, as Robin Wiegman

66  Brigitte Bargetz (Dean and Wiegman 2013) importantly reminds us, unlike today, the “political value” of critique had been undisputed. A second critique of critique bears upon its individualistic and narcissistic attachment. Critique’s obsession with unveiling, critics observe, nourishes the fantasy of critical omnipotence and risks producing absolute truth claims. It relies on an “infinite reservoir of naïveté in those who make up the audience for these unveilings” (Sedgwick 2003, 141). At stake is, thus, a mode of “critical sovereignty”, as Wiegman (2014, 7) writes, “which gives the critic sovereignty in knowing, when others do not, the hidden contingencies of what things really mean”. Such critique implies a self-righteous or even narcissistic attitude, relying on the idea of a world that is “divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones” (Rancière 1991, 7), where the former should teach the latter. It risks placing the critics as seemingly objective observers while leaving unmarked where and under which conditions their knowledge is being produced. A third claim is that critique upholds a potentially dangerous attachment to destructive critique. In his essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”, Bruno Latour (2004), both polemically and self-critically, engages with critical academic knowledge production that is organized around the idea of scientific facts’ social construction and the revealing of illusions. But what are the possibilities of these critical interrogations, he asks, when questioning facts and declaring contingency have become a widely held public dictum? In their (over-) investment in debunking critique, Latour cautions, critical theories come close to conspiracy theories. The deconstructivist approach to truth, he argues, has in particular come into alarming proximity with those “dangerous extremists” (Latour 2004, 227) who take up the “very same argument of social construction” but with the aim to discredit and destroy crucial, yet potentially life-saving, socio-political insights—for example, the denial of climate change. While critique might, at first sight, hail emancipatory knowledge production, for Latour, it risks working into the hands of conservative forces and being appropriated for legitimizing their goals. Consequently, he calls for a scholarly return to a sort of “realism” which aims not at getting “away from facts” but, on the contrary, at getting “closer to them” (Latour 2004, 231). This threefold affective structure of critique—the attachment to negative affect, narcissism, and destruction—has led many scholars to proclaiming a time “after critique” (Castronovo and Glimp 2013) or “postcritique” (Anker and Felski 2017). Here, reparation, affirmative critique, or affirmation have become critique’s complements, opponents, or alternatives. Sedgwick, for instance, suggests reparation or “reparative reading” as paranoia’s complement and as that which leaves space for positive affects like pleasure and love as well as for the unknown and surprise. Yet, this proposal does not mean abandoning critique altogether but taking it as only one methodology among others. As Wiegman (2014, 7) emphasizes, too, reparative reading is not an “alternative to critique” but “a means to compensate for its increasingly damaged authority”. Others have

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 67 suggested affirmative techniques in order to circumvent ready-made assumptions and to embrace, instead, the unforeseeable possibilities of the future and practices of inventiveness. Writing in the context of contemporary ethical theory and against the background of a new global politics of “social and moral panic”, Rosi Braidotti (2008, 9) develops an affirmative ethics in contrast to regimes of negativity. Unlike a “politics of mourning and the affective economy of melancholia” (Braidotti 2008, 10), affirmative ethics emphasize relationality and the “involvement with others” (14) and thus also enable “new forms of resistance” (10). In a similar vein, Brian Massumi (2010, 338) holds “affirmative critique” against “criticism” or “negative critique”, where “preexisting positionings, as encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment”, rule. Still, others have emphasized going beyond false alternatives, beyond good and bad, optimistic and pessimistic modes of critique. While negation “travels a closed circle predictable in its choreography”, Erin Manning claims (2016, 203), “affirmation creates the trajectory, and from there the potential of the what else emerges”. Certainly, all these engagements express different interventions. Yet what connects them, however loosely, is how they aim to oppose the contemporary crisis of imagination and to address political agency as well as the resistant potential of hope anew. Against Joyful Judgementalism and Complacent Narcissism: But also, against Writing Out Critique Affirmative or reparative approaches offer insightful interventions. Reading their objectives in the context of feminist, queer, anti-racist, postcolonial, anti-­ classist, and anti-ableist perspectives, they reclaim modes of critique which have often been othered in manifold and usually interrelated ways as seemingly irrational, naive, ignorant, uninformed, emotional, or hysterical. To “theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant”, Sedgwick (2003, 126) writes, and thereby critically addresses a differentiation or—even more—hierarchization of different epistemological registers. Relying on the idea of rationality and a sovereign self, the concept of critique always also carries with it androcentric, anthropocentric, ableist, and Eurocentric traces. Not only has the Western modern idea of the sovereign self referred to a white, male, bourgeois, able-bodied self; to characterize someone or something as emotional as opposed to rational has also been used for interlocking devaluations related to sex, gender, race, and class. Against this background, I consider critiques of critique instructive, for they add—at least implicitly, as this purpose is hardly addressed in these debates—to a critique of Western modern epistemologies and the racist, ableist, and masculinist dimensions they entail. Contesting such differentiations and devaluations, contemporary critiques of critique problematize a critique that builds mainly on “fault-finding” (Williams 1983, 84), on narcissistic or paternalistic gestures of superiority, on fantasies of omnipotence,

68  Brigitte Bargetz cynical detachment, autonomy, and invulnerability. At stake is a mode of “criticism” as “authoritarian judging”, as Raymond Williams (1983, 86) explains, thus also offering a helpful distinction between critique and criticism. Such criticism stresses a form of detachment from the world and from others and nourishes the fantasy of “seeing everything from nowhere”, the so-called “god-trick”, as Donna Haraway (1988, 581) has called it. By doing so, criticism ignores “the life of critique” (Sonderegger 2019, 272, my translation), that is, that critique is also an embodied practice that needs to be translated into and out of the everyday (Bargetz 2016). This critique of criticism, as I would suggest calling it in line with Williams, is crucial for critical knowledge production and for further thinking the political, particularly in times of crisis. However, as much as I approve of the need for widening the scope of critical epistemologies beyond androcentric, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric narrowing, I am also reluctant to abandon critique altogether and to fully embrace affirmation (Bargetz 2019; Bargetz and Sanos 2020). In fact, I question the charge of critique as being merely about negative paranoid affect. Rather, it seems that paranoia might equally, however paradoxically, be about good feelings—for paranoia might nurture cynical satisfaction when bad events occur. Critique in this paranoid sense not only entails and fosters negative affect, as many critics of critique have hailed, but also includes what I would call joyful judgementalism without action. In 1931, Walter Benjamin published an essay where he polemicized against the “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) (Benjamin [1931] 1974, 29) of the time, by calling it “left melancholy”. With this notion—to be taken up decades later by Wendy Brown—he criticizes the radical left for merely articulating an attitude that lacks political consequences. This “left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer in general any corresponding political action”, Benjamin (1974, 30) notes, for “all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet”. Or, as Brown (1999, 20) pointedly summarizes: “left melancholy is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present”. Benjamin’s critique of such complacent radical gestures also helps to better illustrate the positive, yet problematic, affects paranoia reveals. Exactly because paranoid critique implies knowing everything beforehand, it ultimately enforces a form of both pleasant passivism and joyful self-confirmation. And yet. Why should only critique be about narcissism? “How would we know when the ‘repair’ we intend is not another form of narcissism or smothering will?” Lauren Berlant (2011, 124) asks. Positioning oneself against critique by emphasizing the positive feelings that affirmation may produce does not hold either, because both affirmation and paranoia may produce violent knowledge claims and because there is no guarantee that supposedly positive affects such as affirmation have only positive effects.

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 69 Emphasizing optimism as affirmation’s enabling alternative to the pessimism of critique falls short in yet another way. It risks idealizing positive affects by assuming that “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005) can simply be “switched off”. Affirmative critique might fall into the trap of basically thinking or feeling away the structural and historical conditions that have produced bad feelings in the first place. Highlighting affirmation as an insightful attitude oriented towards the future and a politics of the possible, risks presuming a politically neutral “zero point” from where everything seems possible. It ignores how the past inscribes itself in affective and material(ized) ways into the present (Bargetz 2020; Bargetz and Sanos 2020) and nourishes the liberal idea of a cheerful future right ahead of us, if only we would imagine it. Also in this sense, Heather Love (2007, 29) claims that hope “achieved at the expense of the past cannot serve the future”. However, overestimating positive affect does not only feed into ignoring those conditions that evoke bad or negative feelings. It also risks erasing those who suffer from the conditions of inequality and violence. As I have argued together with Sandrine Sanos, “going beyond ‘conventional’ critique while emphasising affirmation, active force, and futurity [might] contribute to the unintended erasure of engagement with the materiality of historically specific power relations and its very concrete material effects” (Bargetz and Sanos 2020, 509). Consequently, affirmative approaches eventually exclude the knowledge produced within struggles against these conditions. This is the constellation critical, queer, feminist, and anti-racist critiques have highlighted when dealing with “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005), “feeling backward” (Love 2007), political depression (Cvetkovic 2012; Fisher 2014), or a “politics of anger” (Lorde 1981). By choosing an affirmative and optimistic take over a critique of power and domination, affirmative approaches not only silence these critical, feminist, queer, and antiracist genealogies but seem to require “theoretical amnesias and disavowals” (Bargetz and Sanos 2020, 503) to be able to take up a reparative stance. In sum, these objections can unwrap the complex and complicated issues when thinking about what kind of affective and temporal political modes critique, affirmation, or reparation might release (Bargetz and Sanos 2020). They interrogate an overreliance on the transformative potentialities of positive affects as well as the delegitimizing of critique’s seemingly negative affects. I therefore refrain from abandoning the matter of critique and argue for (re-)thinking the complicated matters of both negative and positive affects alongside each other and how they relate to “negative” and “affirmative critiques” (Sonderegger, 2012, 260; Bargetz and Sanos 2020). In a similar vein, Antonio Gramsci (1996 sq, 28 §11, 2232) has put forward combining the “pessimism of the mind” and the “optimism of the will” while Cornel West (2008, 216) has emphasized that “hope is inseparable from despair”. More explicitly and in line with a certain critical, queer, feminist, and anti-racist tradition, I argue for political melancholy as a way to deal with both moments of affirmation and moments of dissonance

70  Brigitte Bargetz and, consequently, for political melancholy, as an insightful (affective and temporal) mode of critique. Melancholic Agency and a Politics of Futures Past Political melancholy is more than a supposedly negative affect, incapable of opening up new or different political imaginaries. Based on the insight that supposedly negative or bad feelings are, indeed, political, as queer, feminist, and anti-racist scholars have convincingly shown (e.g. hooks 1990; Ahmed 2004; Ngai 2005; Probyn 2005; Love 2007; Gould 2009; Berlant 2011; Cvetkovich 2012), melancholy does not only point to an affective atmosphere which enforces the melancholic subjects to passive dwelling in their own hopelessness or narcissistic quietude. In line with the anti-racist and feminist slogan (Evans 1979) “The personal is political!” I consider melancholy a “public sentiment” (Cvetkovich and Pellegrini 2003, 1), yet in an ambivalent way. In this vein, melancholy is not an individual but a political affect and, consequently, also a historical affect (Bargetz 2020). Melancholy is a “historical problem related to the experience of modernity”, Jonathan Flatley (2008, 3) notes, following Benjamin. It thus allows access to particular Western modern “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) as well as to the yet-unrealized emancipatory promises of democracy. Melancholy is a critical affect which may hold the capacity for political agency precisely because it allows for a critique of the historical present. When I emphasize melancholy’s critical potential, I conceive of critique as a sign of dissatisfaction with the present and, consequently, as a critical engagement with the here and now. At the same time, critique includes the longing for and anticipation of an elsewhere and otherwise (Bargetz 2019). Understanding critique in this sense always implies both the questioning of prevailing structural constraints and a political vision. Critique interrogates the conditions of possibility of political agency while always taking political ambivalences into account. This understanding goes beyond critique as only negative, while it also moves beyond a merely affirmative, reparative, or optimistic view. How then, may melancholy hint at a political horizon and entail a creative force for change? Adopting Benjamin’s critique of a particular left-wing melancholy, Brown has problematized a political left that has been stuck in a passivizing, self-centred mourning over the loss of past political promises. Brown developed her insights regarding debates within the left at end of the Cold War era. More recently, when the “specters of Marx” (Derrida 1994) seem to have been regaining momentum, Enzo Traverso (2016), on the contrary, has suggested embracing “left melancholy”. He claims that thinking through melancholy has the potential to offer an alternative to the dominant regimes of historicity and in that sense to revive revolutionary thought. In order to reframe melancholy, he draws on a vast archive of leftist thinkers such as Marx, C.L.R. James, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Daniel Bensaïd. Melancholia, he states, does

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 71 not necessarily “mean a retreat into a closed universe of suffering and remembering” (Traverso 2016, xiv). Rather, it is “a constellation of emotions and feelings” which facilitates the binding together of the “search for new ideas and projects” and the “sorrow and mourning for a lost realm of revolutionary experiences” (Traverso 2016, xiv). Melancholy is an affective force of transformation and of the revival of revolutionary practices and ideas in the guise of a rebellious counterfactual melancholy as grief over missed opportunities. At the same time, melancholic agency refers to an affective mode of holding on to an imaginary as well as to the idea that something could be otherwise. Melancholy can nourish a desire for emancipation and democracy because it constantly reworks a political horizon—no matter how promising. Mark Fisher (2014, 23) has coined the notion of a “hauntological melancholia” in order to grasp the political mood of a “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009, 23) where no alternative to capitalism seems possible. Hauntological melancholia, here, does not indicate the longing for a lost past. Instead, it entails a critique of looking backward, while simultaneously sympathizing with a politics of melancholy. It is, as Georg Spitaler (2018, 184, my translation) pointedly describes, an “expression of a haunting repressed past as well as a future that has not yet occurred, but also a refusal to give up on the desire for this possible future”. Melancholy is therefore appealing as a mode of resistance, because it is haunted by an emancipatory possibility which is being kept open. As Fisher (2015, my translation) explains, “Of course, one cannot simply wish back the future. But one can point out that we have lost a future . . . The melancholy with which I look at this development is a form of refusal to resign myself to it—a melancholic attachment to longing for another future”. In this vein, melancholy links past, present, and future. Political melancholy is both a valorization of the loss of and a vehicle for political agency, since it is a reminder of and an attachment to the very belief in the possibility of agency as an affective archive for countering the contemporary political atmosphere. Understanding melancholy in this sense does not stand in the way of political mobilizing but, on the contrary, keeps alive the potentiality of emancipatory transformation. Melancholy is political in another way, too. While I have emphasized the risk of historical ignorance in view of the turn to affirmation, melancholy does not overlook but rather embraces archives of “loss” (Eng and Kazanjian 2003), as it already holds a relation to the past. As such, melancholy acknowledges the past and avoids ignoring, forgetting, or even writing out particular historical subjects of loss as well as their struggles, defeats, and hopes. By taking into account archives of loss in this way, melancholic agency is also about melancholizing as a gathering of “knowledge of the historical origins” of melancholia, and “at the same time of the others with whom these melancholias might be shared” (Flatley 2008, 2). In this vein, Enzo Traverso (2016, 17–18) refers to Judith Butler, who has emphasized the transformative effects of loss, as well as to Douglas Crimp’s mourning in the context of ACT UP activism, in order to acknowledge how loss

72  Brigitte Bargetz may also nurture politicization and militancy. Speaking of melancholic agency means not only refusing to forget and ignore, for instance, queer and racialized losses of the past but also remembering the political subjects’ experiences as well as their losses’ affective traces in the present. It is a refusal to write out the political struggles of the past and helps to keep alive the collective political action that has arisen from—supposedly depoliticizing—negative feelings. Thinking through melancholia this way, refers to the fact that “the past remains steadfastly alive in the present”, as David Eng and David Kazanjian (2003, 4), among others, have pointed out in their engagement with a politics of loss. Referring to Benjamin’s angel of history who “resists the storm of progress”, Heather Love (2007, 14) emphasizes a politics of “feeling backward” in view of queer politics and claims, “We need to develop a vision of political agency that incorporates the damage that we hope to repair” (Love 2007, 151). Repair or reparation, here, does not suggest simply thinking away the past. It means acknowledging the violent histories of the past and their affective and material trajectories into the present to reconfigure political agency. In this sense, melancholic agency does not promote a politics of injury (Brown 1993) or humanitarian empathy for the victims. As Traverso writes, critical melancholy focuses on the “vanquished”, such as the enslaved people, and perceives their losses and tragedies as a “burden” and “debt” but also as a “promise of redemption” (Traverso 2016, xv). Similarly, Angela Failler (2009, 54) claims that melancholy hints at grief’s political potential “as a resource for the future” despite the ongoing histories of racist exclusion.2 Undoubtedly, melancholy has been used to criticize specific political constellations. While Benjamin’s and Brown’s critiques of left melancholy are primarily oriented towards critical theorists and an (academic) left, Paul Gilroy employs the figure of melancholy in order to criticize a dominant feeling structure, that is, the British imperial dismissal and disavowal of colonial history. He brings up the notion of “postcolonial melancholia” (Gilroy 2005) to criticize the longing for an imperial politics that both evokes and rekindles colonial, nationalist, and racist power relations. Identifying a “melancholy of race”, Anne Anlin Cheng (2000, 11), similarly, argues that white melancholy has been the dominant US American identity formation in which the racialized “Other” is both denied and re-assimilated. Here, the notion of melancholy supports an understanding of how it has been possible in hegemonic US discourses to manage the simultaneous yet contradictory narratives of freedom and equality, on the one hand, and of violence and the exclusion of “Others”, on the other hand. Yet, this understanding of racial melancholy is only part of the story. For it applies not only to a white structure of feelings but also to a critical political tool. Because, as Cheng (1997, 51) asks, “What about the minority? Can they be melancholic too?” She explains that melancholy has always existed in two different ways: “for raced subjects”, as a “sign of rejection”, but also as a “psychic strategy in response to that rejection” (Cheng 2000, 20). Melancholy is a way of

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 73 explicitly engaging with melancholic subjectivities or, as Heather Love (2007, 6) claims in view of the dismissal of queer life and more explicitly of lesbians as anachronistic and belated, of “mak[ing] space for various forms of ruined subjectivity”. A politics of melancholy may, thus, be both a delegitimizing strategy as well as a possibility for melancholic agency. It is also in this sense that Sara Ahmed (2010) speaks of the “melancholic migrant” as an “affect alien”. For Ahmed (2010, 139), melancholy has been a familiar figure in contemporary Britain, where “the melancholic [i]s the one who ‘holds onto’ an object that has been lost, who does not let go, or get over loss by getting over it”. The melancholic migrant is accused of holding on to an unhappy object of difference, for instance, the turban and how he has been teased about the turban which, then, also tells a history of racism which the turban entails (Ahmed 2010, 133). By not getting over speaking about the turban and, consequently, speaking about racism, the melancholic migrant is not only blamed for hindering his own flourishing. He is also incriminated for obstructing the dominant others’ happiness. Yet Ahmed advocates for inverting this perspective: by appropriating the figure of the melancholic migrant in a subversive way and by reclaiming melancholy as their own strategy, the “melancholic migrants” can draw attention to mechanisms of exclusion and above all to racism. Thus, the reappropriation of melancholy’s dismissive stance is also a form of melancholic agency and, consequently, a potential mode of resistance. By acknowledging critical, feminist, queer, and anti-racist archives, it is possible to conceive of melancholy as an imaginary force for conceiving the future anew. Melancholy urges us to remember the losses of the past as well as the conditions these losses have provoked for rethinking possible futures. In this sense, melancholic agency arises from the connection between present, past, and future and does not presuppose a historical neutral starting point for reimagining the future of resistance. Eventually, melancholic agency can stem from opposing the objectification of melancholic subjects. Coda: Melancholic Agency as Staying with the Trouble Taking melancholy as an ambivalent and critical political affect does not mean being attached to bad, ugly, or negative affects. Developing the notion of melancholic agency, I have argued that melancholy may point to a political horizon and may thus work as an affective register of the political imaginary. Political melancholy carries the possibility of interrupting instead of accommodating a “closed horizon” (Fisher 2009, 29); it may point to the “impossible world” as one that “exists beyond the horizon of our present thinking”, as Judith Butler (2020, 64–65) has recently framed it, in exploring non-violence. Such political melancholy gestures towards the “not yet” (Muñoz 2009), and—taking up Alex Zamalin’s discussion about black utopia—may keep “alive a horizon, which would exist as an unfulfilled possibility” (Zamalin 2019, 14).

