George Shulman, New York University

Theorizing (Beyond) Impasse: Fiction-making and Truth-telling in American Politics

This talk explores the current crisis in American politics, especially in regard to authoritarian, anti-democratic, incipiently fascist rhetoric and practices. Its first claim is that the language and frameworks of theorists and critics on the left cement the impasses and foreclosures they lament, and prevent them from addressing the dangers they fear. Its second claim is that fruitful engagement with the current impasse requires rethinking the relation between "fiction" and "reality," to enable what Cornelius Castoriadis called the radical imagination. As the history of political theory demonstrates repeatedly, a "possibility for new possibilities" is opened up, not by argument, empirical evidence, or fact-checking, which presume the givenness of reality, but by "figures of the newly thinkable," which manifest its contingency.