After Revolution? After Man?

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union it would seem that the idea of revolution has been swept into the dustbin of history, or at least into the dustbin of the Euro-American academy. Even within feminist and queer theory, two of the academic discourses ostensibly most devoted to sweeping transformation, the word scarcely appears in most of the work written over the past three decades. Our purpose here is not to offer an extensive investigation into the reasons for this postrevolutionary “turn.” Certainly part of it is a general air of pessimism that has swept through critical theory in the face of the failures of the so-called Communist states to actualize the great socialist aspirations and the ruthlessness of advanced capitalism that has created inequalities of world historical proportions, let alone the never-ending war, horrific structural violence, and brutal suppression of revolutionary movements that plague our world today (see Cornell 2008). The Marxist dream of a revolution toward an emancipated humanity and a classless planetary society is, we are told even by supposedly leftist thinkers, a hopelessly romantic and impossible metanarrative that relies on bad pretensions to scientific truth and problematic assumptions of an originary “human nature.” Moreover, revolution, the story goes, is inextricably connected to a hubris of humanism that cannot survive the “death of Man” in late twentieth-century European philosophy, a hubris that sees Man as the maker of his own world and therefore as having the power to change it. Feminist and queer theory, of course, have long highlighted and critiqued the phallocentrism and heteronormativity inherent in all forms of humanism and, as such, for several decades now they too have largely relinquished revolution as a necessary part of overcoming Man.

Unfortunately, however, such reports of the death of Man seem, paraphrasing Mark Twain, to have been greatly exaggerated. This is not, to be sure, for lack of trying. Indeed, there have been countless assaults on Man over the past centuries: from the attack on his false universalism by early feminists and abolitionists (Wollstonecraft 1992, Cugoano 1999), to Nietzsche’s (1968) blistering assault on the nihilism he brings, to the late twentieth-century critique of his metaphysical presuppositions (Derrida 1984, Foucault 1994, Heidegger 2008a), to more recent feminist and decolonial challenges to the violent exclusions he relies on for his perpetuation (Irigaray 1985a, Spivak 1999, Wynter 2003, Fanon 2004). This death of Man rhetoric has taken on an especially apocalyptic tenor in light of what climate scientists have named the “Anthropocene,” that is, the geological epoch of the “human dominance of biological, chemical, and geological processes on Earth” (Crutzen and Schwägerl 2011). The immense threat posed by climate change, coupled with the limited ability of “traditional” frameworks in the humanities and sciences (including Marxism) to appropriately address it, has called for a fundamental reconsideration of the place of “the human” within nature and history and laid bare the profound vulnerability of Man (see Chakrabarty 2009). If centuries of violent exploitation of his many Others has not been strong enough cause for his deposing, perhaps his now-too-obvious destruction of the planet might be. That is, of course, if the planet doesn’t get him first. (As always, we hardly need to point out, Man will be the last casualty of his own destructive boomerang and, thus, we feminists should not revel too much in watching him wince in the face of his own impending doom.)

This seismic shift in the geopolitical—better, cosmopolitical—scene has provoked some thinkers to call for a merciful end to Man.¹ We cannot possibly hope to address the monumental problems facing us today, they suggest, with the “traditional” philosophy of Man—“Humanism.” As such, “posthumanist” theorists have sought to move beyond the many boundary projects of Humanism, which work to reconsolidate Man as the sovereign subject of rational mastery, and to reconceptualize our place in the material universe in a more egalitarian and sustainable way (see Braidotti 2013). One can certainly see why posthumanism might be a palatable alternative to the old Humanism for many feminist and queer theorists, given feminism’s birth as a challenge to the “universal” philosophy of Man, and indeed, there is much recent work that seeks to use posthumanism as a way of freeing us from any lingering attachment to the humanist subject (Man) as crucial to feminist and queer politics and from an enduring human exceptionalism in relation to animals and other forms of matter. Often juxtaposed to the so-called linguistic turn (which is usually said to include both psychoanalysis and Foucauldian “discourse analysis” as residual Humanisms), these thinkers in feminist-queer science studies, “new” materialism, and affect theory attempt to reconfigure humans as dynamic open systems embedded in a vital universe characterized by the constant flux of matter-energy, perpetual transformation, and unpredictable forms of entanglement (see Barad 2007, Giffney and Hird 2008, Coole and Frost 2010, Gregg and Seigworth 2010, Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). From this perspective, it might seem that by even thinking about revolutionary socialism as absolutely necessary for a cosmopolitical feminist and queer theory and politics, we are embracing an old-fashioned Humanist dream, or what Rosi Braidotti refers to as Marxism’s “humanistic arrogance of continuing to place Man at the centre of world history” (2013: 23).