74  Brigitte Bargetz Yet, speaking about melancholic agency, I do not want to idealize melancholy or, worse, the related practices of exclusion and denigration of the subaltern. On the contrary, the way I conceive of political melancholy takes melancholy as a critical concept and therefore also embraces the violent archives of melancholy and the different subjects and struggles these archives entail. Political melancholy refers to neither a passivizing mourning over the loss of past political promises nor a future-oriented, yet currently unrealizable, hope for a “better” life where change in the present is “sacrificed” for a better future (Bargetz 2019). Melancholy points to an ambivalent affective agency (and possibly resistance), a “melancholic hope” (Winters 2016, 16), while “staying with the trouble”, to take up Haraway’s (2016) well-known expression. By thinking of melancholic agency as staying with the trouble, I emphasize a temporality of the present that is not presentist, not ahistorical, but which acknowledges that contemporary politics carries traces of the past as well as signals of the future. Haraway (2016, 1) is inspiring here as she writes that in urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. Staying with the trouble neither presumes an optimistic zero point from where everything seems possible nor is it desperately attached to a (violent) past. Staying with the trouble starts from the messiness of the “scandals of times”—for Haraway (2016, 2), the “Anthropocene and the Capitalocene”—for reimagining the future. It thus prioritizes neither “despair nor hope” (Haraway 2016, 4) but aims at going beyond the idea of “technofixes (or techno-apocalypses)” (Haraway 2016, 3). It is in this sense that I consider melancholy not as failure to get over things and let things go but as an affective critical mode of staying with the troubles of the time. Staying with melancholy is a mode of neither overcoming nor progress. By acknowledging, instead, the neglect of violent histories and (affective) continuities with the past, staying with melancholy might therefore also help to criticize Western democracy’s violent history, without completely discarding desires for democracy. Political melancholy may, possibly, point to a way of “preserving the democratic horizon” (Zamalin 2019, 13)—not by “giving up its darkness” (Zamalin 2019, 13) or suspending the violent modes of the political that do not work, but by staying with or dwelling in the dark (Anzaldúa 1987; Akomolafe

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 75 2017) in order to find one’s way around. Staying with melancholy, consequently, also means staying with critique and negative affect. Melancholic agency does not refrain from but rather engages with the troubles of the historical moment, while imagining a different future that may—­however ambivalently—already be laid out in the present. As an affective mode of critique, melancholic agency refers to a mode of knowing that something else might be happening, yet without longing for past political attachments or a past that has never happened, or postponing it to the future. Staying with melancholy refers to the past, while maintaining the critical conviction that something else is conceivable, for this “bitter earth may not be what it seems”, as Saidiya Hartman (2020, 6) maintains. In this sense, political melancholy critically epitomizes an archive of futures past. Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Maša Mrovlje and Alex Zamalin, the participants of the online workshop “Hopes, Disappointments, Unfulfilled Promises: Reimagining the Future of Resistance” (May 2022, University of Vienna), and especially Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, as well as Magdalena Freudenschuß and Sara Minelli for their generous engagement with and helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2 Failler also develops an understanding of “melancholic agency”, yet explicitly through the insights of psychoanalytic theory.

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76  Brigitte Bargetz Benjamin, Walter. (1931) 1974. “Left-Wing Melancholy: On Erich Kästner’s New Book of Poems.” Screen 15 (2): 28–32. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2008. “Affirmation, Pain and Empowerment.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 14 (3): 7–36. Brown, Wendy. 1993. “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory 21 (3): 390–410. Brown, Wendy. 1999. “Resisting Left Melancholy.” Boundary 2 26 (3): 19–27. Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso. Castronovo, Russ, and David Glimp. 2013. “Introduction: After Critique?” English Language Notes 1 51 (2): 1–5. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 1997. “The Melancholy of Race.” The Kenyon Review 19 (1): 49–61. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2000. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann, and Ann Pellegrini. 2003. “Introduction: Public Sentiments.” The Scholar and Feminist Online 2.1 (Summer). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ps/printint. htm. Dean, Jonathan. 2015. “Radicalism Restored? Communism and the End of Left Melancholia.” Contemporary Political Theory 14 (3): 234–55. Dean, Tim, and Robyn Wiegman. 2013. “What Does Critique Want? A Critical Exchange.” English Language Notes 1 51 (2): 107–22. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: MPublishing. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. 2003. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press. Evans, Sara. 1979. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Alfred Knopf. Failler, Angela. 2009. “Racial Grief and Melancholic Agency.” In Embodiment and Agency, edited by Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherwin, 46–57. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books. Fisher, Mark. 2015. “Die Zeit hat ihren Geschmack verloren.” WOZ. Die Wochenzeitung, March 19, 2015. www.woz.ch/-5a08. Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gould, Deborah B. 2012. “Political Despair.” In Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, edited by Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson, 95–114. New York: Continuum.

Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past 77 Gramsci, Antonio. 1996. “Gefängnishefte.” In Kritische Gesamtausgabe in 10 Bänden, edited by Klaus Bochmann, Wolfang Fritz Haug, and Peter Jehle, 9. Hamburg: Argument Verlag. Hall, Stuart. 1992. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Carly Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 277–94. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2020. “The Plot of Her Undoing.” Feminist Art Coalition. https://feministartcoalition.org/essays-list/saidiya-hartman. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48. Lorde, Audre. 1981. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 9 (3): 124–33. Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2010. “On Critique.” Inflexions 4 (December): 337–40. www.inflex ions.org/n4_Brian-Massumi-on-Critique.pdf. Meißner, Hanna. 2015. “Gesellschaftstheoretische Wissensproduktionen: Performative Visualisierungen und das Denken des Un/Möglichen.” In Prekarisierungen: Arbeit, Sorge und Politik, edited by Susanne Völker and Michele Amacker, 200–16. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Mrovlje, Maša, and Alex Zamalin. 2023. Reviving Hope in a Time of Crisis. Forthcoming. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Probyn, Elspeth. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schwarz, Bill. 2017. “Haiti and Historical Time.” In The Black Jacobins Reader, edited by Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg, 93–114. Durham: Duke University. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1997) 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is about You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 123–51. Durham: Duke University Press. Singer, Mona. 2005. Geteilte Wahrheit: Feministische Epistemologie, Wissenssoziologie und Cultural Studies. Wien: Löcker Verlag. Sonderegger, Ruth. 2012. “Negative versus Affirmative Critique: On Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Ranciere.” In Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger, 248–64. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

78  Brigitte Bargetz Sonderegger, Ruth. 2019. Vom Leben der Kritik: kritische Praktiken—und die Notwendigkeit ihrer geopolitischen Situierung. Wien: Zaglossus. Spitaler, Georg. 2018. “Spukende Zukunft: Zur Theoretisierung von Hauntology, politischer Handlungsfähigkeit und (post-)demokratischen Gefühlen in den Romanen Das lange Echo und Quecksilbertage.” In denken, schreiben, tun: Politische Handlungsfähigkeit in Theorie, Literatur und Medien, edited by Amalia Kerekes, Marion Löffler, Georg Spitaler, and Sabine Zelger, 183–99. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Tlostanova, Madina. 2018. What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press. Vrasti, Wanda. 2016. “Self-Reproducing Movements and the Enduring Challenge of Materialist Feminism.” In Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises, edited by Aida A. Hozic and Jacqui True, 248–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, Cornel. 2008. Hope on a Tightrope. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Publishers. Wiegman, Robyn. 2014. “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn’.” Feminist Theory 15 (1): 4–25. Williams, Raymond. 1977. “Structures of Feeling.” In Marxism and Literature, edited by Raymond Williams, 128–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1983. “Critique.” In Keywords, edited by Raymond Williams, 84–86. New York: Oxford University Press. Winters, Joseph R. 2016. Hope Draped in Black. Durham: Duke University Press. Zamalin, Alex. 2019. Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. New York: Columbia University Press.

6 Despair and Other Political Feelings Deborah B. Gould Parts of this chapter originally published in 2012, Originally published 2012, Continuum Publishing, reproduced with permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Introduction This essay analyzes the workings of political despair. Drawing from my research about and experiences in ACT UP, the direct-action AIDS movement in the United States, I plumb despair’s doings in activist contexts: the less-than-fully conscious processes it can set in motion, activist norms regarding the feeling, its effects on social movements and their participants, and its (perhaps surprising) generative political potential.1 While the affective terrain in the United States during the first decades of the 21st century has been variegated, a pervasive political despair frequently has been in the mix, albeit variably experienced. Scholars and activists who wish to better understand the sources of political (in)action must grapple with such feelings of political inefficacy and hopelessness, the sense that nothing will ever change no matter what some imagined collective “we” does. Over four decades ago, Doug McAdam developed the concept of cognitive liberation, arguing that in order for people to form and participate in social movements and other forms of protest, they need to believe that something is “both unjust and subject to change” (1999, p. 34; emphasis his). Following from McAdam’s insight but with terminology that adds emotion into the mix and signals that the experience of cognitive liberation may in practice be more akin to a vague sensation rather than a lucid, coherent thought, my questions in this essay revolve around senses of political possibility and impossibility: their sources, textures, and effects. I conclude the essay by considering how ACT UP’s relation to despair, in illuminating how structural conditions are felt and subjectivized, might help us to understand and navigate what I see as a newly emergent structure of feeling, the felt contingency of now. Despair’s Emergence Feelings materialize and play out in contexts, and their workings and effects are conditioned by those contexts. The task, then, is to approach political DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-9

80  Deborah B. Gould feelings with a historical perspective, rejecting any a priori claims that posit a necessary relationship between a specific emotion—say, political despair— and a given response—say, political demobilization. I begin with a discussion of ACT UP’s changing affective landscape and an exploration of why, how, and with what effects despair emerged within the direct-action AIDS movement. From its start in 1987 through 1989, ACT UP’s activism provided an enormous sense of political efficacy for participants, due in large part to the dramatic victories that activists achieved early on. During this period, the scientific-­ medical establishment, pharmaceutical companies, and numerous government bodies responded to ACT UP’s demands, and, in a context where research studies about different AIDS drugs appeared promising, activists felt optimistic.2 Our victories corroborated and bolstered a newly emergent sense that we could force the powers-that-be to listen and respond to us, that we could force change, that we could, and would, save lives. That optimism began to fade in the early 1990s. Concrete activist victories that prolonged the lives of people with AIDS (PWAs) continued in this period, but the deaths continued to accumulate and movement on the AIDS treatment front stalled.3 ACT UP/NY member Theo Smart suggested that among some activists in late 1991, “the conviction that a cure would not be found in their lifetime began to take root” (1992, p. 44). Meanwhile, the deaths were relentless. ACT UP/Los Angeles member Mark Kostopoulos acknowledged his frustration: “We’ve worked for three years . . . but all our successes haven’t changed the fact that people continue to die” (Barker, 1991). In 1992, British gay/AIDS activist and writer Simon Watney described the gay world as “a community approaching despair” (Watney, 1992, p. 18). Pessimism intensified in April 1993 when European researchers released their Concorde study which found that early intervention with AZT did not prolong patients’ lives.4 The news out of the Ninth International Conference on AIDS in 1993 was even more devastating. Ferd Eggan, a member of ACT UP/Chicago and Los Angeles, recalled that conference as “the downest time . . . the worst.” Essentially, the reports were that there was nothing that was working and that there was no hope to be had whatsoever. And everybody was dying. I mean, all the people who had gone on AZT and had been healthy for awhile all started dying. And so I think there was a feeling of futility, a feeling that we had done a lot, and maybe stretched it as far as we could, you know, the Ryan White Care Act was paying for care for people, the government had finally begun to respond, but at the same time, there was no cure; there was no treatment; there was no nothing. (Eggan, 1999, emphasis his) The situation was equally bleak through 1994 and 1995.

Despair and Other Political Feelings 81 Feeling Despair The unceasing AIDS deaths generated despair in ACT UP in two interrelated ways. First, the stream of illnesses and amassing of dead bodies prompted a physical and emotional exhaustion among many members that was fertile ground for hopelessness to take hold. ACT UP was quick-paced and all-consuming; caretaking, which many of us were involved in, was similarly absorbing. The pace allowed little time to pause and almost no space for an interior life. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hope had tantalized us, holding out the possibility that someone would beat this horror and survive. But as the deaths within LGBT communities and within our own ranks accumulated, daily life became physically and emotionally draining, and hope became difficult to hold onto. People grew increasingly tired of false hopes, indeed, worn out by them. In describing why she eventually left ACT UP/NY, Jean Carlomusto acknowledged the role played by the never-ending deaths and her consequent exhaustion: “I just got really burnt out and sort of withdrew from life in general for a period of time. A lot of that was about the cumulative amounts of deaths that happened” (Carlomusto, 2002, p. 42). ACT UP/NY member Marion Banzhaf likewise pointed to the amassing of deaths as particularly devastating: “It got to be too much. You can’t sustain that level of loss without becoming traumatized by it” (Banzhaf, 2002). ACT UP/Chicago member Jeanne Kracher had a similar analysis about the toll taken by the accumulating deaths: “I think people were exhausted . . . . How did we manage all the grief, how can you manage that? I mean, how does anybody manage?” (Kracher, 2000). In this climate of utter exhaustion, surrounded by unrelenting death and illness with no end in sight, people felt emptied, drained, depleted. Despair easily edged out hope. Alongside the despair that grew out of that physical and emotional exhaustion, the accumulating deaths generated political despair as well. Many within the movement began to sense that our actions, even those that were successful, were simply unable to stem the tide. No matter what we did, no matter our astonishing victories, people continued to die. They started to live longer, but then they died anyway, shattering ACT UP’s hopeful vision that its street activism would save lives. ACT UP/NY member Dudley Saunders recalled: “ACT UP had all these incredible successes so quickly . . . . It’s incredible, the things we got done. We’d won all these battles, but the war—we were all still dying. There really was no hope. It was horrible” (Saunders, 2003). ACT UP/Chicago member Tim Miller also juxtaposed the victories and the deaths: Even if we had a success every day it might not have been enough success. Because people were still getting sick. And in Chicago, I think people were relatively healthy for a great period of time. And then all of a sudden, a lot of people started getting ill. A lot of people started dying. And that’s demoralizing. (Miller, 1999).

82  Deborah B. Gould Social movements offer a vision of a different future and a way to get there. As ACT UP’s hopeful vision of activism leading to a cure faltered, the picture that took hold was of unremitting illness and suffering; early deaths of lovers, friends, and fellow activists; decimated queer communities; continuing government neglect and attacks from the right; and an ever-exploding crisis. Death was everywhere and our street activism was exhausted; we had nothing else to offer. If an empty hole is what remains after someone dies (Brown, 1994, p. 157), then that hole grew immense in ACT UP during the early 1990s. Unconsciously, we tried to fill it with demonstrations and fact sheets; with pithy and poignant agit-prop, angry chants, and campy humor; with flirtation, sex, and another angry action.5 Still, no matter how much we all tried, the hole became more gaping, more devastating, and the growing despair became harder to cover over. A sense of political efficacy and optimism initially helped us to navigate the daily toll of the AIDS epidemic. But it is hard to hold onto the hope that through your action you will be able to save lives when all your actions, even those that are unqualified successes, feel entirely inadequate to the task. As ACT UP/Chicago member Jeff Edwards noted, after years of “intensive, all-consuming political involvement in which ACT UP had exploited every tactic short of violence, people were still dying, with no end in sight; maybe, some were coming to think, political action was fruitless” (2000, p. 493). As the deaths continued unabated, it became harder to believe our own hopeful rhetoric that action equaled life, as one ACT UP catchphrase put it. Many ACT UP activists felt we had reached the limits of activism, which sapped their hope and generated an even more absolute despair. Despair, then, arrived on the heels of ACT UP’s hopeful but receding vision, and as despair took hold, it depleted many members’ activist energy, replacing their rousing anger and forward momentum with exhaustion and immobility. Despair has different tempos for different individuals, and although despair was prevalent in the early 1990s, not everyone in ACT UP felt it. I remember feeling anger, only anger. Grief and despair about the deaths and about our seeming political inefficacy emerged for me only in 1994, during ACT UP/Chicago’s last year. Soon after, especially as I began my research about the movement, I was flooded with those feelings, a deluge that suggested to me the extent of my previous denial, a psychic process that I return to later. Prior to that point, I was mainly aware of my anger: about government negligence, about the right wing’s use of AIDS to advance its homophobic agenda, about the illnesses and deaths of friends and comrades, about the disappearance of a vital world. But while it is true that activists felt despair to different degrees and at different intensities, the evidence indicates its pervasiveness during this period. The Workings of Despair Two factors help to explain why and how despair did its destructive work, contributing to ACT UP’s undoing.6 First, the unconscious processes that it set in

Despair and Other Political Feelings 83 motion had extraordinary force and were difficult for individuals and the movement to navigate. Second, and related, ACT UP’s emotional habitus provided no means for activists to address the growing despair except through denial.7 Despair and Unconscious Processes

In a 1993 speech ACT UP/NY member and cultural theorist Douglas Crimp posed the question “Why do we despair” and offered the following answer: Surely because we seem no closer now than we did when ACT UP was formed in 1987 to being able to save our lives. And unlike that moment, when the very fact of our growing activism afforded the hope that we could save ourselves, very few of us still truly believe that the lives of those now infected can be saved by what we do. (Crimp, 2002, pp. 227–28). Our street activism was exhausted, no longer offering hope. Crimp continued, “Without hope for ourselves and our friends many of us now turn away from these battles” (p. 228). Understanding despair through a more or less cognitive lens, we might expect a growing hopelessness about AIDS and AIDS activism to lead some to a conscious, even rational, decision to leave ACT UP; its activism seemed to be no longer working, so why continue? That may be true to an extent, but I think what made the despair especially powerful were the unconscious forces it set in play; as a result, a more affective rendering of emotion that takes less-than-fully conscious and nonrational processes seriously offers a more fruitful approach.8 Revolving around despair were immense grief and a devastating feeling of helplessness, a sense that the AIDS crisis would not end soon, that AIDS deaths would continue no matter what activists did. We can imagine why AIDS activists might want to disavow such a psychically painful constellation of feelings. In Crimp’s words, “It should come as little surprise to us that we might now find AIDS an idea that has become unbearable and against which we might wish to defend” (p. 227) and that we might also require “a psychic defense against our despair about AIDS” (p. 228). That is, AIDS activists might want to defend against the pain of grief and of despair, against the tremendous shame and guilt that in despairing you were giving up on ACT UP and the potential it once had signaled, that you were somehow giving ground to and even worse, becoming complicit with, those who wanted to see queers dead, that you were deserting your own people and thus in some sense abandoning your queer and perhaps HIV-positive self as well. Given that constellation of painful feelings associated with the growing despair, AIDS activists might turn away from AIDS and AIDS activism, perhaps feeling exhausted and numb but not necessarily even aware of their own despair.

84  Deborah B. Gould They might turn toward activism that was emphasizing healthy gay bodies rather than dying ones, fighting to lift the ban on gays in the military, for example (Crimp, 2002, p. 228). Alternatively, they might turn away from activism altogether, overwhelmed by the deaths and consequent grief, demoralized by a sense of political inefficacy, wracked by guilt both about surviving and about giving up, and simply unable to feel activist rage any longer. Or, in a contrary way, and I am again drawing from Crimp here, the pain of despair, the shame at feeling yourself giving up, might have encouraged some to disavow those sentiments via a moralistic deploring of other activists who were ostensibly abandoning the fight. Reacting to a shift in focus in lesbian and gay politics away from AIDS and toward issues like the ban against gays in the military, some AIDS activists demanded of former comrades and of others in the lesbian and gay community, “Where’s your anger?!” alongside exhortations to “feel your rage” and “remember AIDS.” For Crimp, this moralistic “hectoring” by some remaining AIDS activists indicated the direct-action AIDS movement’s disavowal of despair, our collective failure to assess and confront its depths (2002, pp. 222, 227, 244). The force of these less-than-fully-conscious processes significantly shaped how the movement navigated the painful feelings associated with despair. We ignored it, denied it, repressed it, projected it onto others who we berated for succumbing to it. Despair was in the room with us, but it found no route other than denial. Forbidding Despair

Notably, the psychic and the social buttressed one another in this case in the sense that ACT UP’s emotional habitus disallowed despair. And that is the second way in which despair contributed to ACT UP’s undoing.9 In offering street activism as a response to despondency about the horrors of the AIDS crisis and to the sense of political impotency that was widespread in the early and mid-1980s, ACT UP fashioned itself as an antidote to despair, a place to “turn your grief into anger.” Despair, then, was verboten in ACT UP, the constitutive outside of the movement’s emotional habitus. ACT UP/NY member David Barr points out that ACT UP “didn’t have a discourse about emotions other than anger,” but, even so, “they were all there” (Barr, 2002). There, but unacknowledged. Barr’s sense was that ACT UP’s emotional habitus required feelings like grief and despair to be submerged for fear that permitting their expression somehow would destroy the organization; the ethos, he suggested, was as follows: “ ‘We just better not stop being angry, because that will open up all this other stuff and then we’re really in trouble’ ” (Barr, 2002). So, while despair and its companions were banned, anger was required, as was the optimistic belief, even faith, that ACT UP’s collective action would save lives, especially the lives of PWAs in the room. AIDS activism entailed an assertion of heroic agency: never mind the enormous barriers

Despair and Other Political Feelings 85 standing in our way, we would save our lives and the lives of our lovers, friends and comrades. In this context, there was no space for despair, which, following feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, might best be described as an “outlaw emotion” (1989). Operating beneath conscious awareness, a social group’s emotional habitus provides members with an emotional disposition: a sense of what and how to feel, labels for their feelings, schemas about what feelings are and what they mean, ways of figuring out and understanding what people are feeling. An emotional habitus contains an emotional pedagogy, a template for what and how to feel, in part by conferring on some feelings and modes of expression an axiomatic, natural quality and making other feeling states unintelligible within its terms and thus in a sense unfeelable and inexpressible. ACT UP’s emotional habitus made despair largely unintelligible and thus difficult to feel and express.10 What lay behind the proscription against despair in some ways differed for HIV-negative and HIV-positive participants. HIV-negatives demonstrated solidarity with HIV-positives by expressing anger about the crisis; indicating their faith in and commitment to activism; putting their bodies on the line; holding onto hope for a cure. Therefore, despairing of the crisis ever ending, of being able to save the lives of those now infected, might flood one with shame about failing to be a properly hopeful AIDS activist as well as guilt about giving up on the struggle and thereby in some sense abandoning PWAs. It was thus difficult to admit, even to yourself, that you were despairing of an end to the crisis, that you were feeling both helpless and hopeless. Anxiety about betraying PWAs might propel you to disavow your despair and fight all the harder. And, indeed, as I suggested earlier, many of us were so steeped in ACT UP’s emotional habitus that all we felt was anger and conviction that our activism would succeed; it was hard to acknowledge or even to recognize sentiments of despair. But others quietly left the movement, overwhelmed by the deaths and consequent grief, demoralized by a sense of political inefficacy and helplessness, wracked by guilt both about surviving and about giving up, wanting to avoid being in the room with desperate PWAs who needed your help and somehow were holding onto hope when you were no longer able to, wishing to avoid seeing yourself as someone who was betraying PWAs as well as abandoning the movement when it most needed more troops. Addressed by ACT UP/NY member Gregg Bordowitz in his video Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), PWAs within the movement shouldered an additional burden. They had to assume the role of the hopeful, persevering PWA, heroically determined to fight the virus and survive the crisis. To preserve the vision that ACT UP’s activism was saving lives, to inspire the uninfected to keep fighting on their behalf, they had to cloak their own dying as well as any despair they might feel. For both HIV-negatives and HIV-positives, then, to despair was to breach one’s proper role as an AIDS activist and thereby affectively ditch the movement and (other) people with HIV/AIDS.

86  Deborah B. Gould That was the ethos against despair, but in the early 1990s, many in the movement did start to feel it. The unrelenting deaths anesthetized many members’ feelings of anger and overwhelmed their hope that activism would be able to stop the dying. Rather than attend to this growing despair, ACT UP members were more likely to ignore its depths, disavow its prevalence, and badger people because they were “succumbing” to it, none of which helped people overcome despair (Crimp, 2002, p. 227). ACT UP’s emotional habitus, born in a moment of despair and consequently oriented toward dealing with despair by overcoming it, offered no other response and, indeed, under the pressure of growing despair, itself began to unravel. Activists continued to elevate and authorize anger, but the force of the despair began to numb people to anger, lessening the effectiveness of activists’ emotion work (Hochschild, 1979, 1983). Ferd Eggan recalled the shift in his own feeling states. While in ACT UP/ Chicago, “the anger about people dying sustained [him].” But by the summer of 1990 when he moved to Los Angeles, everything “had become too complex and too human to just be angry.” He recalls, It was easier when the government wasn’t doing anything. Then the government was doing something, but the something was inadequate. Then ultimately it wasn’t just the question of whether it was quantitatively inadequate; it was qualitatively inadequate. ‘Cause there was no resolution to the crisis, because there was no medication, there was no treatment, there was no cure. (Eggan, 1999; emphases his). The complexity of AIDS, the unending deaths, and the lack of positive prospects on the treatment front overtook Eggan’s anger. He continued, “Kevin Farrell [from ACT UP/L.A.] and I and a couple other people just said, ‘Well, you know, mainly we just feel bad. We don’t feel fiery demandful for something, because there isn’t any something’ ” (Eggan, 1999; emphases his). For Eggan, the death in 1992 of a close friend in ACT UP/L.A., Mark Kostopoulos, marked the moment when ACT UP’s emotional habitus seemed exhausted: All of these ACT UP veterans got together, [Mark’s] friends, people who had been in ACT UP for years, and we wanted to have a political funeral down the street. But at the same time . . . a lot of us just wanted to feel sad. We didn’t particularly want to have a political funeral. We just wanted to feel sad, to mourn. I mean, we had just sort of reached the end of righteous indignation. (1999) Eggan notes that “others were still very much full of anger” (1999), but for some, sadness, grief, and despair were now overwhelming anger. Because the movement’s emotional habitus prohibited despair, it was unable to provide helpful tools for navigating that affective state when it arose despite

Despair and Other Political Feelings 87 efforts to exile it. It was a shameful secret not to be divulged to anyone. In that context, despair emerged in a way that individualized and depoliticized the feeling. Anger, in contrast, had united us, forming an important part of our collective self-definition. Even if our anger often had different sources and targets, we shared the feeling and that allowed us to relate to one another. Whereas anger had been collectivizing, despair was individuating, particularly insofar as it violated ACT UP’s emotion norms and, in part as a result, went largely unacknowledged. With no collective space carved out for its expression, participants who felt despair had no way of interjecting it into their activist lives. As a result, it remained illegible to the room at large, an unacknowledged presence, but one that was nevertheless felt by many. To feel it, however, placed one outside of ACT UP’s culture. It created a feeling chasm that seemed impossible to bridge: How does despair legibly speak to anger? How does anger speak to despair, except by demanding “Where’s your anger?” As the movement declined, that question was asked over and over during ACT UP meetings, “as if checking other people for I.D.,” in the words of ACT UP/NY member John Weir. Where “rage bestow[ed] authenticity” (Weir, 1995, p. 11), despair only created alienation from fellow activists and from ACT UP itself. Where anger had made participants feel like they were part of something vibrant and larger than themselves, despair made people feel alone, guilt-ridden, sad, and bad, and inclined to leave the movement. Along with less-than-fully-conscious processes, then, the movement’s ethos against despair contributed to its inability to attend to it when it did emerge. What is notable here is both the power of ACT UP’s emotional habitus to structure its members’ feelings and emotional expressions—effectively submerging despair— as well as the limits of that power insofar as that emotional habitus did not rid people of the negative feeling itself. As systems of dispositions, habitus are not exact blueprints but instead consist of “virtualities, potentialities, eventualities” whose actualization is contingent (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 135). With no established practices for navigating feelings of despair, once it developed among a number of participants, it affected the organization as a whole, draining many people’s energies, effectively and affectively depleting the ranks. Despair and Activism? Are there alternate routes for political despair? Scholars and activists alike tend to put movement and hope in one basket and demobilization and despair in another. But the following brief discussion of the period when the direct-action AIDS movement emerged challenges the presumption that despair and its companion feelings inevitably deactivate, revealing instead that the effects of despair, as for any individual or collective feeling, are contingent.11 Despair contributed to the decline of the direct-action AIDS movement in the early 1990s, but it played a role in its 1986–87 emergence as well, a period when

88  Deborah B. Gould the numbers of diagnoses and deaths per year were rising exponentially, there were no FDA-approved drugs to treat AIDS, and lesbian and gay communities’ activist efforts to fight the crisis—primarily lobbying and occasional candlelight vigils—were failing to move the government and scientific-medical establishment to respond. Lesbians’ and gay men’s powerlessness vis-à-vis all levels of government—and the deadly consequences of that powerlessness—were clear, and yet more confrontational activism was outside of most AIDS and lesbian and gay activists’ political imagination. In that context, as thousands of gay and bisexual men died while the government aggressively ignored the epidemic, people became increasingly pessimistic about saving the lives of PWAs. The period just prior to the emergence of direct-action AIDS activism, then, was a period of horror, grief, desperation, and despair, a time of “deepening gloom” in lesbian and gay communities, in Epstein’s words (1996, p. 117). While it certainly is true that despair sometimes flattens political possibilities and generates political withdrawal, it also sometimes wrenches open new political horizons, alternative visions of what is to be done and how to do it.12 In the 1986–87 period, feelings of hopelessness and desperation, rather than foreclosing political activism, spurred lesbian and gay support for confrontational tactics that had long been abandoned by the mainstream, establishment-oriented gay movement. Epstein concurs: “One response to these difficult times was a rebirth of activism, epitomized by the actions of groups like ACT UP” (1996, p. 117). In a context where existing forms of AIDS activism were coming up largely empty, people’s despair acted as a goad, inspiring creative risk-taking and an abandonment of the tried and true (but evidently ineffective) path in order to strike out in new, untested activist directions. Amid an escalating epidemic, government negligence, widespread clamoring by politicians and pundits for repressive legislation including quarantine of PWAs, and more general attacks on lesbians and gay men, activists effectively tapped into sentiments of despondency, desperation and despair and offered street AIDS activism—oppositional, self-consciously confrontational, uncompromising, indecorous—as a legitimate and necessary route to save lives. Activists altered the affective experience of despair by coding it to mean “having nothing left to lose,” and rather than paralyzing, despair became freeing. Activists collectivized and politicized despair, conjoined it with anger, and channeled those feelings into militant street-based AIDS activism. Counterintuitively, then, the despair of this period helped to launch a movement. Given a widespread view that hope is necessary to activism,13 my claim about the prevalence of despair in the moment of ACT UP’s emergence might seem implausible. Despair connotes utter hopelessness, a sense that nothing can be done to change oppressive circumstances; despairing people, we might presume, do not act up. That may frequently be true, but the directionality of political ­feelings, where they take us and the sorts of behavior they motivate, cannot be established in an a priori fashion. Aspects of their nature, especially their nonstatic, combinatory, and indeterminate qualities, suggest why. Nonstatic: emotion,

Despair and Other Political Feelings 89 etymologically related to motion, suggests movement and flow rather than stasis. Even feelings of complete hopelessness oscillate and change, sometimes due to a momentous event—a Supreme Court ruling, a successful people’s revolution elsewhere—sometimes due to the engagements of everyday life—gathering with people, having a conversation, viewing a work of art, reading history, listening to music, seeing graffiti on the street. Combinatory: feelings come bundled together, and they do not always form a coherent package. Antonio Gramsci’s famous dictum referencing pessimism of the intellect along with optimism of the will suggests the possibility of feeling despair and hope simultaneously. Despair can coexist not only with grief and sadness, as it did in ACT UP’s later years, but also with an activating anger, as it did in the 1986–87 period. How despair combines with or gets tethered to other feeling states affects its political potential. Indeterminate: feelings are not deterministic, and they do not produce invariant effects; despair can demobilize, and that may be its most probable direction and effect, but such an outcome is contingent rather than inevitable. Along with being conceptual, my insistence here is political: despair need not be the end of the story in an activist context; how activists contend with that negative affective state matters. Despair’s Potential With the indeterminacy of political feelings in mind and to better understand why and how despair contributed to ACT UP’s undoing, we need to return to the movement’s emotional habitus and to the emotion work that generated it. Given the emotional habitus and political horizon that prevailed in the early 1980s, prior to the emergence of ACT UP, direct-action AIDS activists understandably engaged in emotion work that harnessed grief to anger, channeled both into direct action, and thereby attempted to bury the despair circulating in lesbian and gay communities in that moment. Despair is not necessarily depoliticizing, but it seemed to be in the early and mid-1980s, and it also was painful to feel. As a result, AIDS activists tried to submerge it, in themselves and in others, and their authorizations of anger and incitements to feel faith in direct action succeeded for a number of years. That emotion work was crucial for ACT UP’s emergence and growth, but the emotional habitus that we generated and that shaped our activism did not provide us with ways to deal with the despair that eventually took hold within the movement. In the context of accumulating deaths and a growing sense of our inability to save lives, exhortations to anger and to keep the faith lost their resonance, no longer collectivizing and activating as they once had, nor offering a route out of despair. Could it have been otherwise? Given the course of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s and how overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and helplessness were in that context, I am not sure whether efforts to deal with despair in ways

90  Deborah B. Gould other than through denial would have lessened its destructive impact on the movement. But given the occasional prevalence of despair in the contemporary political landscape, it is worth considering how activists might respond to such hard feelings in ways other than by defending against them. Because, of course, ACT UP isn’t alone in disavowing despair. The political left in the U.S. more generally similarly prohibits despair; we tend to deny its existence, moralize against it, and attempt to convert it into proper, acceptable activist feelings, à la “don’t mourn, organize.”14 But not acknowledging bad feelings and continual exhortations to feel outrage leave the politically depressed feeling unaddressed, or worse. Rather than requiring outrage and optimism, perhaps we should recognize that people feel multiple complex feelings regarding the state of the world. What might be the political potential of working with despair rather than denying it or trying to convert it into the ostensibly requisite hope? What might happen if we acknowledged despair, addressed it, collectivized it, and even politicized it and mobilized on that basis? On May Day, 2003, a little over a month after the start of the United States’ war in Iraq, Feel Tank Chicago—an art/activism/research collaborative interested in political emotion—held the First Annual Parade of the Politically Depressed.15 Wearing bathrobes and slippers, ten people stood in front of the State of Illinois Building in downtown Chicago holding signs with messages like “Depressed? It Might Be Political,” “Shocked, Awed, and Seriously Depressed,” and “Don’t Just Medicate, Agitate!” Feel Tank held the Second Annual Parade one year later and then skipped the next two years, “too depressed to get out of bed.” We held the Fifth Annual Parade on July 4th, 2007 with about 60 participants. We paraded through the streets of downtown Chicago amid tourists and Fourth of July revelers. Signs again referenced feelings of political despair, dissatisfaction, frustration, and exhaustion, and linked them to the possibility of active resistance. Some passersby stopped to wonder about this perhaps surprising event where people proclaiming political depression were, nevertheless, marching in the streets. Many asked what It was all about. Some joined in, perhaps relieved to find other political depressives interested in collectivizing their bad feelings. Bus and cab drivers honked their approval. The Parade of the Politically Depressed evidently struck a chord. The route for despair is not fixed, and while some circumstances, like those facing direct-action AIDS activists in the early 1990s, make despair extremely difficult to address, how we do shapes the effects it will have. Most importantly, we can recognize the political nature of our senses of possibility and impossibility, and find ways to move forward with both. From Despair to the Felt Contingency of Now This essay was spurred by my sense that political despair and resignation to the status quo characterized a dominant structure of feeling, if variably so, from

Despair and Other Political Feelings 91 the 1980s into the early 2000s, with consequential political effects. I conclude by suggesting the need to plumb and consider how best to navigate a recently emergent structure of feeling, what I call the felt contingency of now. We live in a moment, at least in the United States, that feels loosened, unsettled, contingent, by which I mean, full of political potential. The 2008 global economic collapse challenged the ideology and practice of neoliberalism and, in the U.S. context, created the sense that something else might be possible. Barack Obama’s presidency re-stabilized the neoliberal status quo, but a sense of possibility reemerged amid the United States’ 2016 presidential election during which Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ surprising primary campaigns together manifested a forceful challenge to the hegemony of the political and economic establishment. Even as Joe Biden’s presidential victory in 2020 revived the neoliberal status quo, these recent political-economic upheavals have left an aftertaste that is not easily forgotten. Something else is in the air, and that something else is both exhilarating and terrifying. What for decades had seemed natural, inevitable, and impenetrable no longer does, but what is to come is unknown. On the one hand, even as society’s ruling forces have been shaken and the social order is more disorganized than usual, different forces on the right have been composing themselves anew, opening trajectories with greater unfreedom, injustice, inequality, trajectories with greater racist, anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-queer, misogynist violence, as the Trump years and rightwing authoritarianism across the globe have manifested. On the other hand, liberatory possibilities have emerged as well amid this profound crisis of neoliberal legitimacy. In the U.S. context, socialism has become more popular. As well, while the COVID pandemic has revealed that four plus decades of neoliberal ideology and policies have eviscerated the social safety net, decimated the public health system, and hollowed out the very notion of the social, it also has shaken neoliberalism’s mantra of individual responsibility as greater numbers of people who have “played by the rules” find it ever more difficult to make ends meet, as out-of-control global pandemics and catastrophic climate change-related events reveal interdependence to be undeniable and individual solutions to be no solutions at all. Perhaps this context produces new political possibilities. After all, even in its hollowed out form, the U.S. state was able to be put on war-footing amid COVID, enacting policies that were recently unimaginable such as direct cash payments to people, additional unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, and student loan forbearance. To be sure, all of those policies were temporary, all were within the confines of a capitalist system, none were enough. But they are policies that contradict the previously dominant message that you’re on your own, with no help on the way, perhaps allowing us to pry open our imaginaries about what else we might fight for and how else we might organize society. Pervasive feelings of hopelessness sometimes give way and the sense that “another world is possible” emerges and takes off, moving beyond the status of a leftist chant.16 A vital question confronting leftist scholars and activists

92  Deborah B. Gould is how to respond to the openness of this moment in a manner that reckons with a recomposing right and offers other routes through the felt contingency of now. Notes 1 This essay draws from my earlier writings on the topic of despair (most directly Gould 2012 but see also 2009, Ch. 7). I again wish to thank my collaborators in Feel Tank Chicago for our many rich conversations. 2 The conventional wisdom at the Fifth International Conference on AIDS in June 1989 was that “HIV infection might soon become a chronic manageable illness” (Epstein 1996, p. 237). 3 The class of drugs that have helped people to live longer, protease inhibitors, did not emerge until 1995–96. ACT UP’s activism was a crucial factor in the development of these drugs, but that extraordinary success was not yet known in the early 1990s. 4 See Epstein (1996, pp. 300–305). 5 What I am saying here should not be read as suggesting that ACT UP’s street activism and other activities are reducible to the fulfilment of psychic needs. We can recognize the political nature of activism even while pointing to the role that unconscious processes often play. 6 A few chapters of ACT UP continue to do vital work, but as a national movement ACT UP had largely declined by the mid-1990s. 7 By emotional habitus I mean the collective, largely nonconscious, emotional dispositions within a social group, along with members’ embodied, axiomatic attitudes and norms about feelings and their expression; see Gould (2009). 8 See Gould (2009, 2010), where I argue for the utility of the concept of affect for prying open a conceptual space to explore those aspects of human motivation that are nonconscious, nonrational, and nonlinguistic. 9 See Holmes (2012) for a discussion of how forbidden feelings affected second-wave feminist movements. 10 One reason that I like the term habitus for thinking about feelings is that it locates feelings within social relations and practices, thereby pointing toward their conventionality and countering a standard understanding of feelings as wholly interior to the individual. I am especially drawn to the concept because it forces us to consider together phenomena that are often opposed to one another: the social and conventional aspects of emotion, on the one hand, along with the nonconscious and bodily components, on the other. Indeed, an emotional habitus has force precisely because its bodily and axiomatic qualities obscure the social, conventional nature of feelings and generate the sense that what one is feeling is entirely one’s own. I prefer the term emotional habitus to a concept from the sociology of emotions literature that on its face might appear similar—emotion culture (Gordon 1989)—because the former, by emphasizing practices, especially those that are nonconscious and noncognitive, offers an account of why and how specific feelings become widespread within a collectivity and why and how they sometimes change. 11 For analyses that explore the generative and creative political potential of loss (of bodies, ideals, places), see Loss, edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian (2003), as well as the work of Feel Tank Chicago. 12 Solnit (2004) makes a similar point. 13 See, for example, McAdam (1999, p. 34) and Aminzade and McAdam (2001, pp. 31–32).

Despair and Other Political Feelings 93 14 Solnit argues precisely the opposite, that audible elements of the left only focus on the “bad news” of the world, thus bolstering an identity that is “masculine, stern, disillusioned, tough enough to face facts” (2004, pp. 15–16). I agree that the left tends toward apocalyptic narratives about the world, but I also think that the emotional demand of those narratives is to be outraged and to not give in to despair (corroborating Solnit’s point about the left’s masculinism). 15 Full disclosure: I helped to plan this event and participated in it, along with others described below. 16 Charles Kurzman’s study of the 1979 Iranian revolution (2004) illustrates a dramatic instance where widespread feelings of political impossibility were rapidly replaced by a new sense of possibility and belief in collective agency.

Bibliography Aminzade, Ron, and Doug McAdam. 2001. “Emotions and Contentious Politics.” In Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, edited by Ron Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth J. Perry, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, 14–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banzhaf, Marion. 2002. Interview conducted by Deborah B. Gould, September 12, New York. Interview housed in my personal ACT UP archive. Barker, Karlyn. 1991. “Taking AIDS Battle to Capitol Hill.” Washington Post, September 29, B4. Barr, David. 2002. Interview conducted by Deborah B. Gould, September 11, New York. Interview housed in my personal ACT UP archive. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Rebecca. 1994. Gifts of the Body. New York: HarperCollins. Carlomusto, Jean. 2002. Interview conducted by ACT UP Oral History Project. www. actuporalhistory.org. Crimp, Douglas. 2002. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Edwards, Jeff. 2000. “AIDS, Race, and the Rise and Decline of a Militant Oppositional Lesbian and Gay Politics in the U.S.” New Political Science 22 (4): 485–506. Eggan, Ferd. 1999. Interview conducted by Deborah B. Gould, October 30, Chicago. Interview housed in my personal ACT UP archive. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian. 2003. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gordon, S. L. 1989. “Institutional and Impulsive Orientations in Selectively Appropriating Emotions to Self.” In The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers, edited by David D. Franks and E. Doyle McCarthy, 115–36. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gould, Deborah B. 2010. “On Affect and Protest.” In Political Emotions, edited by Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds, and Janet Staiger, 18–44. New York: Routledge.