While we wholeheartedly affirm the end of Man and the rethinking of our relationships with the other forms of matter, both living and non, with which we share the universe, we do question the increasing effort put into debunking “the human” and “human agency” at a time when neocolonial and neoliberal capitalism have perhaps never been more destructive to the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants (human and non). Why does it seem, in other words, that posthumanism is necessarily postrevolutionary? While the joyous vitality that seems to characterize much of this posthumanist theory and its celebration of our connectedness with the universe (including technology) would seem to put these thinkers very far afield from Martin Heidegger’s “pessimism” about our ensnarement in modern technoscientific rationality (2008b), in the end we are often left with something quite similar to Heidegger’s conviction that there is nothing humans can actively do to make things better without intensifying our ensnarement and we must therefore patiently hope that Being (or the planet in this case) chooses to spare us in spite of our past sins. For posthumanism, any focus on specifically human agency (such as that involved in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism) always risks a reinstatement of the old humanist subject, effectively smuggling in the Man who fucked everything up in the first place through the back door. Thus many posthumanist critics are engaged in a hypervigilant search for Man in every form of theory and politics, and any trace of him must be sussed out and rejected in the name of “life itself” and the future of the planet. When not a call for a more ecologically sustainable way of living based on a reassessment of the integral linkages between all scales of existence, then, the most “political” (or, perhaps better put, polemical) of posthumanisms are typically directed at deflating the “humanistic arrogance” of other academics and political theories rather than at any forms of systemic violence such as capitalism, colonialism, racism, or phallocentrism.

We are not the first, to be sure, to register uneasiness over the often-blithe repudiation of Man and his premature burial in much posthumanist theory, especially considering how spectacularly Man’s handiwork is presently on display. Claire Colebrook (2014a, 2014b), for example, has put the brakes on any celebratory posthumanism that would claim to have abdicated Man’s throne atop the great chain of being. According to Colebrook, posthumanism is a recuperative gesture which enables Man to continue surviving vampirically by appearing to be dead while appropriating his previously excluded Others as his now proper domain. As she convincingly argues, we should not buy so easily into the sham of Man’s self-effacement. While making atonement for his past exclusion and exploitation of the rest of the universe (i.e., women, the colonized, nonhuman animals, “life itself,” the Earth), Man redeems himself while simultaneously annexing these prior exclusions. Thus, when posthumanists and feminists turn to something like “life itself” or to our interconnectedness with the material universe as a way of overcoming Man, and while they spend their efforts diligently hunting down Man in all his former guises, Man has made off with the “goods” once again. For Colebrook, then, posthumanism is actually an “ultrahumanism,” which simply takes the world as Man had always made it in his (Euro-American, Bourgeois, White) image and supposedly “subtracts” Man, leaving Man’s old world masquerading as a new “posthuman” one. As she puts it: “Humanism posits an elevated or exceptional ‘man’ to grant sense to existence, then when ‘man’ is negated or removed what is left is the human all too human tendency to see the world as one giant anthropomorphic self-organizing living body” (2014a: 164). Because it was always Man who had given the world its sense, pronouncing Man dead ironically allows him to live on stronger than before because the world continues on in his image while his former critics—feminists, for example—now content themselves with his “vacated” world and devote themselves to tracking him down only in his old clothes (which he of course discarded long ago).

So far, so good. We agree that posthumanism is a bit too self-congratulatory in its self-conferred status as the undertaker of Man. We also agree that it is often politically distracting—despite its best intentions—and that while many of its theorists are busy having contests over which of quantum nonlocality or bacterial sex is “queerer” and castigating the ancien régime (i.e., Marxists and “poststructuralists”) for its humanist dementia, Man is laughing all the way to the bank. This point, however, is also where we part company with Colebrook. For Colebrook, while the urgent possibility of human extinction is not the occasion for posthumanism, neither is it the occasion for revolutionary struggle. To quote her:

What if social political revolution among human beings were still to leave the relation between the human species and life in the same place? Today’s frequently cited Marxist cry—it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—should be read as symptomatic. Should we not be more concerned with the world’s end than the relations among markets and individuals? The Marxist premise that we cannot save the world ecologically until capitalism is dealt with, should be questioned, and reversed: as long as we imagine life and the world to be primarily anthropogenic, or emerging from human meaning and history, we will not confront the disjunction between the human species (in all its modes) and the life that it regards as its own. A new mode of critique that would not be political would be required. (2014a: 197–8)