94  Deborah B. Gould Gould, Deborah B. 2012. “Political Despair.” In Politics and the Emotions, edited by Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett, 95–114. New York: Continuum. Gregg Bordowitz. 1993. Fast Trip, Long Drop (video), https://www.vdb.org/titles/fasttrip-long-drop Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (3): 551–75. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Holmes, Mary. 2012. “ ‘Building on a Firm Foundation of Tolerance and Love?’ Emotional Reflexivity in Feminist Political Processes.” In Politics and the Emotions, edited by Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett, 115–36. New York: Continuum. Jaggar, Alison M. 1989. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” In Gender/Body/Knowledge, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, 145–71. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kracher, Jeanne. 2000. Interview conducted by Deborah B. Gould, February 15, Chicago. Interview housed in my personal ACT UP archive. Kurzman, Charles. 2004. The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McAdam, Doug. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Tim. 1999. Interview conducted by Deborah B. Gould, July 13, San Francisco. Interview housed in my personal ACT UP archive. Saunders, Dudley. 2003. Interview conducted by ACT UP Oral History Project. www. actuporalhistory.org. Smart, Theo. 1992. “This Side of Despair.” QW, September 13, 43–44. Solnit, Rebecca. 2004. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books. Watney, Simon. 1992. “Political Funeral.” Village Voice, October 20, 18. Weir, John. 1995. “Rage, Rage.” New Republic, February 13, 11–12.

7 Resistance and/or Metamorphosis Politics as Breathwork David W. McIvor1

Another world is . . . breathing.

—Arundhati Roy (2003)

I can’t breathe is the refrain that best captures the present moment of social and ecological distress.2 Born from the public spectacle of the murder of Eric Garner in 2014, and then amplified after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, “I can’t breathe” is a fractal of a larger condition of breathlessness. This larger condition includes not only brutal enactments of police violence in the wake of what Saidiya Hartman has called the “nonevent” of emancipation but also the great collapse of breathing space in what Byung Chul-Han has referred to as neoliberalism’s “psycho-politics” (Hartman 2022, 116; Han 2017, 3). For Hartman, patterns of inequity in breathable life reflect a continuation of anti-Black oppression. For Han, neoliberalism has colonized psychic space so thoroughly that even moments of spontaneous self-expression feed cycles of exploitation. The COVID-19 pandemic brought its own dynamics of breathlessness, in the form of acute respiratory failures and a breathless, and suffocating, polarized politics. Underlying—and further troubling—these conditions is the evacuation of breath from the biosphere. The earth’s sixth mass extinction is nothing if not a radical reduction of breath: of bird song, animal cries, and the unpaid metabolic labour of trees and plants. In short, the breathable atmosphere of the earth appears to be shrinking: less air, heavily polluted and unevenly distributed, with a species so disoriented and traumatized by its own inventions (capitalism, colonialism, antiBlackness, and digital technologies) that it may be forgetting how to breathe. What is the hope for resistance to these proliferating conditions? Franco Berardi has argued that “asthmatic solidarity” might be a mechanism of response to psycho-social conditions of breathlessness, in which the suffering of antiBlack violence can be joined to the anxiety of those afflicted by the pace of life under neoliberalism (2019). Poetry, for Berardi, enacts resistance by returning us to the rhythm of our own breath, and it heralds the possibility of “insurrection” as a new kind of “respiration”—a way of breathing differently, in solidarity, to DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-10

96  David W. McIvor resist the inequities of the present (2021). Caterina Albano, similarly, calls out the “unequal distribution of breathing” and the structural disavowals of humanity’s “dependence on the shared substrate of air”, and views art as a medium of critique and resistance (2022). Jean-Thomas Tremblay has similarly argued that social inequities can be categorized as the uneven distribution of “difficult breathing”, and they chart the appearance of resistance to such conditions within experimental film, endurance performance, and eco-poetics (2022). For such authors, critique illuminates and licenses resistance to conditions of breathlessness, and resistance centres and grounds hopes for a better form of life. However, is resistance the best way of moving within or beyond the breathless present, or is it better seen as another form that breathlessness is taking? This volume of essays is centred on the widely shared impression that the affective reservoir of emancipatory or resistant politics has dried out in recent years, but perhaps this desiccation stems in part from the very framework of resistance. Resistance, as the martial arts, yoga, and somatics teach us, tightens the body and restricts the breath. While there may be moments when this is appropriate, it may not facilitate creative responses to present conditions, but instead fixes the body in a defensive posture. Resistance, therefore, does not facilitate growth, learning, or invention but only gathers the available powers of the body while shutting down receptivity to the new. Resistance inhibits metamorphosis, which requires the relaxed, full breathing associated with learning (Wall 2018). This is more than a metaphor. To instantiate a different body-politic will require practices of adaptive plasticity: of reinvention and re-creation, rooted in specific places and relationships rather than in temporary insurrections or aesthetic forms of resistance (as essential as these might be in their own right). And that work of metamorphosis can learn plasticity from breath, as a medium of interchange between the somatic and the social, as well as between the static and the emergent. In this essay, I want to meditate on the relationship between metamorphosis and breath, to circle around an understanding of emancipatory politics as breathwork, made manifest through embodied praxis and a praxis of embodiment. In the previous work, I have focused on the politics of mourning and grief (McIvor 2016; McIvor and Hirsch 2019; McIvor et al. 2021), but here I want to speculate on what moves us from the lessons of loss—including attachment, precarity, and ambivalence—to the possibilities of plasticity, or shift. This touches upon larger questions that I cannot address adequately here, including how societies can not only grieve their losses, traumas, and injustices but how they can use pain as a means for transformation. Here I focus on an aspect of this problematic, by staging a political–philosophical conversation on the relationship between breath, resistance, and metamorphosis, using the post-colonial critique of Achille Mbembe, the plastic materialism of Catherine Malabou, the critical theory of Han, the eco-phenomenology of David Abram, the philosophy of breathing offered by Luce Irigaray, and the neo-Freudian mysticism of Norman O. Brown.

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis 97 The fruit of this multilogue is a call for an erotic, sensuous politics rooted in the soma or body—both the body’s unavoidable materiality `but also its plasticity. Plasticity uses the powers of indeterminacy from within determinate systems (for instance, the autonomic nervous system). Breath and plasticity imply one another. While seemingly abstract, this dialogue anticipates and helps contextualize emergent practices and discourses within activist and social movement spaces such as healing justice, spiritual activism, collective transformative practice, pleasure activism, and resilience-based organizing (RBO), among others. Each of these models of praxis reveals the interconnections between somatic and social resilience, or between a sensuous, rooted politics of place and a holistic, inspirational vision of change. I show this by focusing in particular on three models for somatic-social transformation: regenerative activism, emergent strategy, and generative somatics. While the limitations of these forms of praxis need to be understood in order to identify areas for growth, such practices represent the best hope for overcoming a (relatively) narrow politics of resistance in order to generate alternative visions of flourishing. The Philosophy of Breathing Achille Mbembe has positioned his decolonial critique within the present era of constriction by calling for a universal right to breathe (2021). Breathlessness is a necropolitical production, as capitalism exposes an ever-greater percentage of the world population to conditions of precarity. Precarity—exposure to pollutants or toxins, and increasing vulnerability to severe weather events—is a form of necropolitics as population management, where the unfortunate many are forced to live “at the edge of life” (2019, 3), while liveable and breathable space shrinks in spaces relatively removed from the edge. Refugee camps, homeless populations, and everyday mechanisms of violence, surveillance, confinement, control, and abuse constitute the expanding reach of death within life, and these wars against life begin, Mbembe writes, “by taking away breath” (2021, 61). Nevertheless, the possibilities of life exceed the present reign of inequities and abuses. For Mbembe, life is a “dynamic, positive, and often risky exposure to the unknown and the unpredictable” (2022, 3). Mbembe locates his argument, in part, within pre-colonial African epistemologies that give central place to the “sharing of vital breath” (Ibid., 3). For example, the Dogon in Mali and the Yoruba in Nigeria see themselves within broader animacy of the world that all forms of life share. Breath, in these cosmologies, is not only an individual activity: “we all breathe, but we do not simply breathe individually. We also share the vital breath” (Ibid., 4). These frameworks recognize a shared interagency that transgresses the sharp dualisms of mind and body and human and non-human. They do not erase intra- and interspecies differences but acknowledge that agency—like the breath—is always shared. Hence, differences only

98  David W. McIvor emerge within a shared field of interaction. While “imbalances” of power may exist, “they never trump the sharing of agency” (Ibid., 4). All ideas of escape or control are destructive fantasies. The implication is that necropolitics is borrowing from and distorting the conditions for life, which inevitably creates a tension that only the liberation of “vital forces, les forces drien”, can address (Ibid., 4). For Mbembe, the shared agency implied by the inter-animacy of vital breath calls for a universal right to breathe, “meaning the capacity to participate in the vital flows that constitute us all” (Ibid., 9). Central to the exercising of such a right would be a work of attunement to the speech and language of the more than human world, i.e., listening to the speech of animals, plants, and ecosystems in ways that have become de-habituated among industrialized cultures. The demonopolization of language from the human creates space for a consciousness of earthly entanglement. It allows for the conceptualization of “breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in common . . . [and] eludes all calculation” (Ibid., 9). Breath, for Mbembe, is a medium not only of individual life but a medium of connection of the individual/community to spirit—or a broader inter-animacy of life that exceeds and circulates through all animate things. Mbembe’s orientation within pre-colonial African epistemologies is part of a broader trend of revivifying surviving knowledges that have endured the onslaught of colonialism and its corollary epistemic project of rejecting so-called “archaic” or “traditional” forms of knowledge. Yet there are also resources for imagining and inhabiting a more breathable world within the Western philosophical tradition and sciences. For instance, Catherine Malabou has argued that the neuroplasticity revealed by contemporary brain science reflects a broader biological capacity for emergence that must be included in any account of resistance to contemporary forms of power. As she puts it, there may be “a biological resistance to biopolitics”—a resistance that emerges from “possibilities inscribed in the structure of the living organism itself and not from philosophical concepts that skate on the surface of this structure” (quoted in Bhandar et al., 2015). In other words, plasticity rescues embodiment from the purgatory into which it has been thrown by Cartesian dualism and mechanical materialism. The assumptions of materialism have, in turn, insinuated themselves into the critical work of theorists such as Foucault, who, Malabou argues, deprives the biological “of a right of reply” to operations of power. As she puts it, criticizing Foucault (among others), usually the philosophical critique of biopower returns to the opposite to show that nothing in biology allows for a resistance to sovereignty. Such resistance can result only from a conflict between what I call symbolic life and biological life . . . [from] a different dimension . . . call [it] that of meaning, of existence, of history, of all that is assumed to come from purely “cultural” practices. (Ibid., 7)

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis 99 By identifying the possibilities of resistance in what exists outside of the biological, Foucault’s critique of biopower leaves unexplored the possibilities for plasticity (it also has the side effect of empowering the producers of “cultural” practices). Although Foucault’s late attempts to theorize technologies of the self may seem to have anticipated this criticism, they ultimately reinforce a dualism in which mental discipline shapes a flexible body into new forms, as opposed to a body–mind nexus of plasticity through which new forms emerge. By contrast, Malabou points to developments within the science of epigenetics to argue that metabolic cellular processes are themselves subject to a kind of hermeneutics or practice of interpretation, contrary to strict biological determinism. As she puts it, the bio—is a “complex and contradictory instance, opposed to itself” (Ibid., 37). Moreover, although plasticity may seem to imply the possibility of new, emergent phenomena—of unheralded, ruptural events—there is a key relationship between plasticity and repetition. Everything new is an instance of renewal. For example, stem cells repeat the process of differentiation that brings about life, whereas biomimicry repeats the patterns of non-human phenomena. The influence of “nature” on human development is not one directional (from sheer possibility to stable pattern) but bi-directional, insofar as patterns can be deconstructed and re-constructed as information travels back from processes of gene expression to processes of gene replication. Genes are not a form of unalterable material programming. Instead, they are better viewed as a medium of t­ ranslation—a zone of deconstruction and reconstruction. The self-regulating—or autonomic— systems within the biological are open and malleable, and breath is a key instrument of this plasticity. Although Malabou does not linger on this possibility in her work, breath is both an autonomic system regulated by the brain stem and also a tool of conscious manipulation with effects on other autonomic processes, including digestion, metabolism, and the immune system (Zwang et al. 2022). Breathwork, then, is a medium for transformation between the automatic and the emergent. Malabou re-centres biological plasticity as a principle of animation in ways that pair usefully with Mbembe’s account of shared breath. Yet neither go far enough, because neither theorizes the psycho-politics of breathlessness. This is necessary insofar as, according to Han, the psycho-politics of neoliberalism has supplanted biopolitics as the primary form of power. Whereas the biopolitical ordering of bodies was the appropriate technology of power for disciplinary societies, the neoliberal regime “exploits the psyche above all” (2017, 21). Neoliberal psycho-politics taps into and mines the psyche—desires, affects, and even dreams—to feed Big Data, which in turn provides a “psychogram of the unconscious” (Ibid., 21). A twisted version of Freud’s Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden, Big Data unearths the unconscious in order to sell its contents and to exploit psychic discomfort to feed perpetual loops of consumption and depression. The same critique that Malabou levels at Foucault, however, can be levelled at Han. A resistance to neoliberal psycho-politics can be located within the

100  David W. McIvor psyche. Han, by contrast, argues that we have to “disarm” psycho-politics by “killing psychology”, i.e. divesting the psyche of any logos that could be mined and exploited (Ibid., 77). Doing so will make ready subjects for an “event” that opens up a tabula rasa, an “unwritten future” in which the “praxis of freedom” might arise (Ibid., 77). For Han, “events are turns” or radical transformations, but once again plasticity implies that all turns are re-turns—renewals of existing, immanent capacities for metamorphosis. In other words, Han ends up affirming a psychic/symbolic dualism that misses the possibility of psycho-political metamorphosis. The challenge, then, facing an account of resistance qua transformation is to theorize plasticity along with psyche, and both within a broader ontology of vital breath. The eco-phenomenology of David Abrams is a key contribution to this conversation, then, as it traces the respiratory lineage of the psyche—the hidden breathwork, we might say, underlying psychology and psychoanalysis. As Abram points out, the Greek noun psyche was derived from the verb psychein, which meant “to breathe” (1997, 237). The psyche, then, is not a private possession or interior reality but an “invisible yet thoroughly palpable medium in which we (along with the trees, the squirrels, and the clouds) are immersed” (Ibid., 237). The mis-location or mis-identification of the psyche is part of a broader amnesia within the West: a “forgetting of the air” as the “concealment of presence from within the present” (Ibid., 223). Although Abram traces this amnesia to the development of alphabetic script and literacy, it has been reinforced through colonial regimes of appropriation and the corresponding denigration of indigenous epistemologies, many of which shared an emphasis on breath as a medium of interdependent animacy. For instance, the Creek peoples of Southeast America called the creator god Hesakitumesee, or the “master of breath” (Ibid., 228). Similarly, for the Lakota Nation, Taku Škanškan, or the Enveloping Sky, was an omnipresent spirit that imparted “life, motion, and thought to all things”, including giving birth to the four Winds that structure all Lakota ritual practices (Ibid., 228). For the Dinè, or Navajo peoples, the concept of nilch’i—the Holy Wind—refers to the atmosphere as well as to the air that swirls within humans as they breathe. Nilch’I suffuses everything, “grants life, movement, speech, and awareness to all beings”, and serves as vehicle of communication between all elements of the animate world (Ibid., 230). With the rise of literacy, the shared animacy of the world receded into the background. Oral cultures, Abram argues, were better able to sustain a sense of universal inter-animacy because language was seen as a medium shared with the broader, animate world. When language became written and transportable, it distinguished and separated humans from their encircling environment. Oral cultures, then, held at bay an autonomous sensibility, with its requisite and increasingly rigid divisions between inside and outside, body and mind, and the biological and the spiritual. The lack of mediation between inside and outside means that there is “no longer any flow between the self-reflexive domain of

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis 101 alphabetized awareness and all that exceeds, or subtends, this determinate realm” (Ibid., 257). The forgetting of the air is a restriction of vital respiration, which can only be redressed through a kind of sensuous politics of place: a “regionally diverse and interdependent web of largely self-sufficient communities” oriented “by the distinct needs of specific bioregions” (Ibid., 272). Bioregionalism checks a tendency towards wanton abstraction by locating life within specific niches, but it is also, Abram argues, the best way of appreciating the “commonwealth of breath” that encompasses all of life. Luce Irigaray, writing from within Western philosophy but also indebted to Eastern traditions including yoga, argues that an awareness of breathing can bridge the supposed gaps between body and consciousness, activity and passivity, immanence and transcendence—between psyche and atmosphere. However, unlike Abram (or Mbembe), Irigaray emphasizes how an awareness of breathing rests upon the acceptance and cultivation of autonomy, a process by which we “leave prenatal passivity” and “simple contiguity with the natural universe” (1999, 20). Irigaray begins from a similar starting point to Abram or Mbembe, insisting that the atmosphere is but the universal flowering of life in which all participate and towards which we should express gratitude and responsibility. Yet she refuses notions of fusion and argues that only autonomy and differentiation provide a means of mediation between self, other, and world. The first action of life is to breathe by ourselves, and the conscious cultivation of breath throughout one’s life allows for the possibility of malleability “without submission” (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 12). Human culture carries a seed of forgetting because it emphasizes constructed, “suprasensitive” values over the cultivation of life (Ibid., 12). Instead of upholding particular traditions or worldviews, rather, Irigaray argues that the cultivation of breathing can lead to a “new culture of energy” and a new way of being, which would be irreducible to historical or extant indigenous lifeways (2021, 77). A “culture of breath” could serve as a fulcrum for encounters across difference, beyond a dependence on idealized models associated with particular traditions (2021, 87). Irigaray calls for a reimagining of the plastic possibilities of life within a shared “universal” medium that nevertheless has to be experienced from a position of autonomy and differentiation. We cultivate this new culture of energy through the development of sensuous practices of attunement to the more than human world, while, at the same time, developing a practice and presence of self-attunement through somatic work (such as yoga), conscious breathwork (pranayama), and by paying attention to the relationship between desire and difference. To complete this eclectic conversation on the philosophy of breath, I turn briefly to the work of Norman O. Brown, whose mystical version of Freudianism is past due for a renaissance. Brown understood psychoanalysis as a revolutionary endeavour—more in line with a prophetic vision of emancipation than a disciplinary matrix of normalization. For Brown, the revolutionary kernel of psychoanalysis is the idea of the “body as a (political) organization, a body politic;

102  David W. McIvor as a historical variable, as plastic” (1990, 127). Yet for Brown, this plasticity is not only a biological dynamic; it is not contained within biological entities, but reflects a broader, transjective process of intake, projection, and retention, at conscious and unconscious levels. Dualisms of self and other, body and mind, nature and culture, are better seen as compromised habits of breathing. As Brown puts it, the dualism of self and external world is built up by a constant process of reciprocal exchange between the two. The self as a stable substance enduring through time, an identity, is maintained by constantly absorbing good parts (or people) from the outside world and expelling bad parts from the inner world . . . [yet] “there is a continual ‘unconscious’ wandering of other personalities into ourselves”. (Ibid., 147) Plasticity, on this reading, is not a product or possession of the biological per se, but a psychic and earthly phenomenon. The self is an illusion, an act of pretend possessiveness; a “bit of the outside world swallowed, introjected; or rather a bit of the outside world that we insist on pretending we have swallowed” (Ibid., 144). The surrounding atmosphere of “love’s body” belies the possibility of an individual person, which trips into Whitehead’s fallacy of simple location by accepting the boundary between self and other as real (Ibid., 154). Individuality or autonomy is a side effect of Protestant literalism, through which the word becomes detached from the breath of living bodies (Ibid., 224). The actual body—love’s body—is to be built by spirit, the “breath of life, the creator spirit” (Ibid., 224). Although Brown’s mysticism seems to elevate spirit above the flesh, and the immaterial above the material, these are false distinctions that Brown is attempting to overcome. Love’s body is both fleshly and earthly: “Dionysus calls us outdoors” (Ibid., 229). Breath, as Brown puts it, is not “the image of a more divine thing; it is the divine thing” (Ibid., 230). Therefore, body consciousness is breath consciousness, and vice versa, and they both abjure “brain-consciousness” and man-made idols such as scripture: “the word made flesh is a living word, not a scripture but a breathing” (Ibid., 231). Brown’s mystical vision aligns well with Mbembe’s call for a universal right to breath, Malabou’s plasticity, and Abram’s eco-phenomenology of holy wind, but it sits in tension with Irigaray’s emphasis on autonomy and differentiation as the means of sharing or participating within a new culture of breath. Nevertheless, this can be seen as a productive tension that attunes us to challenges of practice rather than a dialectical conflict in need of theoretical resolution. This conversation on the philosophy of breath points to four ideas that constellate into an erotic, embodied psycho-political response to breathlessness: (1) a politics of cultivated sensuousness, (2) rituals of mediation between the needs for both connection and separation (interdependency and autonomy), and (3) the conscious

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis 103 development of the plastic powers of the soma for (4) imagining and enacting metamorphosis in the body politic. Less resistance than allowance, this practice of attunement to self, other, and earth bridges between the soma and the social, with breath as the plastic medium. Breathwork as Radical Praxis While the authors surveyed earlier can be used to theorize a new culture of breath, the spade work of building this culture will fall upon the broader lifeworld. For this reason, it is both notable and promising that emerging practices and discourses within activist- and social movement spaces have been taking up the themes of sensuality and somatics, bridging from anti-colonial and anti-­ capitalist critique to visions of collective, embodied transformation. It is too facile to dismiss this emergent style of praxis as self-indulgence or as neo-liberalism in a new guise (Godrej 2017). Rather, I think we should see the proliferation of this language and its corollary practices not only as a means of naming the traumas of our breathless age but of identifying strategies for metamorphosis. Ideally, these strategies not only engage formal political systems but offer alternative spaces—or life rafts—where groups can build collective resilience and practices of mutual care. By placing these practices into conversation with the philosophy of breathing outlined earlier, we might better see the tensions and plastic possibilities within and between these movements and their surrounding environments (political, ecological, and cultural). There is an almost dizzying array of associations, activist groups, centres (academic or non-profit), individual practitioners, popular writing, and academic scholarship that have incorporated somatic attunement into movement-building discourse and practices over the past 15 years. Many locate the origins of this shift to the inspiration of the United States Social Forum of 2010, in which the language of healing, spirituality, and the relationship between mind, body, and the social permeated many of the workshops, discussions, and associated events (Karides et al. 2010). The story of direct influence of the United States Social forum can be overstated, however, as the discourses of self-care and somatic attunement have pervaded movement spaces and conversations of different lineages and across different regions and cultures, almost as a kind of efflorescence of the collective unconscious more than the direct transmission of specific texts or ideas. In this brief essay, I do not have the space to catalogue the differences between these approaches or provide a means of categorization. Rather, I will quickly fly over several instantiations of what we could call the mind–body movement space to highlight key aspects that resonate with the emergent philosophy of breath described earlier. In particular, I will explore regenerative activism, the emergent strategy/pleasure activism associated with the author and activist adrienne maree brown, and generative somatics, before re-connecting this argument with the philosophy of breath outlined earlier.

104  David W. McIvor Regenerative activism “involves practices that renew and revitalize us and our movements”, even in the midst of “social and ecological struggles” (Regenerative Activism 2019). Regenerative activism explicitly links personal and social well-being and argues that the “way we treat the world is a mirror of how we treat ourselves” (“Mission”). Regenerative activism understands regeneration as a “container” for a work of “remaking ourselves and deepening self-awareness” in order to create collective initiatives that embody the values of solidarity and care. Regeneration sees political action as an aspect of the pursuit of a holistic vision of psychic and social well-being—bridging facile distinctions between inner and outer experiences. The principles of regenerative activism have seeded themselves into specific social movement spaces, including Extinction Rebellion (Westwell and Bunting 2020). Extinction Rebellion has consciously paired practices of self-care with direct actions aimed at publicizing the climate crisis and demanding substantive policy change (Ibid). Importantly, these practices of attunement work with—and do not try to dispel—difficult emotions such as despair, but see that despair as a way of breathing or being in the world that must be acknowledged and held, rather than being seen as obstacles to be quickly overcome. There are striking similarities between regenerative activism and the work of adrienne maree brown (and many others) in developing the discourse and praxis of emergent strategy. Brown has outlined emergent strategy as a means of exploring “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long to long for” (brown 2017, 8). The principles of emergent strategy, including “change is constant (be like water)” and “what you pay attention to grows”, reflect a synthesis of somatic attunement with social activism (Ibid., 41). For brown, emergent strategy rests upon a practice of cultivating attention that is both embodied and ecological: “find(ing) my way back to listening to the earth and my own nature through longing and intuition” (2021, 6). Attunement to the needs and plastic powers of the body is an essential means, for brown, of both envisioning and embodying the work of social justice. Social transformation in response to breathlessness must be embodied, because it is only—brown intimates—by accessing the soma that activists can get clear on what they are capable of doing. As she puts it, “somatics helped me begin to gauge what I truly wanted and needed from connections, from political space. I  got clearer on what I  could offer” (2019, 276). This speaks to both the idea of “being the change you seek in the world” but also pragmatic concerns such as activist burnout and fatigue. Somatics, then, is a “necessary element of political praxis” (Ibid., 277). Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the somatic work at the heart of emergent strategy reveals the plasticity of somatic attunement—often through conscious breathwork ­practices—as a resource to be cultivated and stretched into movement spaces and practices.

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis 105 Staci Haines has also argued for a deep connection between somatics and social movements (2019). Somatics is a method of reintroducing subjects to the facts of embodied life, which both constrains and makes possible self- and social transformation. The Cartesian split between mind and body de-privileged the body in ways that infected political-materialist frameworks that overlooked experiences of embodiment, or, as Irigaray quips with regard to both Hegel and Marx, “does not their thought address the dead rather than the living?” (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 23). Nevertheless, there is never simply a body; bodies and experiences of embodiment are always located within a “much wider fabric of life” (2019, 18). Generative somatics, in contrast to neoliberal modalities of selfcare, de-individualizes and politicizes the body by integrating social analysis that examines embodiment in terms of the interaction effects between bodies, experiences, and environments. Yet, from this paradigm, the body is not merely the pale reflections of environment but a lively, plastic medium of possible transformation. Put another way, although there is no way to distinguish cleanly between “external” political or cultural environments and the shape of bodies, we can talk intelligently about the powers of the body for grounding both a critique of breathlessness and the transformation of these conditions. Attunement to breath—and its restrictions—is a key aspect of generative somatics. The areas of restriction, whether they are in the thoracic area of the throat and neck, the chest, the abdomen, or the diaphragm, have different implications regarding the source of tension and the means of modification (Haines 2019, 285–88). Restrictions across any of these “bands”, however, inhibit the body’s capacities for relaxed attention, safety, expression, and voice. So-called “political” actions—voice, exit, or loyalty—require embodied capacities that can become stuck or stiff due to traumas or patterns of mis-use. These embodied habits, moreover, cannot be altered by intellectualization or even talk therapy, whether that takes the form of individual psychoanalysis or Habermasian models of deliberative democracy. Rather, they require a somatic practice of metamorphosis, or what Haines and other refer to as the “somatic arc of transformation” (2019, 155). The somatic arc begins with attunement to one’s current shape, mixed with “commitment” work of identifying purpose, goals, and values that can guide transformative process (Ibid., 155). Commitment, however, requires “somatic opening” in order to become embodied (Ibid., 157). Somatic opening requires attunement practices such as “centering”, in which individuals drop out of intellection and focus on physical sensations, which is—as one somatic practitioner puts it—“the fastest way to become present with oneself” (Somatic Centering 2018). Physical attunement to bodily sensations and associated emotions, images, or stories loosens the grip of existing embodied habits. On the basis of somatic opening, Haines argues, effective and resilient connections to others can be drawn, new stories about the self can be created, and relationships between the shaping effects of the environment and the plastic possibilities

106  David W. McIvor for transformation within the soma can be identified and explored. Put another way, somatics is a body politics: a way of assessing the effects of environmental conditioning in order to tap into the plastic potential within experiences of embodiment. In many respects, these ideas and practices might seem to already exist within historical activist spaces, such as those associated with radical feminism. Yet the sources for tapping into embodiment are arguably much more available and socially salient than they were for consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s or intersectional movements such as the Combahee River Collective. Nevertheless, the nascent experience of Extinction Rebellion does reveal a significant tension between those who are committed to the language and practice of self-care, and those who are less comfortable with these frameworks, who see them as too esoteric, immaterial, impractical, or spiritual (Westwell and Bunting 2020). The emphasis on somatics, then, can be a barrier to participation for those millions of breathless subjects who have been encultured to dissociate the experience of embodiment. Moreover, regenerative activism and similar approaches have been criticized for the ways that they seemingly elevate the personal over the political or the spiritual/somatic over the structural. However, this critique seems to rest on a facile binary that overlooks the way that structural political–cultural realities work by influencing the soma-psyche. The critique that somatics creates a barrier to participation is also self-defeating. Any effective response to the spiralling conditions of breathlessness will need to work with the material of the soma-psyche in order to both envision and bring about substantive social transformation. The emerging paradigm shift within activist spaces towards practices of embodiment resonates with the reconstructed philosophy of breath outlined earlier. First, there is an emphasis on sensation as a tool of connection to both self and other, and a corresponding image of politics in terms of cultivated sensuousness that can expand our collective sense of the embodied life. Second, many of these approaches discuss the important work of mediation between individual and social, between what Abram calls the “inner wind” of the individual and the shared breath of the atmosphere. Third, somatic approaches emphasize and aim to cultivate the plastic powers of body for transformation. Fourth, they use that plasticity to imagine alternative social arrangements and futures. They tap into what Haines calls the “intelligence in aliveness” in moving towards a world of better breathing (2019, 161). In conclusion, this brief essay has tried to show how those concerned with “resistance” to socio-political conditions of breathlessness are wise to attend to the body—not merely as the site of social traumas or injustices, but as a medium for metamorphosis. Movements that successfully incorporate the body and its plastic powers into their visions and practices of social transformation are the best hope for responding to the spiralling conditions of breathlessness. Movements

Resistance and/or Metamorphosis 107 that overlook the body and its potential for reshaping politics will only ramify the breathless politics of the current moment. By contrast the breathing body—a body that can breath—is both a generative metaphor and a specific, materials location of intervention through which the body—and the body p­ olitic—can be changed. Notes 1 Associate Professor of Political Science, Colorado State University. [email protected]. 2 The phrase even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_can% 27t_breathe.

Bibliography Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books. Albano, Caterina. 2021. Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berardi, Franco. 2019. Breathing: Chaos and Poetry. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2021. The Third Unconscious. London: Verso. Bhandar, Brenna, and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, eds. 2015. Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou. Durham: Duke University Press. brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy. Chico, CA: AK Press. ———. 2019. Pleasure Activism. Chico, CA: AK Press. ———. 2021. Holding Change. Chico, CA: AK Press. Brown, Norman O. 1990. Love’s Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Godrej, Farah. 2017. “The Neoliberal Yogi and the Politics of Yoga.” Political Theory 45, no. 6 (December): 772–800. Haines, Staci. 2019. The Politics of Trauma. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. Psychopolitics. London: Verso. Hartman, Saidiya. 2022. Scenes of Subjection. New York: Oxford. Irigaray, Luce. 1999. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2021. A New Culture of Energy. New York: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. 2016. Through Vegetal Being. New York: Columbia University Press. Karides, Marina, Walda Katz-Fishman, Rose M. Brewer, Alice Lovelace, and Jerome Scott. 2010. The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement. Chicago: Changemaker Publications. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2021. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 52 (Winter). ———. 2022. “How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness.” NOEMA Magazine, January 11. McIvor, David W. 2016. Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

108  David W. McIvor McIvor, David W., and Alexander Keller Hirsch, eds. 2019. The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss. Boulder, CO: Lexington Books. McIvor, David W., Juliet Hooker, Ashley Atkins, Athena Athanasiou, and George Shulman. 2021. “Mourning Work: Death and Democracy During a Pandemic.” Contemporary Political Theory 20: 165–99. “Mission.” Advaya. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://advaya.co/mission. Regenerative Activism and the Ecology of Movements. 2019. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://advaya.co/events/2019/04/06/regenerative-activism-and-the-ecology-ofmovements. Robinson, Bryan. 2020. “Is Your Computer Screen Stealing Your Breath?” Forbes, November 14. Roy, Arundhati. 2003. War Talk. Boston: South End Press. Somantic Centering with Sumitra Rajkumar. 2018. Irresistible Podcast, January 18. Accessed January 1, 2023. https://irresistible.org/podcast/12p. Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. 2022. Breathing Aesthetics. Durham: Duke University Press. Wall, Tyler James. 2018. “Breathing is Life, and Life is Breathing.” June 1. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://feldenkrais.com/breathing-life-life-breathing/. Westwell, Emily, and Josh Bunting. 2020. “The Regenerative Culture of Extinction Rebellion: Self-Care, People Care, Planet Care.” Environmental Politics 29 (3). Zwang, Jelle, Rick Naaktgeboren, Antonius van Herwaarden, Peter Pickkers, and Matthijs Kox. 2022. “The Effects of Cold Exposure Training and a Breathing Exercise on the Inflammatory Response in Humans: A Pilot Study.” Psychosomatic Medicine 84, no. 4 (May): 457–67.

Part III

Facing Failure and Pessimistic Seductions

8 Responding to Failure The Case of the US Disability Rights Movement Gisli Vogler

Introduction This chapter explores discussions about failure in relation to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The act prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities and is seen as one of the great achievements of the US disability rights struggle. The decades that followed the passing of the ADA in July 1990 were however marked by a narrow interpretation of its provisions by federal courts (Colker 2005; Krieger 2003b). This development resulted in a sense of disappointment at the failure of progressive politics that chimes with the notion of left melancholia. Indeed, alongside the judicial backlash to the ADA, the theoretical underpinning of the law, the social model of disability, also faced significant challenges (Shakespeare and Watson 2001).1 This left disability activism and scholarship without the grand narrative that fuelled the global disability rights movement and the emergence of disability studies in the late 20th century. The chapter looks at how disability scholar-activists debated engaging with failure productively to articulate lessons to be learned from the failings of the ADA. I trace different interpretations of how the Americans with Disabilities Act failed, and how to respond to this failure, that loosely form a “backlash” and a “tension” narrative. The “backlash” narrative took as its starting point the assumption that the ADA failed to achieve its goals because the act was met with a backlash by courts and the media (Krieger 2003b). Disability activists should therefore respond to this failure by learning to limit future backlash. In contrast, the “tension” narrative suggested that the “backlash story” does not account sufficiently for the contradictions already present in the ideas and goals of the various organizations that form the US disability rights movement (Bagenstos 2009). It was these contradictions that facilitated a selective interpretation of the ADA by federal courts and that should be the focal point of a response to the failure of the ADA. This chapter suggests that both narratives offer important insights into how failure can act as a positive catalyst for future, improved activism. At the same time, I argue that their approaches risk undermining the lessons learned from DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-12

112  Gisli Vogler the perceived failings of the ADA if they do not consider in what ways failure is a part of the utopian dimension of disability activism, that is, the effort to imagine a better world inclusive of disabled people. The chapter turns to utopian scholarship to distinguish between two types of failure: the inevitable failure that comes with any endeavour to envision and enact a different future from within the present structures and practices, and the concrete failure, the tensions, and mistakes that may be particular to a specific moment and movement. The former, because of its inevitability, should be embraced as a positive dimension to resistance which allows for its renewal and further development. The latter, in contrast, offers an important moment to learn from past mistakes and overcome them. The chapter shows how attentiveness to these two types of failure is crucial for disability advocates to avoid the twin danger of unquestioning hope or resigned fatalism. The argument unfolds in three stages. First, I introduce the backlash and tension narratives and their important insights into how resistance movements can productively engage with failure. The second section introduces debates on utopia to think further about failure in resistance movements. The third and fourth sections apply this framework in the context of disability activism, first by highlighting the utopian impulse underlying the ADA, which is followed by a critical discussion of the responses to failure in the tension and backlash narrative. On the Response to the ADA: Learning from Failure First, some context. The first organizations fighting for the rights of disabled people were founded in the late 19th to mid-20th centuries (Nielsen 2012). Organizations such as The League of the Physically Handicapped focused predominantly on specific groups and at times specifically distanced themselves from the label of disability to avoid the stigma attached to being disabled. From the 1960s onwards, a diverse pan-disability movement emerged, known today as the US disability rights movement, which challenged the exclusion of many disabled people from most socio-economic spheres because of widespread prejudice and physical barriers. Its key message was that it is not physical or mental impairments that prevent disabled people from participating equally in society, but a society built around a particular social norm of body and mind. This shifts the focus from the need to treat and rehabilitate disabled people, or their separation in asylums, towards issues of discrimination and accommodation. The 1960s also saw the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which did not include disability as a social category protected from discrimination. This fact encouraged disability rights activists to fight for their own legislation that prohibits discrimination based on one’s disability (Patterson 2018). The ADA is at times seen as the culmination of these efforts to use legislation to enforce equal rights for disabled people but, as suggested earlier, its passing was soon met with profound disappointment.

Responding to Failure 113 The different takes on the success of the ADA to be discussed in this chapter shared a concern with a narrow interpretation of the ADA’s provisions. Judges, they noted, used more ambiguous cases to reinforce traditional conservative arguments about the need to prevent the supposedly rampant abuse of the welfare system and uphold the protections of “true disability”. The consequence was that “the only litigants less successful” than people litigating against discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act are prisoners, “who are rarely even represented by counsel” (Bagenstos 2009, 1). The takes on the ADA differed in their interpretation of the reasons and causes for, as well as the conclusions we can draw from the narrow interpretation. The issue with a narrow reading seems to have been at least partly resolved with the 2008 amendment which specifically asserted a broader definition of disability (Warden 2020). The disagreements nonetheless are instructive in how failure can be used productively as a tool to move resistance forward. I begin by introducing the “backlash” narrative which emerged in a series of conferences, articles, and edited collections at the turn of the century. This take on failure perceived the ADA as a positive achievement of the US disability rights movement, whose original intent was betrayed by conservative courts and judges: “The problem with the ADA’s failed promises, therefore largely lies with the Supreme Court rather than Congress’s basic framework in enacting the ADA” (Colker 2005, 4). Proponents highlighted that the ADA was unique in the degree of support it received in Congress, with an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats voting in favour of passing the legislation. They emphasized the “transformative” (Krieger 2003a, 342) character of the law, which moves beyond conventional civil rights law, including previous disability legislation, by positing a structural as well as formal equality. According to this approach, disabled people must not only not be treated worse than other people in a similar situation but also be treated differently, in light of past and present cultural and structural barriers that prevent disabled people from participating equally in society, by accommodating their difference to the extent this is possible without, for example, breaching health and safety regulations. The ADA furthermore replaces the individualist definition of disability, which assumes that disability is linked to identifiable physical or mental traits of an individual (Blanck 2021). It is enough to be perceived as having or having had a disability to qualify for the protections of the ADA. This interpretation of disability resonates with the social model of disability. The model highlights how people become disabled through social stigma and physical barriers that prevent equal access to public spaces for people who are deemed disabled. The backlash narrative concluded that the law (should have) marked a fundamental, positive shift in the societal relationship towards disability. This contrasts with the reception the law received following its phasing in by 1994, in which disability advocates describe as a backlash with the following key features. First, the federal judiciary interpreted the law in consistently narrow terms, meaning that most plaintiffs lost their cases. Judges,

114  Gisli Vogler including judges of the US Supreme Court, ignored the interpretative guidance and the intent of the legislators which had been laid out in extensive reports on how to read the (undoubtedly complex) legislation (Colker 2005, 8). Second, there was a media backlash against the ADA, with popular media, from newspapers to sitcoms, gesturing to supposedly frivolous and absurd consequences of the ADA (Krieger 2003b, 9; Pelka 1996). The backlash story conveyed an image of a positive effort to combat injustice, on the one hand, and a system incapable of upholding these ideal standards, on the other. There is variation and complexity, as contributors noted that there were ambiguous and unclear parts to the ADA that made it vulnerable to problematic interpretations (Diller 2000). However, such reflections usually did not undermine the basic features of the story. Those representing the backlash perspective at conferences and in scholarly publications articulated its features in several ways. Some advocates challenged the disability rights movement’s focus on disability legislation (Wald 2000). This position offered an important critical reflection on the use of limited resources and on what the most effective ways of pursuing disability justice might be. It identified failure as a suitable moment for rethinking the direction disability activism is taking. Hope for greater success was placed on other approaches to tackling discrimination and injustice, such as protest and public debate. Another typical response was one of frustration with the legal institutions and with a society that “simply does not get” the ADA and what it aims to do (cf. Krieger 2003a, 340). Frustration can lead to a valuable effort to use perceived failure to re-energize activism. Such an approach accepts the failure but treats it as a sign that even more action is needed. Hope arises from the conviction in the power of activism (although a defiant response to one’s frustration may also be an act of despair, a decision to keep going even when the conviction is no longer there). A third view read the backlash as part of the natural process of social change. This perspective suggested that the more radical the transformation sought through legal mechanisms, the more intense the push-back will be against it by the institutions invested in the status quo. Any “transformative legal regime” that does not reckon with this potential backlash “is unlikely to fulfil its architects’ expectations. Misunderstood, misconstrued, or directly perceived as illegitimate, it will eventually yield to the mechanisms of sociological retrenchment, of which backlash is simply the most conspicuous type” (Krieger 2003a, 382). In other words, how things are and not just how they ought to be must take priority in disability activism if activists want to ensure that their proposals for social change are met with less resistance. Failure is here fruitfully used as a critical lens to rethink the orientation of activism and this response also gestured towards the need to grapple with the inevitability of failure that comes with progressive activism. The second approach to the failure of the ADA, the “tension” narrative, challenged the backlash story by foregrounding tensions within the disability rights movement and the role they played in facilitating the narrow reading of the ADA

Responding to Failure 115 (Tucker 2001). A first tension arose from the decision to use anti-discrimination law—historically a tool to ensure people are treated similarly—to remove structural barriers to participation by accommodating disabled people’s difference (Bagenstos 2009). This tension was deepened by a second tension between the aspirations to see disability as a social phenomenon and as a universal category and an emphasis on the disabled community as a distinct minority within the United States that has faced unique barriers. Those supporting the interpretation of disability as a universal category argue that all humans are subject to physical differences that could become disabling under specific social circumstances, which clashes with a sense that disability refers to a distinct group of people with rights. In narrowing down the definition of disability, courts followed the latter interpretation of disability. Courts’ interpretations of the ADA also echo a historic emphasis within the movement on self-reliance and independence that chimes with conservative values. This emphasis is a consequence of the experiences that many of the early activists in the movements had of being subjected to deeply dehumanizing and violent treatment in asylums or of quasi-imprisonment at home without the ability to move outside because of physical barriers such as inaccessible transportation (Bagenstos 2009, 3). Alongside the constructive criticisms of the backlash narrative, the tension narrative also offered a positive response to the perceived failure of the ADA. According to this argument, failure should lead us to critically evaluate the tensions within any complex, widespread movement and to revise the general vision in order to develop an improved approach in the future. In particular, similar to the first response to the backlash narrative mentioned earlier, the suggestion here was to reduce the focus on anti-discrimination law, which cannot achieve what disability rights activists were hoping for. The positive response to failure by both approaches overlapped with views expressed by key activists behind the ADA. Judith Heumann for instance emphasized that people recognized “that they needed more than just the ADA and [section] 504 and these other laws. They needed both implementation, but they also needed the voices of disabled people, and they needed disabled people understanding what their rights were” (Heumann 2020). For Heumann, too, the successes and failures of the ADA served as an energizing moment that helped bring out new ways of thinking about the movement’s achievements and future action (Heumann and Gray 2020). At both the level of scholarly advocacy and activism, we therefore see that the perceived failure of the ADA, and more generally the challenge to the social model, inspired rather than undermined or paralysed activism. Law and Utopia: Embracing Contingency To understand more fully how activists might productively engage with and respond to failure, I turn to the role of failure in utopian political thought and