As such, Colebrook is interested less in imagining a more just world, than “what life would be like if one could abandon the fantasy of one’s own endurance . . . for beyond ‘man’ one cannot figure the good life but only contingent, fragile, insecure, and ephemeral lives” (2014b: 22). Frankly, we have had quite enough of “contingent, fragile, insecure, and ephemeral lives.” Indeed, this sounds not like the imagination of living beyond Man, but rather like a meticulous description of the lives of the majority of the world under conditions of advanced capitalism right now. Of course, her point here is that “Man” (and presumably capitalism) is an apotropaic charm that ensures (the fantasy of) survival for certain members of the human species—an immunological protection against the contingency, fragility, insecurity, and ephemerality inherent in our existence as animals in an indifferent universe. For Colebrook, Man has convinced himself through this fantasy that the Earth is his “home.” And it is precisely this fantasy, this protective bubble that Man bought himself at the expense of all his others, that is now being burst by the impending climatological catastrophe. Despite her astute critique, however, Colebrook ultimately leaves us in what is perhaps a worse position than the posthumanists: dispossessing ourselves of our arrogant fantasy of survival and giving ourselves back over to the volatility of the universe, since any idea of enduring (and certainly flourishing) involves the reinstatement of an anthropomorphic enframing of the world’s “inhuman” forces.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

• Approximately 95 percent of the world population (6.7 billion) lives on less than $10 a day and 3.14 billion live on less than $2.50 a day (Ravallion et al. 2008).
• The richest 85 individuals (0.000001 percent) possess as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population (i.e. 3,500,000,000 people) (Oxfam 2014).
• Anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 Africans have died in the latest Ebola outbreak (AFP 2014) and the average annual mortality rate from malaria is 650,000 (90 percent of which are from sub-Saharan Africa) (CDC 2014).
• Current animal extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than the Earth’s historical average and one-third of all animal species are now either threatened or endangered as a result of what has been called “Anthropocene defaunation” (Dirzo et al. 2014).
• One in fifteen black men in the United States is imprisoned (Pew Center 2008) and 30 percent of all U.S. black men will be imprisoned at least once in their lifetime (Sentencing Project 2013). Black men in the U.S. are 21 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white men (Gabrielson et al. 2014).
• There are 780 million people who live without access to clean water and 3.4 million die annually due to water and sanitation-related causes. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths occur in the global South (Prüss-Üstün et al. 2008, WHO/UNICEF 2012).
• Approximately 21 million people are victims of forced labor and 1.2 million children are trafficked annually (ILO 2012).
• Since 2011, nearly 250 new state-level restrictions have been passed on abortion in the U.S. More than half of U.S. women of reproductive age now live in a state with at least five laws restricting abortion access (Guttmacher Institute 2015).

It is unclear how, without any ideal of collective survival or flourishing, we might be able to begin to address these (and countless other) crises (see Cornell 2004). For us, it is not (as Colebrook perhaps rightfully characterizes certain Marxist positions) that the ecological disaster cannot be addressed until after we have ended capitalism, but rather, that the relentless pursuit of profit inherent to capitalism will never permit us to address issues of the climate and ecology in any substantive way because all attempts to do so must remain compatible with the dictates of surplus accumulation. The crises of advanced capital and of the climate (as well as the others to which we have referred) are fundamentally linked—a point not lost on billions in the global South. Furthermore, we refuse the “forced choice” (to borrow a phrase from Jacques Lacan) offered by Colebrook and other posthumanist theorists. For Lacan, a “forced choice” is a result of the “alienating or” that makes us see a choice when there really is not one. His example, quite pertinent here, is a thief’s threat: “Your money or your life!” Either way, the victim loses the money (Lacan 1981: 212). By implying that we must choose either to save life (our lives, endangered species’ lives or “life itself”) or to struggle against capitalism, these theorists have accepted the “alienating or” of advanced capitalism.