116  Gisli Vogler action. Utopia has traditionally been conceived as a literary and philosophical tradition dedicated to developing a blueprint of a perfect society. In the last century, critical theorists, from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, and poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault have helped rethink utopianism as part of an effort to problematize Enlightenment faith in progress (van der Walt 2014). Ernst Bloch in particular has become known for his broader understanding of utopia which includes a wide array of “dreams of a better life”, expressed in anything from architecture to music. Utopias provide less of a universal blueprint than an “expression of hope” that acts as a “directing act of a cognitive kind” (Bloch 1995, 1, 12). His heirs have articulated two key elements to this conception of utopia that are crucial for thinking about the failure of the ADA and transformative law: its ambiguity and provisionality. Utopias are ambiguous because they constitute partial, limited attempts to imagine a better world which are formulated using the language and frameworks of the present. Utopias simultaneously present a moment of radical disjuncture to think and act freely using our imagination, but also “force us to face the fact that we do not live there; we live here, and we cannot but use the language of the here and now in all our imaginings” (Winter 2006, 3). The question then is how to respond to this ambiguity: do we presuppose that we have the means to identify our vision of the world as the only correct one and to resolve all problems that come with implementing this vision in its “true” form, or do we affirm the limitations of our ability to imagine the not-yet. To affirm the limits to our utopian impulse is to embrace provisionality. Provisionality does not imply imprecision, vagueness, or the refusal to take a position on the challenges of our time (Levitas 2007, 303). Instead, it is about leaving behind the desire to envision and implement a perfect society, in favour of imagining a better society that is characterized by change, difference, and open to criticism. The complexity of reality demands that utopian actors and thinkers articulate concrete ideas about moving beyond the status quo that remains open to revision as society changes and their implications become clearer. Furthermore, it means that we cannot rely on a set framework that guides us as to when, and to what degree, to hold onto our utopian convictions and visions and when to adapt them. Instead, we must constantly renegotiate the difficult balancing act between acknowledging the boundaries of the present and seeking to transcend them towards the hoped-for future. Awareness of the ambiguous and provisional character of utopia enables activists to face up to the fact that some form of failure is inevitable as the utopian vision fails to materialize in and transcend the present. This is important because fear of inevitable failure has in the past encouraged utopian thinkers and actors to pursue totalitarian or violent means to overcome the limits reality puts on their ambitions. The acknowledgement of inevitable failure also allows activists to challenge another problematic reaction, which arises from the gap between the present and the hoped-for future: the argument that failure is a sign

Responding to Failure 117 that “utopian” demands and endeavours are unrealistic and must be moderated by taking a more realist(ic) approach (Thaler 2019, 1012). Once activists accept that their projects are ambiguous and provisional, inevitable failure can instead become a source of playful experimentation—“a site of beginnings that exceed themselves in unrealized ways, where inspiration for alternative political worlds might be derived” (Gabay 2022, 288). Engagement with inevitable failure comes with a twofold danger of succumbing to unquestioning hope and resigned fatalism. First, acceptance of the inevitability of failure can encourage activists to ignore the concrete failings of their utopian endeavours, because failure was programmed in anyway. Second, treating failure as inevitable can lead to overly pessimistic worldviews and to avoiding any projects or goals that seem more prone to failure than others. But affirmation of provisionality and ambiguity also provides the tools for a discussion about whether a particular instance of failure was inevitable or could and should have been avoided. For such a discussion to succeed, it must try to distinguish between inevitable and concrete failure and ask in relation to concrete instances of failure, to what extent they were inevitable and therefore something to be acknowledged and even embraced. While all failure is a consequence of the fact that we cannot escape the imperfection of the present, and although the boundaries between types of failure are fluid, their sources differ in important ways. Inevitable failure is largely an expression of our inability to imagine the not-yet, while concrete failings are a consequence of insufficient attentiveness to the present conditions and the potential and limitations of a chosen strategy to move from the present to the future. The former should encourage a playful revision of our imaginings, the latter should drive activists to improve the tools and strategies deployed in envisioning and enacting a better world. Disability Activism and Utopia I now return to disability activism and begin by considering the role of utopia for the ADA. Disability and utopia have historically been linked through eugenics, and this has meant that engagement with the utopian impulse has always been unavoidable for disabled people. In response, some disability advocates reject utopianism altogether, given its tendency to envision perfect societies freed from disability; others have sought to articulate their own utopias from the perspectives of disabled people (Abberley 2018; Garland-Thomson 2012). The latter approach is key to the social model, which envisions “a society where people with impairments live and flourish alongside everyone else but where disabling barriers and disablist values and attitudes have disappeared” (Oliver 1996, 38). The social model is the theoretical framework behind the ADA and it is therefore unsurprising that disability advocates are keenly aware of the utopian features of the ADA, viewing it as a transformative effort by an outsider group to shape society according to its demands and visions (Krieger 2003a).

118  Gisli Vogler At the same time, advocates discussing the success and failure of the ADA often reduce the ADA to its ability to secure the rights of disabled people, including through successful litigation in courts. That is, they neglect its utopian features that go beyond protecting the rights of individual people in the present. We can trace this difficult relationship between disability legal activism and utopia back to the seminal essay The Right to Live in the World, which was published in 1966 by influential legal scholar and disability activist Jacobus tenBroek and is viewed as foundational to the ADA (Hirschmann 2021). In brief terms, the essay advocates for an integrationist policy, in line with what has become known as the social model of disability—“entitling the disabled to full participation in the life of the community and encouraging and enabling them to do so” (tenBroek 1966, 843) — and suggests that this integrationist approach is already the national policy adopted by legislatures. Rehabilitation programmes, for example, clearly signalled the intent of the US government to integrate disabled people into the workforce, in order to secure higher productivity for society while bearing the cost of such integration. The essay furthermore highlights that any costs arising from accommodating disability are comparatively small when contrasted with the costs of separate institutions for disabled people and must furthermore be considered in relation to the benefits of a larger workforce. Most importantly, tenBroek contrasts this legislative intent with the approaches taken within the judicial system. He argues that the judiciary has fallen behind in its approach to disability and, in so doing, denied disabled people the right to live in the world. It is therefore not utopian to expect such integration, but a logical consequence of changing attitudes towards disability that judges should acknowledge going forward. tenBroek’s effort to present the integrationist argument as non-utopian is likely born out of a problematic historical view of law and utopia as incompatible (as well as the general sentiment often found in society that associates utopia with something idealistic). In the seminal book of utopian studies, Utopia, Thomas More reports of the inhabitants of the island of Utopia as follows: “they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige Men to obey a body of Laws, that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects” (More 1685, 148). The logic at play is that if a society is perfect or ideal—not with regards to more mundane things such as the weather, but in terms of order and the distribution of wealth—it surely does not need legal procedures to prevent people and institutions from behaving in non-ideal ways. Laws are instead cast as an unwelcome reminder of a world full of imperfection. To enable a system without extensive laws, utopias rely on a static conception of human nature that can be the subject of a pre-defined social order without any likely deviations from social norms that would require legal adjudication (Aviles 2003, 136; Herman 2016). This reading of utopia has long been problematized and utopianism has over the centuries changed in important ways (van der Walt 2014). First, the

Responding to Failure 119 human rights movement—which later included the disability rights movement—­ connected utopian thought with legal action in the form of the universal declaration of human rights (Moyn 2012, 1). Together with broader shifts away from monarchies to representative democracies anchored in a constitution and constitutional court, this connection helps explain the important role of transformative law for (disability) activism. Second, critical theorists, as discussed earlier, developed a broader understanding of utopia that foregrounds utopia’s provisionality and ambiguity. Taking up this reading of utopia, we can interpret tenBroek as contributing to the debates on the link between utopia and law, while introducing a unique focus on disability. The Right to Live in the World formulates a transformative legal utopianism that is sensitive to the here and now without reducing the vision of a better world to the status quo. Although tenBroek seeks to present his integrationist argument as arising from the policy implemented in the past, his vision of an inclusive society clearly goes beyond that. The right to live in the world entails at the minimum a right of free and equal access to means of transportation, accommodation, and communication. It also entails a right not to participate in the world, i.e. to privacy (tenBroek 1966, 918). Even today these demands can be seen as utopian when contrasted with the barriers that disabled people continue to encounter in each of these areas. In other words, tenBroek acknowledges the provisional nature of his utopian approach and avoids an abstract, rigid conception of a perfect society by connecting his utopian thought with past and present understandings of social policy. The suggested integrationist vision is also ambiguous. It is marred by the limits of the social model, which has been criticized for separating impairment and disability and assuming that only disability is a socially constructed concept, i.e. physical and social barriers and stigma disable people with physical impairments. This fails to account for the fact that impairment, too, is not a neutral category and is often used as a way to stigmatize non-dominant minorities. The vision finally reproduces the limits of rehabilitation programmes. Even though tenBroek specifically links his account to a broader civil rights agenda and the idea of active citizens, his focus remains on the goal of increasing participation rather than on challenging the terms of exclusion in the first place. Disability Legal Activism and Failure The reconstruction points to the important role played by the utopian impulse in the theoretical underpinnings of the ADA. With the link between the ADA and utopia in place, I conclude by returning to the topic of failure. I sketch how the points on utopia help us refine the arguments by disability advocates in a way that accommodates failure within the utopian endeavour and avoids resigned fatalism and unquestioning hope. The first response within the backlash narrative usefully asserts that perceived failure could act as a motivation to re-evaluate the concentration of resources and

120  Gisli Vogler attention on specific projects. Wald (2000) for instance suggested that a greater focus is needed on mobilization and creating a debate around disability rights. But his argument lacks a reflection on the underlying assumptions about what constitutes failure. Without it, activists are unable to say with any certainty that a re-direction of resources and energy was successful or the right decision. The disability movement is at risk of an endless cycle of changing tactics whenever and wherever its utopian projects encounter setbacks. This is because, while significant concrete failure should lead to a critical engagement with what has and hasn’t worked and whether to change the focus, inevitable failure only reminds us of the provisionality and ambiguity of our projects. The question therefore is: has legal activism failed in ways that are to be expected of an effort to imagine an alternative, better world? The second response within the backlash narrative—a defiant form of activism that laments society’s inability to understand the benefits of the ADA— helps energize activism by encouraging a hopeful belief in the capacity of the movement to overcome (any) setbacks. It fruitfully uses failure to re-invigorate resistance and avoid fatalism. Without a differentiation of concrete and inevitable failure, though, the approach succumbs to unquestioning hope. Such hope is problematic because it does not allow activists to learn from past failures and losses and therefore makes resistance unable or unwilling to improve its visions of the future. This then makes it even more likely that activism is disappointed as utopian aspirations clash with reality. Worse still, activists are simultaneously robbed of the tools to separate out and address avoidable forms of failure. Resigned fatalism is likely the ultimate outcome. The point here is not to deny the benefit of energizing activism and a sense of “now more than ever”, but to enable it to combine this motivating force with a recognition of both the provisionality of the utopian project and the need to address mistakes made in the process of envisioning and enacting positive social change. The third response within the backlash narrative offers a valuable counterpoint to the defiant position (Burkhauser 2000). Yet, the proponents’ insistence that activists take backlash into account potentially goes against the very idea of transformative political action, including legislation, risking curtailing the utopian impulse only because backlash is inevitable. Thus, it may help legitimate efforts by elites to conserve the status quo and engender a public backlash against proposals for social change. Similarly, the argument that backlash is a sign that we must be more sensitive to what kind of transformative action is possible at present—for example, by ensuring that “the process of normative change” has proceeded to such an extent that “the new law will receive adequate support” (Krieger 2003a, 382)—risks ignoring the fact that transformative law is about envisioning and enacting the not-yet. Social change always transforms the horizon of expectation and understanding in society and thus what may have seemed impossible one day can become plausible or even matter of fact the next day. Lastly, to assert the inevitability of the backlash, given the ambiguity of the ADA

Responding to Failure 121 statutes and the lack of public awareness-raising prior to the implementation of the ADA, is potentially to obscure the transformation within society that has produced this specific backlash. We are at risk of underestimating that the “is” of politics, e.g. the increased polarization of US society over the last decades, is part of the problem and not just the “ought”. In short, without the necessary differentiation of what kind of failure we are talking about, the third response risks unduly favouring the present and the seemingly possible. To avoid these tendencies, activists must be able to distinguish between a general mechanism of backlash to change and the historical manifestation of backlash to the ADA. An acknowledgement that the former is inevitable could help normalize it. In contrast, greater sensitivity to how the actions prior to the passing of the legislation facilitated the backlash, especially the limited effort to raise awareness of what the ADA meant for citizens, could have helped develop suitable counterstrategies. For an evaluation of the second narrative, I focus on Samuel Bagenstos’ (2009) Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement. The book reflects on how tensions within disability activism facilitated the limited interpretation of the ADA by judges and how this recognition should encourage further action towards overcoming these tensions. The critical reflection speaks directly to the provisional and ambiguous character of utopian thought and action. Bagenstos also suitably acknowledges at the end of the book that “there is probably no way to avoid the contradictions of the disability rights movement—and perhaps little reason for the movement even to try”. Instead, he suggests that what the movement can and should do “is seek to manage those contradictions and keep focused on the ultimate goals” (Bagenstos 2009, 149–50). The book calls this the “pragmatic spirit” of the movement. The discussion of utopia and failure in this chapter shows that this pragmatic spirit is also a utopian spirit and ideally involves an extensive discussion about the relationship between failure and utopia and the distinction between concrete and inevitable failure surrounding the ADA. Only then does the pragmatic, utopian spirit enable activists to face up to the contradictions and shortcomings within the movement, while resolutely rejecting the idea that such shortcomings legitimate the reductive approach to ADA taken by courts or public commentators. Put concretely, a spirit combining pragmatism and utopianism allows activists to reflect on how conservatives tapped into tendencies within the disability rights movement that are open to conservative interpretation, as highlighted by Bagenstos, while insisting that the movement’s ultimate goals—not just of getting disabled people into jobs but the radical endeavour to re-imagine their lives—are incommensurate with conservative views on self-reliance and limited state welfare. Conclusion This chapter contributed to debates about the productive role of failure in resistance movements by foregrounding the neglected perspectives of disability

122  Gisli Vogler scholar-activists. I revealed the range of responses that emerged in the aftermath of a narrow interpretation of the milestone legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and how disability advocates viewed failure as a positive catalyst to assess and re-energize activism. The chapter also problematized advocates’ underlying assumptions about the failure of transformative, utopian projects. I  drew on utopian scholarship that has developed a different way of thinking about utopia, highlighting the provisional and ambiguous nature of endeavours to imagine a different, better world. Attentiveness to this ambiguity allows activists to distinguish the inevitable failure that comes with the utopian impulse from the concrete failures and mistakes made in efforts to enact a better future. To avoid falling for unquestioning optimism about resistance or resigned fatalism at its inevitable setbacks, resistance, and activism must acknowledge the inevitable failure of its utopian impulse and separate it from concrete failings that could or should have been avoided. Note 1 The model directs attention to how society creates barriers that prevent disabled people’s full participation in society. It advocates removing the social barriers to enable full integration of disabled people as equal members of society. The model has been criticized for overemphasizing the social dimension to disability and the society’s ability to remove these barriers.

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9 Beside(s) Hope A Thought Experiment on (Black) Life, Death, and Literary Puncturing Joseph Winters Introduction In a conversation between Angela Davis and CBS correspondent Lillia Luciano about Davis’s life-long commitment to radical activism, Davis proclaims, “No change is possible without hope . . . no movement is possible without hope”.1 Alluding specifically to the urgency of building a world that would not require “persistent interventions of police and imprisonment”, Davis attests to the inseparability of hope and the possibility of change, kinetic motion, and transformation. While hope is not sufficient and might not lead to the kind of change that abolitionists desire, there will certainly be no positive change (towards freedom, racial justice, socio-economic equity) without collective desires and aspirations for a more promising future (and belief that this future is possible and viable in part because this belief is actualized in practices and struggles). Davis’s call for the indispensability of hope, especially to an abolition project, would seem to go against the arguments made by authors associated with Afro-pessimism, Black nihilism, and so forth. According to Calvin Warren, for instance, political hope, or hope that is directed towards political ends and goals, relies on the perpetuation of Black suffering. He claims that “the logic of the Political—linear temporality, biopolitical futurity, perfection, betterment, redress—sustains black suffering” (Warren 2015, 218). The structures of the political and the grammar of progress cannot redress, but can only reproduce, the “metaphysical structures that pulverize black being” (218). And while this sounds bleak, Warren is not against hope per se but against a certain conception of hope or an unquestioned set of assumptions about the content and destination of hope. Taking seriously both Davis’s commitment to prison abolition and Warren’s displacement of Political hope, this essay questions whether hope, or a prevailing understanding of this mode of expectation and inspiration for action, is the proper response to a world that is organized by relentless violence, Statesanctioned death, and ecological devastation. Similarly, I question whether we have interrogated the ways in which repeated appeals to be hopeful sustain and affirm the order and disorder of things. To pursue this line of thought I offer a DOI: 10.4324/9781003356271-13

126  Joseph Winters counter-intuitive reading of authors associated with Black pessimism (Warren, Sexton, Wilderson, and Douglass) showing how pessimism dislodges a particular kind of hopefulness, one that is never too far from an attachment to redemption. In the place of hope is a something like a clearing that permits the indeterminate, the undecidable, an openness to that which cannot yet be articulated, and the speculative. I conclude this experiment by turning to the work of Denise da Silva and Octavia Butler, authors within a Black feminist tradition that underscore the importance of re-imagination and speculation within the proverbial hold or abyss, a re-imagination that does not deny the insights of the pessimist but supplements them and moves them in slightly different direction. Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Life Lived in Death At the beginning of “Black Nihilism and Political Hope”, Warren identifies a similarity between Martin Luther King and President Obama regarding an enduring paradigm of redemption that demands the sacrifice of Black people. Citing the former’s “American Dream” sermon, where King endorses a general willingness to embrace suffering with love against white supremacist terror, Warren contends that Black suffering becomes the vector through which the dream might be actualized. As he puts it, “Black sacrifice is necessary to achieve [and perhaps transform] the American dream and its promise of coherence, progress, and equality” (217). The point here is not just that the attachment to Americanstyle progress conceals or disavows persistent forms of brutalization that asymmetrically target Black people. The more acute point that Warren is making is that the dream and fantasy of progress, as a path towards ontological coherence, requires “corporeal fracture” in a “political arithmetic saturated with violence” (217). This is a fracture that Black people under the regime of racial capitalism have had to embody or take on involuntarily. The redemptive logic extolled in King’s speech is repeated (eternally) according to Warren when Obama responds to the acquittal of George Zimmerman by assuring the body politic that each generation is improving and becoming more perfectible on racial matters. In this instance, the path to perfection, and the very idea of US perfectibility, is predicated on Black death, specifically the death of Trayvon Martin, who was walking aimlessly and up to no good. This death, in other words, becomes an occasion to embolden expectations for a future democracy where not yet actualized ideals will be manifested and perpetually expanded. In this juxtaposition of King and Obama, Warren refuses a specific conception of hope that is tantamount to a striving for Political redemption. Not unlike Lee Edelman (2004), for whom futurity and the concomitant attachment to form will always justify the suppression of the queer figure designated to take on the death drive, Warren maintains that there is an antagonistic relationship between the domain of the Political (betterment, futurity, and rectification) and those forced to give form to the terror of Blackness (Warren 2018, 5). More precisely, the promise of ontological

Beside(s) Hope 127 coherence, of becoming a full being, denies the void at the heart of being, a void of terror that Black people have been called to give shape and form to, a calling that, to bring together Althusser and Heidegger, is something like an interpellation towards death (Althusser 2001, 118; Heidegger 1962, 304–11). But of course Political hope, hope in the Political, or hope as redemption from and of anti-Blackness through political arrangements and infrastructures, does not exhaust the conception of hope. Warren broaches this non-equivalence when he makes a distinction between spiritual and Political hope. He writes, To speak of the ‘Politics of Hope’ is to denaturalize or demystify a certain usage of hope . . . If we think of hope as a spiritual concept—a concept that always escapes confinement within scientific discourse—then we can suggest that hope constitutes a ‘spiritual currency’ that we are given as inheritance to invest in various aspects of existence. The issue, however, is that there is often a compulsory investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. (Warren 2015, 218–19) I take it that Warren’s notion of the spiritual operates as a placeholder for investments, energies, and modes of endurance that cannot be subsumed under the protocols of science and empiricism. Warren is after the Kantian noumena, the unknowable, but without the endeavour to trap the unknowable within the domain of science, demonstrability, instrumentality, etc. He is therefore interested in extricating hope from the demand to hitch these spiritual energies onto the domain of politics for the sake of intelligibility. As Warren puts it, “the politics of hope posits that one must have a politics to have hope; politics is the natural habitat of hope itself” (219). Consequently, Warren’s Black nihilist stance is not against hope per se but rejects “circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing, practicing, and conceiving of hope” (219). It rejects the notion, for instance, that one has to express faith in (liberal) democracy, elections, the State, and human progress in order to circumvent despair.2 One might respond to Warren by claiming that he conflates the Political with all political strategies and possibilities, or that he delimits political struggle to its paradigmatic and structural features, especially those features that define Statecentred politics and projects of reform that measure success by the impact on law and policy. While there is something to this concern, I want to stay with a particular intervention by the Black nihilist, one that refuses the compulsory nature of Political hope while opening up space to imagine and practice hope in a manner that will appear unintelligible and non-sensical to the regime of Political hope, a regime that measures our desires and pursuits according to their utility, efficacy, and the capacity to preserve the general order of things (or the commitment to order itself). For Warren, political hope assumes that anti-Black violence can be sutured within and through the very domain that needs to pulverize and get rid of the nothing, the void that subtends being. Even though this is an impossible task,

128  Joseph Winters the fantasy of stomping the void out can be maintained by disproportionately directing violence towards those who have been designated as embodiments of the nothing. For Warren, this does not mean that there is nothing that can be done or that we have to accept the ontological and axiological parameters of the human to determine Black worth and value. In fact, as suggested earlier, the fundamental nature of anti-Blackness, which includes the positioning and outlining of the human being over and against Blackness, leads Warren to depart from the realm of (human) being/ontology altogether and embrace practices of the spirit (or practices that involve an openness to the invisible, the mysterious, and the miraculous). As Warren writes, “I would have to suggest that there are no solutions to the problem of anti-Blackness—there is only endurance. And endurance cannot be reduced to biofuturity or humanist mandates. Endurance is a spiritual practice with entirely different aims” (Warren 2018, 172). While he does not flesh out what this spiritual practice consists of, he does indicate that endurance involves going through the “valley of the shadow of death” (172). A reference to Psalm 23, this biblical citation suggests the need for practices and modes of sociality that stay with the lowly, the opaque, the dead and dying, and the death that shadows the reproduction of life. To think with Du Bois’s language, the Black nihilist’s endorsement of spiritual endurance as the only solution to anti-Black violence might be an unhopeful stance but not necessarily hopeless (Du Bois 1994, 128). To put it differently, if there is a space for hope, then this space will be carved out through an abandonment of those repositories of hope and confidence that are tethered to humanism, progress, and other anti-Black paradigms. And yet the language of Black spiritual endurance runs into problems and limitations according to an author like Patrice Douglass. In an otherwise sympathetic review of Warren’s fascinating text Ontological Terror, Douglass broaches a difference between Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism. While the afro-pessimist remains attached to the nothing that Blackness has come to stand in for, Douglass contends that Warren concludes his study with a desire to hold onto Blackness as some-thing, even if that indeterminate thing is aligned with “the soul, psyche, and spirit” (Douglass 2019, 396). For Douglass, Warren “announces that ontological terror is the destruction of something, rather than nothing, that is quite specific” (396). In other words, Warren wants to rescue something; he wants to preserve a spiritual legacy that has enabled Black people to remain in existence under severe duress and anguish. Here we might intervene and underscore that using the language of spirit to describe that which escapes the parameters of what can be conceptualized, measured, quantified, and pinned down is actually all too human and familiar. At the same time, the grammar of spirits and shadows might be the language that best approximates the condition of being forced to give form to the constitutive void, to the predicament of functioning as “equipment in human form” (Warren 2018, 6) while not being completely determined by that anti-Black function. While Douglass questions Warren’s turn from nothing to (spiritual) something, Jared Sexton worries about the conservative quality of endurance as a “solution”

Beside(s) Hope 129 to and prescription for Black suffering. In his contribution to a Syndicate roundtable discussion of Warren’s book, Sexton writes, “To endure means to remain in existence, of course, but it also means to suffer patiently, a subsidiary prescription that would seem orthogonal to the urgency . . . that animates [Warren’s] text” (Sexton 2021). In addition to the language of endurance, Sexton interrogates the way that Warren draws on Fanon’s call for the end of the world, an ontological revolution, that would destroy all life, including the very idea of worldness (Warren 2018, 171). In response to this apocalyptic musing, Sexton reminds us that human life is not all life and the world, such as it is, is not the earth. All of existence is finite, whether it is living or nonliving, human or nonhuman, but imagining it without Being does not require imagining it destroyed. It entails imagining it in and as the ruins of Being, after the end of the world, in an entirely other relation to the nothing from which it comes. (Sexton 2021) There is much to unpack in this formulation. For one, Sexton is drawing attention to a kind of slippage between, and tendency to conflate, human life and life as such, a conflation that puts some critics of human ontologies on a similar terrain as those who want to protect the throne of the human. It is a reminder that human life, depending on one’s genealogy, is a rather late emergence and that Man is a recent fabrication; they do not exhaust or encompass the multiple forms of life and becoming that human life is situated within. Similarly, the distinction between world and earth suggests that the commitment to the former, and its association with boundaries, limits, legible space, and human-making, is not equivalent to the earth, the terrain on which human and non-human worlds are constructed and interact. This slippage, this gap, this non-equivalence is not necessarily the occasion for hope (not for us anyway) but a rem(a)inder of what Maurice Merleu-Ponty calls “the inexhaustible” (2002, 255). I take it that what cannot be synthesized or possessed by the subject, the human, or being compels us to imagine existence in the apocalyptic ruins, to prepare for the ­un-­anticipatable, and to develop alternative ways of inhabiting the nothing from which existence derives. What is noteworthy is that Warren’s response to Sexton underscores a difference between Black nihilism and Afro-pessimism around the possibility of affirming Black care apart from the strictures of political ontology, a framework that delimits how we think about existence and Black people’s relationship to existence. According to Warren, the afro-pessimist “has subordinated all Black existence to political ontology” (Warren 2021) and therefore diminishes the forms of Black care that have enabled Black people to endure in the proverbial hold. Whereas the afro-pessimist eschews the prescriptive moment (because they accept the totality of an anti-Black ordering of things), the Black nihilist “would assert that there are resources not subordinate to anti-blackness . . . [that] have yet to be named or organized systemically” (Warren 2021). While there is much

130  Joseph Winters more that can be said here about the differences between Warren and Sexton, and the nihilist and the pessimist, I am interested in this shared sense of an indeterminate excess or a slight subtraction (expressed in the gap between world and earth, being and existence, human ontology, and Black endurance) that appears to only be approachable negatively or gestured towards without much positive predication. Along this line of flight, one wonders how Warren might think of Cedric Robinson’s descriptions of enslaved peoples who believed in the power to fly home; the Haitians in 1792 who, in the face of an impending French army, embraced their death in the anticipation of a return home; or how the communication with orishas and ancestors preserved the “collective being” of kidnapped Africans under a regime of social death (Robinson 2000, 168–70). For Robinson, even as the Western imperial construct of the Negro “suggested no situatedness in time, that is history, or space . . . , no civilization . . . , and finally no humanity that might command consideration” (81), the conversion of the African into cargo was accompanied by the transfer and transformation of “cosmologies and metaphysics, habits, and beliefs” (122) and the creation of modes of consciousness and interiority that prevented the enslaved from being reducible to merchandise, real estate, and what Du Bois calls “barter in human flesh” (Du Bois 1998, 11). While Warren claims that Black spiritual resources have not been named or delineated, Robinson would suggest otherwise. But let us stay with the slippage that connects the Black nihilist and the pessimist, a slipping or falling, that puts pressure on conventional and sedimented conceptions of hope and despair, and optimism and pessimism. This becomes clear in Sexton’s essay “Ante-Anti-Blackness” as he works through the thought of Fanon, Lewis Gordon, and Orlando Patterson to call for a difficult, and maybe even impossible, embrace of the pathology associated with Blackness. Responding to Gordon’s claim that “in our anti-black world, blacks [rather than mere signs or symbols] are pathology” (Gordon 2000, 88), Sexton broaches the possibility of living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. (Sexton 2012, 7) There is much in this formulation that demands care, attention, and elaboration. Here Sexton is not denying that Blacks participate in or create social life; yet through a re-reading of Orlando Patterson, he is claiming that social death (especially gratuitous violence, the violence necessary to sustain and reproduce social life) always accompanies, shadows, and remains latent within social existence. The affirmation of Blackness, as Sexton intimates, is a way to sidestep

Beside(s) Hope 131 traditional (and understandable) responses to the pathologizing of Blackness: such as cultivating more respectable representations and images of Black people or showing that pathology language turns a condition that is historical and political into an idiom linked to biology, nature, and disease. According to the second response, pathology-talk is part of the legacy of racism that reifies and essentializes certain qualities, attributes, and conditions of a group or constituency. I take it that Sexton understands this legacy very well and yet is willing to make the “counter-intuitive” (7) claim that Blackness should be welcomed as a kind of pathogen to the ordering of the world, without the eager attempt to incorporate Blackness into a framework that is legible, coherent, stabilizing, and life-affirming. Consequently, Sexton uses terms like “black social life and black social death”, “black social life against black social death”, or “black social life in/ as black social death” (7). Notice the significance of the conjunction and the preposition, a series of different relationships (and antagonisms) that prevent the reader from easily separating and opposing life and death, or optimism and pessimism. In other words, Sexton eschews the either/or logic between Black life and death and draws us towards a both/and framework and possibility (5). In accordance with this both/and proposition, Sexton writes, A living death is much a death as it is living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of the state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place . . . Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. (8) Here Sexton is not just making the convention “in but not of” claim when describing the relationship between Black life and world-making operations and mechanisms. He is gesturing towards a complicated interplay between life, death, and those coordinates of the human. On the one hand, Black life is always surrounded by and under regimes of latent and actual violence; Black life is shadowed by an accumulation of violence that has something to do with the ways in which culture, nationhood, sovereignty, and that which brings human coherence and legibility get defined over and against the Black, Black people, and Blackness. Obviously we are all shadowed by the omni-present threat of death, erasure, and non-being. I take it that Sexton is reflecting on the implications of a subject position that is positioned as synonymous with death, a being whose being human “raises the question of being human at all” (Sexton 2011, 6–7). Consequently, the life that Black people live is out of this world, on the move, in flight, lived on spaceships in Bankhead, or in the proverbial sewers, basements,

132  Joseph Winters and undergrounds as hip hop and rap have demonstrated. Black social life spells a kind of death or an undoing of a world that sustains order and optimal living by producing and disavowing the forms of death without which that world could not be or function. Black life enacts a form of living without diminishing the violence that life in this world participates in and without attempting to recuperate a sense of life and sociality that can be separable from ontological terror. Redemption and the End of (an Anti-Black) World There is much that Black nihilism and Afro-pessimism offer for reflection and consideration even as these authors present a problem for thought, gesturing towards the un-thought, the unassimilable, and the surplus that both escapes and catalyses the concept. And yet, like any discourse or paradigm of thought, there are fissures, gaps, and tensions that demand, in Adorno’s language, a “future exertion of thought” (Adorno 2005, 18). Perhaps one place to begin is in the slight distinction between Blackness and Black life, or Blackness and Black people, or Blackness and the position of the Black, a set of distinctions that Fred Moten has emphasized in his work (see for instance Moten 2008a, 1744). The very language of Blackness understandably raises concerns about essentialism, abstraction, and for some the reversal of cause and effect (such that anti-Blackness becomes a primal and primary cause rather than derivative of something more material and comprehensive, like capital or class antagonisms). While I register these concerns, I want to stay with the abstraction, the turn to the para-ontological, or the structural that always forms a dizzying interaction with history, temporality, and experience. Along these lines, I want to think of Blackness as an inexact word that strives to get at a fundamental void, but a void that is also an exuberant movement of energy, a de-forming tumult, or the dark matter that physicists say makes up a good chunk of the universe put can only be detected by its capacity to mess with visible matter. Blackness is akin to what Charles Long, Eduard Glissant, and Saidiya Hartman mean by opacity, or those qualities that subtract themselves from the will to transparency even as this striving for transparency and purity has been so devastating for those designated as embodiments of the opaque. Blackness ante-cedes form, structure, and law even as it catalyses these mechanisms of containment (Moten 2008b, 179–80). And even as Blackness cannot be quantified, measured, or converted into an intelligible object, it can be attached to various bodies and forms in order to manage and deflect the terror affixed to Blackness. And yet if Blackness can be fastened to different forms, bodies, and shapes, then Black people are not the only embodiments of the void that haunts ontology. There might be a stickiness between Blackness and Black people (especially under the regime of racial capitalism and in the afterlife of slavery) but certainly other peoples and subject positions have been placed with the burden of giving shape to the terror of the no-thing, the abyss, etc. In addition, even as the pessimist and nihilist direct attention to

Beside(s) Hope 133 the structural quality of anti-Blackness, it is just as important to underscore how different kinds of Black persons get mis/treated as more deserving of violence and less worthy of recognition, care, and attention. (Think of the relative silence around the deaths of Black trans persons, including sex workers, compared to those cis-gendered Black men and women who can more readily become the icons of Black life, death, and matter.) While these concerns and interventions are important, I want to linger with a general, and perhaps devastating, implication of embracing the non-­coordination between Blackness and the human world, the world of Man, the world that has taken shape through sedimented modes of exploitation and suppression. Perhaps the nihilist and the pessimist share a sense that any modicum of hope has to be extricated from the grammar of redemption, or the recuperation of worldmaking paradigms that rely on the normalization of death and erasure as well as a denial of the limits of social legibility and inclusion. Here is where Frank Wilderson’s description of Afro-pessimism is more than fitting. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism is a “critique without redemption or a vision of redress except for ‘the end of the world’ ” (Wilderson 2020, 174). For Wilderson, the logic of redemption assumes a linear trajectory—an initial (collective) plenitude, a subsequent loss, and the pursuit of restoration. Crucially for the ­afro-pessimist, there is no prior moment of plenitude for the slave insofar as the Black comes into being through and as violence, as a loss that cannot be described or made determinate. There is a loss of a loss that evades the politics of mourning. The structure of redemption, as Wilderson describes, provides the horizon for coherence, a coherence that is parasitic on anti-Blackness or the barring of the Black from the sphere of the human. The human, in other words, is not simply an organic figure but rather is fabricated, in myriad and patterned ways, in opposition to and against certain qualities and traits (death, the animal, the nonrational, non-sovereignty, incoherence, and disorder) that have been hurled onto Blackened subjects. Consequently, any attempt to restore the prevailing idea of the human, to treat that as the horizon of struggle and striving, will r­ e-introduce and intensify Black anguish. By identifying the structural and constitutive constraints to liberation, to what and who can be recognized as a liberated and full human subject, Wilderson makes an implicit shift from the language of redemption to that of rupture, upheaval, and the apocalyptic. Instead of liberation being a denouement, a conclusion, or the fulfilment of a progressive telos, it will involve something like a Benjaminian break with the continuum of history (Benjamin 1969, 261). Along these lines, Wilderson does not claim, as some critics of Afro-­pessimism lament, that there is nothing that can be done because anti-Blackness is permanent and immutable. He writes, for instance, I am not suggesting that Black people should resign themselves to the inevitability of social death . . . [since] it is constructed by the violence and

134  Joseph Winters imagination of other sentient beings. Thus, like class and gender, which are also constructs, not divine designations, social death can be destroyed. (Wilderson 2020, 103) Here Wilderson suggests that social death, or the positioning of the Black as the target of gratuitous violence for the sake of human renewal and preservation, is a political ontology; it has been constructed, reproduced, and secured according to various interests, pursuits, and projects. Even as it exists across time and has become part of the warp and woof of the world, it can be destroyed. But notice that the emphasis here is on destruction without an accompanying vision of what a world/earth without anti-Blackness would look like. There is a similar refusal to put forth a prescriptive and constructive proposal for struggle, one that would furnish norms, distinctions, goods, and the requisite practices for endeavours to eliminate anti-Black racism, unbalanced State violence against Black people, or the fungibility of the Black image (which includes the circulation of spectacularized Black death as part of a national ritual and liturgy of healing and reconciliation). Even though Wilderson does not provide a prescription or an alternative vision of the world, he does indicate that “the first step toward destruction is to assume one’s position (assume, not celebrate or disavow), and then burn the ship or the plantation, in its past and present incarnations, from the inside out” (Wilderson 2020, 103). This assumption becomes something like an “embrace of incoherence”, an im/possible taking on of the disorder that accompanies revolutionary desire (250). To put it differently, the ethical and political response to social death would involve, instead of endeavours to expand the sphere of coherence and wholeness, an openness to the incoherence that Blackness signifies under the regime of the Human.3 This might be an impossible task but one that is worthy of taking up. Black Feminist Poethical Speculations And yet one wonders if the destructive desire, the striving for the end of the world, is easily separated from the capacity to re-imagine, to invent, to follow trajectories of thought and desire within the space made available by questions and critical interrogations that cannot be resolved for the time being. To put it differently, if the unwillingness to provide a particular kind of constructive proposal is one way to stay with the incoherence, to stay in the conjunction between Black life and death, then this does not mean that this space of indeterminacy has not always been one that incites imagination, poetics, speculation, dys(u)topian musings, intimacy through cuts and wounds, and communication with the dead and dying. Here we might take a turn to think of the work of authors like Denise da Silva and Octavia Butler, thinkers who have had a significant impact on Black studies, Black feminism, and discussions about the post and trans-human. In da Silva’s work, for instance, the global quality of raciality exists within a fabricated

Beside(s) Hope 135 and projected opposition between the transparent I and the affectable object, or the self-determining and autonomous European subject and the non-European object that can only be governed from outside (Da Silva 2007, xxxviii). For the Brazilian philosopher and theorist, racial subjection cannot be separated from modern schemas of representation and engulfment (typified in authors like Descartes, Kant, and Hegel) that position the transparent I “in a contention with others that both institute and threaten its ontological imperative” (Da Silva 2007, 4). What is crucial for da Silva is that the racial necessarily institutes the transparent I and its others as unstable subjects; therefore it announces (the possibility of) . . . accounts that do not reproduce the regions of transparency and the regions of affectability that compose the contemporary global configuration. (33) The antagonism between the self-governing subject and the externally ruled other is unstable and therefore does not always re-enact the usual planetary script; rather this instability leads to divergences, failures, system jams, and something like the unproductive within the framework of global racial configurations. Denise da Silva reminds us that racial subjection is tethered to “a certain kind of thinking” which governs and contributes to the sedimentation of a “certain kind of world” (Da Silva 2014, 85–86). This prevailing mode of thinking and world-making is organized around a general will to transparency, which is betrayed by our devotion to the following pre-conditions of knowledge, truth, and relation—separability, determinacy, and sequentiality (Da Silva 2020, 43). The criteria of separability is similar to what Bataille calls discontinuity (Bataille 1989, 34), or the tendency to turn distinctions into qualitative differences, vertical disparities, subjects and objects, and the general treatment of others as tools and instruments for various projects. The rule of determinacy requires and emboldens the construction of boundaries, the protection of borders and partitions, and the regulation of that which threatens to overflow and unsettle. Finally, sequentiality is what propels the regime of linear time, progress, or the time of the sovereign. It presumes that time can only move in one direction and that the past is separable from the present (even if the past can be invoked to inspire, incite, and haunt). I take it that da Silva endeavours to get at the epistemic assumptions and foundations that organize and propel enduring ways of carving up, ordering, and governing the planet, operations of engulfment that have been devastating, especially for the global South, the impoverished, non-human life, etc. But da Silva also underscores that part of the efficacy of the racial/colonial paradigm is its ability to, in Zakiyyah Jackson’s terms, “foreclose [alternative] modes of being/ feeling/knowing” (Jackson 2018, 619). For da Silva, one of these alternative modes is what she calls “black feminist po-ethics”, a portmanteau that brings together poetics and ethics and draws connections between imagination and

136  Joseph Winters creativity and less pernicious modes of relationality and co-existence (Da Silva 2014). One author that da Silva locates and thinks with within this Black feminist poethical tradition (where imagination and care meet) is the speculative fiction novelist Octavia Butler. One text that da Silva draws from is Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred. In this time-travel narrative, the main character, Dana, travels back to an ante-bellum plantation to save the life of Rufus, her “white, patriarchal, slave-owning ancestor” (Donaldson 2014, 94). The novel goes back and forth between the present and the past, in a manner that blurs the temporal distinction and suggests that the present and future might be dizzying repetition of the past. In addition, because Dana saves the character Rufus repeatedly and must care for him (in order to secure her future) despite his terrifying practices towards the enslaved, the reader must confront a monstrous kinship, a wounded entanglement that exists across generations and that cannot be explained away by progress. For da Silva, this allows Butler to depart from the rule of efficient causality, a rule that continues to govern descriptions of the relationship between primitive accumulation and the production of surplus value (such that the former becomes separable from and merely prior to the latter). In other words, Butler is after a meta-conception of temporality and causality that would, among other things, enable us to “appreciate how slave labor and native lands live in capital” (Da Silva 2014, 93), how coloniality is essential to the accumulation of capital. Along this line, we might think of Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower as doing something similar regarding space and geography. The novel begins with the main character Lauren Olamina and her family residing in a gated community that is supposed to protect and separate life from the chaos of the outside—­ poverty, homelessness, violence, arson—disorder that exists under the regime of “neoliberal instrumental denigration of the planet” (Zamalin 2019, 131). In one of Lauren’s diary entries, she writes, “Crazy to live without a wall to protect you. Even in Robledo, most of the street poor—squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general—are dangerous. They’re desperate or crazy or both. That’s enough to make anyone dangerous” (Butler 1993, 10). Here a kind of madness is associated with not having a wall, even as desperation can make anyone dangerous, any space treacherous. In the opening chapters of Parable, this sense of communal and self-protection gets undermined right away. We know the characters need to leave their community to search for scarce resources; some are even attracted to the danger associated with the outside (such as Lauren’s brother); a young girl is killed by a stray bullet that pierces through a metal gate; people from the outside eventually invade and ransack this gated community in Robledo causing Lauren and others to wander and survive on the outside. The wall betrays a permeability, an exposure to the wild exterior, that it is supposed to defend against. What is interesting is that Lauren links the need for protection with a certain picture of God. She writes, “A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person” (Butler 1993, 15). This leads Lauren to ponder whether “god” is

Beside(s) Hope 137 a signifier for what makes one feel “special and protected” (15). In other words, god is an extension of the desire to make, sediment, and police borders for the sake of protection and security. Of course, Butler gestures towards another understanding of the divine and the sacred through Lauren’s creation of Earthseed. According to Lauren’s “books of the living”, God is re-described as perpetual change and movement. In fact, “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you” (3). Instead of patterning life and existence after a sovereign, self-sufficient subject that is defined over against affectability and permeability, Lauren underscores touching and being touched, the reversibility of moving and being moved. And yet in light of Lauren’s hyperempathy, her capacity/burden of feeling other people’s pain, this religion of touch, change, and mutual bending is replete with suffering and anguish. And although she and her wandering community of survivors create a community based on Earthseed principles, the need to preserve this community in the face of religious violence and enslavement means that Earthseed must latch onto “the profitmaking enterprise” as well as the project of space colonization. This preservation strategy results in a narrowing of the earlier political/ethical vision in order to keep recruiting followers and resources (Zamalin 2019, 131). The point here is not just that success is incompatible with radicality. It could be that the necessary attachment to form, preservation, and futurity requires strategies of protection, strategies that will mark something as dangerous and threatening, something that needs to be contained, sequestered, or assimilated. This might sound like I am concluding on a cynical note. Well yes and no. I am simply riffing on the only note I can play. This is one that remains open to the indeterminate, the conjunction between life and death, while acknowledging that our capacity to imagine different worlds and modes of relation within that space must be accompanied by an anticipatory mourning, a preparation for failure even as that failure re-expresses the wound that is our world, our intimacy, our alienation, and our perhaps only hope. Notes 1 www.cbsnews.com/news/angela-davis-on-social-change-no-movement-is-possiblewithout-hope/. 2 Of course, there are different ways to think about despair and its political implications. See for instance Robyn Marasco, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Also see Jared Loggins, “Who Decides What We Do With Our Despair,” American Political Thought 11, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 125–40. 3 I am thankful to my conversations with Andrew Kaplan on these matters.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Minima Moralia. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 2001. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.

138  Joseph Winters Bataille, Georges. 1989. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. New York: Doubleday. Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Da Silva, Denise. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Da Silva, Denise. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer): 81–97. Da Silva, Denise. 2020. “Reading the Dead: A Feminist Black Critique of Global Capital.” In Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, edited by Tiffany King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, 38–51. Durham: Duke University Press. Donaldson, Eileen. 2014. “A Contested Freedom: The Fragile Future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” English Academy Review 31 (2): 94–107. Douglass, Patrice. 2019. “Review of Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation.” The Comparativist 43 (October): 394–96. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press. Edelman, L. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Gordon, Lewis. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existentialist Thought. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Jackson, Zakiyyah. 2018. “ ‘Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July): 617–48. Merleu-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge. Moten, Fred. 2008a. “Black Op.” PLMA 123, no. 5 (October): 1743–47. Moten, Fred. 2008b. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50, no. 2 (Spring): 177–218. Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. Sexton, Jared. 2011. “The Social Life of Social Death.” Intensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 1–47. Sexton, Jared. 2012. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” Lateral 1, no. 1 (May): 1–14. Sexton, Jared. 2021. “Response.” Syndicate, January 6, 2021. https://syndicate.network/ symposia/theology/ontological-terror/. Warren, Calvin. 2015. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (Spring): 215–48. Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press. Warren, Calvin. 2021. “Nihilistic Care (or Residing in the Slippage): Some Divergences between Afro-Pessimism and Black Nihilism.” Syndicate, January 6, 2021. https://­ syndicate.network/symposia/theology/ontological-terror/. Wilderson, Frank. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright. Zamalin, Alexander. 2019. Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Index

Abernathy, Ralph 44 ableism 67 Abram, David 96, 100 – 102, 106 abstract 4, 12, 40, 97, 119 abstraction 4, 27, 45, 101, 132 ACT UP: AIDS activism 6, 71, 79 – 80, 84, 87 – 88; despair as forbidden 84 – 87; feeling despair 81 – 82; feeling hopeless 83 – 84; motivation of 79; political despair 79 – 81, 87, 89 – 90; political efficacy 80, 82 action: collective 3, 20, 25, 27, 30, 32, 41, 43 – 44, 84; political (see political action); radical 3, 13, 21 – 23, 32, 35, 68, 100, 114; revolutionary 2 – 3, 26, 29 – 32, 42 actionism 13 – 14, 19 activism: digital 13; disability 112, 114, 117, 119, 121; regenerative 97, 103 – 104, 106; resistance and 29, 39; spiritual 31, 97; street 81 – 83; see also ACT UP Adorno, Theodor W. 13, 70, 116, 132 affect: negative 6, 63, 65 – 66, 68 – 70, 73, 75, 89; positive 65 – 66, 68 – 69 affective: landscape 1, 63 – 64, 80; politics 63 – 64; vocabulary 40 African narratives 49 African Studies Association 58 Afropessimism 7, 46, 125, 128 – 129, 131 – 133 agency: human 14; melancholic 6, 63, 70 – 75; political 16, 21, 65, 67, 70 – 72 agitation 19, 21 Ahmed, Sara 73

AIDS: activism 83 – 84, 88; AZT treatment 80; deaths 80 – 82, 86, 88 – 89; HIV 65, 83, 85 Albano, Caterina 96 Alberto, Eliseo (Caracol Beach) 51 alienation 51 – 53, 57 – 58, 87, 137 allyship 26 – 27 Althusser, Louis 127 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 58 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 6, 111, 113, 122; disability activism 117, 119; embracing contingency 115; learning from failure 112 anger: feelings of 82, 84 – 86; politics of 69; as unifying 87 antiracism 6, 41, 43, 69 anxiety 95 Arab Spring 4 Asia 58 authoritarianism 29, 40, 49, 63, 68, 91 Bagenstos, Samuel: Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement 121 Banzhaf, Marion 81 Barr, David 84 Bataille, Georges 135 Bauer, Otto 21 Benjamin, Walter 70, 72, 116, 133; New Objectivity 68 Bensaïd, Daniel 70 Berardi, Franco 95 Berger, John 21 Berlant, Lauren 68 Biden, Joe 91

140 Index Big Data 99 Black Lives Matter 34, 39, 45, 50 Black nihilist 127 – 130 Black Panther Party 44 Black Revolutionary: thought 39, 41, 43, 46; tradition 39, 41, 46 – 47 black utopia 73 Blackness 126, 128, 130 – 132 Bloch, Ernst 116 Bolivia 54, 57 Bordowitz, Gregg: Fast Trip, Long Drop (film) 85 Braidotti, Rosi 67 breathing: awareness 101; philosophy of 97, 103; respiration 95, 101 breathlessness 4, 95 – 97, 99, 102, 104 – 106 brown, adrienne maree 103 – 104 Brown, Norman O. 96, 101 – 102 Brown, Wendy 65, 68, 70, 72 Butler, Judith 71, 73 Butler, Octavia 7, 126, 134, 136 – 137; Parable of the Sower 136 capitalist realism 71 Carlomusto, Jean 81 Casanova, Pascale 58 Castro, Fidel 52 Cheng, Anne Anlin 72 civil rights 113, 119 Civil Rights Act 1964 112 Civil Rights Movement 40, 44 climate crisis 11, 16, 18, 63, 66, 91, 104 Cold War 49 – 50, 52 – 54, 58, 70 Combahee River Collective 45, 106 communism 4, 26 comparative studies 49, 52, 57 complacency 1, 16 – 18, 20, 40 comrades/comradeship 26 – 28, 82, 84 – 85 COVID-19 91, 95 Crimp, Douglas 71, 83 – 84 critical theory 65, 96 critique: affirmative 66, 69; of biopower 98 – 99; critique of 65 – 67; post-colonial 96 – 97 Cuba 50, 52 – 53 da Silva, Denise 7, 126, 134 – 136 Dakota Access Pipeline Protests 39, 45 danger: political disillusion 12, 14 – 16, 21; of unquestioning hope 112, 117

Davis, Angela 46, 125 Day, Richard F. 11 Dean, Jodi 25 – 29, 34 Dean, Jonathan 28, 64 Decolonise Oakland 35 decolonization 6, 49 – 50, 52 defeatism 12, 20, 22, 25 Delany, Martin 42 – 43 democracy: socialist 31; troubles of 4, 6, 63 Democratic Republic of the Congo 54 – 55, 57 Derrida, Jacques 49, 57 despair: feelings of 6, 83 – 84, 87 – 88; grief and 82, 84, 86; prevalence 88, 90 desperation 88, 136 disability: activism 6, 111 – 112, 114, 117 – 119, 121; rights 111 – 115, 119, 121 disappointment: expression of 34 – 35, 51; past 2 – 3, 12; sense of 5, 13, 39, 55, 111 disillusionment: memorial 54 – 55, 57 – 58; political 2 – 3, 11 – 13 Douglass, Patrice 128 drugs 12, 80, 88 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) 128, 130 Ebert, Friedrich 15 economic: collapse 91; imperialism 11; inequality 31, 34, 43 economism 17, 19, 21 – 22 Edelman, Lee 126 Edwards, Jeff 82 Eggan, Ferd 80, 86 emancipation: human 2, 13, 15; possibility 14, 18, 22, 95, 101 Eng, David 72 Epstein, Steven 88 equality 4, 27 – 28, 34, 41, 63, 72, 113, 126 expectations 26, 39, 57, 114, 126 extremists 66 Failler, Angela 72, 75n2 failure: forms/types of 7, 25, 112, 116 – 117, 119 – 121; past 3, 13, 120; promotes engagement 5; reality of 5, 16, 42, 116 faith: misguided 1, 40, 43, 84, 89; political concept of 5, 17 – 18, 21 – 22

Index  141 Fanon, Franz 129 – 130 Farrell, Kevin 86 fatalism: forms of 12, 15 – 16, 20; political 11, 15; problem of 12 – 13, 15, 18; secular 13 Feel Tank Chicago 90 feminist: black 45, 134 – 135; perspective 28, 67, 69 – 70, 73; politics 4 Fight for $15 39 Fisher, Mark 71 Flatley, Jonathan 70 Floyd, George 95 Fortune, T. Thomas 43 Foucault, Michel 98 – 99, 116 freedom: of choice 25, 32 – 34; concepts of 39, 41, 72; denied 42 – 43, 45, 91; struggles for 1 – 4, 47 Freud, Sigmund 99 García Márquez, Gabriel 51 – 52, 57 Garner, Eric 95 German Communist Party 15 Gilroy, Paul 72 Glissant, Eduard 132 Global North 58 Global South 29, 49 – 52, 54, 57 – 58, 135 God 20, 137 Gordon, Lewis 130 Gramsci, Antonio 5; disillusion politics 12; faith, political concept of 17 – 20; on fatalism 11, 14, 22; optimism/ pessimism 69, 89 grief 71 – 72, 81 – 85, 88 – 89, 96 Guerra, Wendy 5, 50 – 52, 54, 57 – 58; Todos se van (Everyone Leaves) 50 – 52, 54, 57 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 52 – 53 Halbwachs, Maurice 50 Hall, Stuart 64 Han, Byung-Chul 95 – 96, 99 – 100 Haraway, Donna 68, 74 Hardt, Michael 35 Hartman, Saidiya 75, 95, 132 Harvey, David 65 Hatzky, Christine 52 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 105 Heidegger, Martin 127 Heumann, Judith 115 historicity 2, 70

hope: concept of 40 – 42, 46 – 47, 125 – 127, 130; egalitarian 31, 39; forms of 43, 55, 126 – 127 hopelessness 14, 41, 63, 70, 79, 81, 83, 88 – 89 Hudis, Peter 33 ideology 12, 54, 91 imagination: political 3, 88; of possibilities 2 – 3, 18, 116, 134, 136 inequality 11, 31, 34 – 36, 43, 46, 69, 91 inequity 95 insurrection 14, 19, 21, 44, 95 – 96 intellectuals 12, 16 – 17, 19, 21, 23, 32 Iraqi War 39, 90 Irigaray, Luce 10 – 102, 96, 105 Italian Communist Party 12, 18 Jackson, Zakiyyah 135 Jagger, Alison 85 James, Cyril Lionel Robert (C.L.R.) 70 judgementalism 67 – 68 justice 4, 33, 42 – 46, 97, 114 Kazanjian, David 72 King, Martin Luther 44, 126 Kinna, Ruth 35 – 36 Kostopoulos, Mark 80, 86 Kracher, Jeanne 81 Latin America: disappointments 55; solidarity 5, 13, 49 Latour, Bruno 66 Laxar, Hillary 34 Lear, Jonathan 40 left-wing radicalism 13, 38, 70 Lenin, Vladimir 5, 29, 32 lesbian and gay communities 73, 84, 88 – 89 Lewis, Oscar: Los hijos de Sánchez (The Children of Sánchez) 55 – 57 LGBT community 81 Long, Charles 132 loss: past failures and 2 – 4, 71; political 39, 64 – 65, 70, 72, 74; relationships with 5, 9 Love, Heather 69, 72 – 73 Luciano, Lillia 125 Luxembourg: The Russian Revolution 29 – 30, 32 – 33

142 Index Luxemburg, Rosa: Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy 30, 32 Malabou, Catherine 96, 98 – 99, 102 Malm, Andreas 23 Manning, Erin 67 March Action 15 Markoff, John 34 Martin, Trayvon 126 Marx, Karl 17, 19, 54, 70, 105 Marxism 14 – 15, 17 – 19, 21, 26, 52, 54, 65 Massumi, Brian 67 Mbembe, Achille 96 – 99, 101 – 102 McAdam, Doug: cognitive liberation 79 mechanistic economism 12, 15 – 19, 21 melancholia 3 – 4, 26, 28, 64, 67, 71 – 72, 111 melancholy: causes of 25, 46; political 63, 69 – 71, 73 – 75 memorialization 6, 50 – 51 memorials, textual 49 – 51, 55, 57 – 58 Merleu-Ponty, Maurice 129 metamorphosis 95 – 96, 100, 103, 105 – 106 Miller, Tim 81 More, Thomas 118 Moten, Fred 132 motivation 12, 16 – 17, 22, 40, 119 mourning 64, 67, 70 – 71, 74, 96, 133, 137 narcissism 66 – 68, 70 Nawo, Djibril 51, 55 Negri, Antonio 35 neo-fascist movements 11 Neo-Freudian 6, 96 neoliberalism 27, 40, 45, 91, 95, 99, 105, 136 Newton, Huey 44 – 45 Nora, Pierre 50 Obama, Barack 39 – 40, 91, 126 Obejas, Achy (Ruins) 51, 54 Occupy Oakland 35 Occupy Wall Street movement 5, 25 – 29, 39, 45; reassessment 33 – 36 optimism: cruel 14, 17, 22; naive 13, 23; of the will 11, 69 Other (racial) 72

pan-African 45 Parable of the Sower (Butler) 136 paranoia 28, 63 – 66, 68 passivity 11 – 12, 15 – 16, 23, 101 Patterson, Orlando 130 people with AIDS (PWAs) 80, 84 – 85, 88 pessimism: of intellect 11, 16 – 17, 69, 89; radical 39 – 41 philosophy: of breathing 96, 101 – 103, 106; of praxis 12, 14 plasticity 96 – 100, 102, 104, 106 people with AIDS (PWAs) 80, 84 – 85, 88 police violence 15, 44, 95, 125 political: agency 16, 21, 65, 67, 70 – 72; attachments 2, 65, 75; breathwork 6, 95 – 96, 99, 101, 103; defeat 11; disillusion 2 – 3, 12; faith 17 – 18; feelings 88 – 89; hope 127; imaginaries 63, 70, 91; inefficacy 64, 79, 82, 84 – 85; loss/hope 39; struggle 19, 26 – 27, 127; thought 2 – 3, 5, 39, 115 political action: climate change 16; committee 44; fatalist perception of 17 – 18; transformative 64, 68, 72, 104 – 105, 120 politics: far-right 11, 16, 18; left-wing 13, 19, 68, 70; right-wing 1, 40, 45, 63, 82 possibility: of failure 29, 32 – 33, 35; revolutionary 1, 3, 25; sense of 6, 39, 42, 90 – 91 predestination 20 Prichard, Alex 35 – 36 privilege 13, 26 – 28 propaganda 19, 21 PWAs see people with AIDS Quayson, Ato 50 queer: activism 82 – 83; narratives 6, 63, 67, 70; politics 72 – 73 queer concerns 28 racial: domination 5, 42; lynching 43 – 44; myths 43 radicals 22 – 23 realism 42, 66, 71 Recession of 2008 39 regimes 2, 49, 67, 90, 100, 131 rehabilitation 118 – 119 rejection 25, 72 religion 12 – 13, 15, 21, 137 resilience 4, 32, 97, 103

Index  143 resilience-based organizing (RBO) 97 resistance: active 6, 90; centres 96; failures of 2; forms of 67, 96; future of 50, 63, 73; movements 6 – 7, 112, 121; politics 5, 13, 97 revolution: difficulties 33, 36; inevitable 3, 11, 15, 18, 27 – 28; outcomes 42, 49, 51, 54, 57 revolutionary politics challenges 5, 25 – 27, 30, 32, 36, 42 rhetoric 41, 44, 52 – 53, 82 Rhodes Must Fall 50 right-wing populism 1, 40, 45, 63, 82 Roberts, Neil 47 Roy, Arundhati 95 Ruflo, Juan: Pedro Páramo 51, 57 Ryan White Care Act 80 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio 57 Sanders, Bernie 91 Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar (La plus secrète mémoire des hommes) 55 Sasson, Anne Showstack 11 Saunders, Dudley 81 scepticism 11 – 12, 28 Schwarz, Bill 64 Scott, James 21 Second International 17 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 65 – 67 self-care 103 – 106 self-conscious 35, 88 self-expression 95 self-regulation 99 – 101 self-reliance 115, 121, 137 self-reproduction 16 Sexton, Jared 128 – 131 sexual exploitation 51 Singer, Mona 64 Slaughter, Joseph 58 Smart, Theo 80 Smith, Jackie 34 social: change 18, 21, 114, 120; democracy 14, 21; justice 104; movements 13, 18, 39 – 40, 47, 79, 105; order 17, 30, 91, 118 solidarity: decision-making 25 – 27, 31, 34 – 36; democratic 26, 31, 34 – 36; new communism 26; notion of 5, 25 – 26, 30, 33 – 34; praxis 13, 26, 31 – 34, 36;

promise of 25; revolutionary 25 – 26, 28 – 31, 53 Spartacist Uprising 15 Spitaler, Georg 71 Swann, Thomas 35 – 36 Tchak, Sami 5 – 6, 51, 54 – 58; Les filles de Mexico 51, 54 – 55 tenBreok, Jacobus: The Right to Live in the World 118 – 119 textual memorial 5, 49 – 51, 54 – 55, 57 – 58 theory: contemporary 63; critical 65, 96; political 1 Third World: failures 54, 57; leftism 4 – 5, 49, 51; solidarity 6, 50, 58 traditions 2, 4, 20, 41, 45, 101 Traverso, Enzo 70 – 72 Tremblay, Jean-Thomas 96 Trump, Donald 40, 91 UNESCO 50 United States Supreme Court 40, 89, 113 – 114 uprisings 4, 15, 31, 44 violence 21, 42, 69, 72, 82, 97, 125 – 128, 130 – 134 visualization 50, 64 wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ 57 – 58 Wald, Michael 120 Walker, David 41 – 42, 44 war 15, 45, 52 – 54, 81, 91 Warren, Calvin 125 – 130; Black Nihilism and Political Hope 126; Ontological Terror 128 Watney, Simon 80 Weir, John 87 Wells, Ida B. 43 – 44 West, Cornell 40, 69 white supremacy 5, 42 – 44, 126 whiteness 28, 43, 45, 67, 72, 136 Wiegman, Robin (et al 2013) 65 – 66 Wilderson, Frank 46, 133 – 134 Williams, Raymond 68 Winters, Joseph R. 7 wounds 4, 7, 134, 136 – 137 Zimmerman, George 126