We insist on both life (human and non) and an end to capitalism. And indeed this is precisely the position being taken by climate scientists and activists around the world who are explicitly linking climate politics to countercapitalist movements (see Klein 2013, 2014). As geophysicist Brad Werner has suggested (in a lecture at the American Geophysical Union entitled “Is earth fucked? Dynamical futility of global environmental management and possibilities for sustainability via direct action activism”), the only “dynamic” in his statistical modeling that is cause for “hope” is “resistance [or, movements of] people or groups of people [who] adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture . . . [including] environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups” (quoted in Klein 2013). In on-the-ground movements against and serious scientific research into climatological catastrophe, in other words, there is neither a call to renounce old “Humanist” fantasies of agency or survival nor any pretense that capitalism must not be ended in order to “save” life and the planet. What there is, however, is the idea that collective human action can transform the situation. “Bad” redemptive vision? Of course it’s possible. But perhaps we ought to try it first before being so sure that embracing ephemerality and fragility is the best left for us. Surely we owe it to those who were forcibly made to subsidize (often with their lives) Man’s fantasy of survival over the last five centuries—those who do not need academics to help them divest themselves of their arrogant survival fantasies because they never had them in the first place, and those who bear the least responsibility for the destruction that they now face most imminently (while Man plans his next colonial vacation in the deep sea or in “outer” space). To us, all of this renunciation of survival and transformative possibility by Euro-American academics sounds a little too much like the older sibling who refuses to share his toy and then purposefully destroys it before being forced to hand it down: “Oh you want this? I never liked it anyway.”

To be clear, we are not suggesting that either the posthumanist theorists or Colebrook do not know or care about the “obvious disparity between those who benefit economically from the processes leading to climate change and those who will have to pay for most of the environmental and social costs” (Mora et al. 2013). Nor are we engaged in a simple exercise in demystification in which we purport to reveal the workings of capital behind all of today’s contemporary problems to those who did not previously see it. We do wonder why, however, for many posthumanist thinkers the claim that the destructivity of Man has reached its pinnacle seems to necessarily involve a simultaneous refutation of revolutionary desires and possibilities rather than a more urgent call for collective action. It should, perhaps, at least give us pause when scientists are more forcefully expressing the political implications of their research and calling for collective responses than feminists and other political theorists (see Mora et al. 2013, Klein 2013, 2014). And on that note, neither is our point here a doomsday jeremiad lamenting the lack of global political response at such a crucial moment; indeed, there is no dearth of collective struggles against neocolonialism, advanced capitalism, and ecological destruction around the world today. In light of this, academics in the Euro-American humanities risk being more out of touch than ever.

This prevailing atmosphere of anxiety about political participation seems to result from a literalization of Audre Lorde’s famous “master’s tools” conundrum (1984: 110–13): a fear that perhaps at this point our “old” political tools are too contaminated with “humanist arrogance,” that anything we do politically will make things worse, or even that politics “itself” (as if such a thing exists) is one of the master’s tools and is nothing but a smokescreen for the “return” of Man either as anthropomorphism (in Colebrook and the posthumanists) or as a conservative “reproductive futurism” (in Lee Edelman and queer theory). And in this fear that politics is too polluted (or polluting), are we not returned again to a certain Heidegger? We, who are living in the “end times,” are we not so far gone that “only a god can save us now” (Heidegger 1976)? Must we not give ourselves over to thought and art in order to clear as much space as possible for the “return” of the inhuman forces of the universe that we have hubristically sought to suppress or harness for our own disposal?

“But who, we?” (Derrida 1982: 136, emphasis added).

Shifting the Geographies of Our Political Imagination

We take very seriously the imbrication of politics, conceived within the Euro-American “tradition,” and the philosophy of Man, as we will discuss in greater detail throughout this book. We also firmly believe in patient and reflective thought as indispensable to any revolutionary struggle—in what Michel Foucault calls “the patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty” (1997: 319). Yet, it is simply not enough that the (very real) problem of having to use the master’s—Man’s—tools leads us to a disavowal of transformative politics either in its pessimistic (“only a god can save us”), complacent (“this is the best we can do”), or nihilistic (“why would we try to change anything, we’re fucked anyway”) versions. The recognition of the fact that “our” political frameworks—the ways in which “we” have thought revolution until now—have always been thought from within the philosophy of Man, and the very urgent need to deconstruct this philosophy, is (quite literally) nothing if not an occasion for what Jacques Derrida calls “a re-politicization, perhaps . . . another concept of the political” (1994: 75), or what Foucault similarly emphasizes as our need to “construct another political thought, another political imagination” (Afary and Anderson 2005: 185). Indeed, Foucault argues that “revolutionary undertaking is not only against the present but against the rule of ‘until now’” (1980: 283). And as we will argue in this book, such a “re-politicization,” or new “political imagination,” requires rethinking the fundamental concepts of “our” “traditional” political imaginary along with the thought produced from the perspective of what the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls the “liminal other” of Man (2001).²

Several commenters on various drafts and versions of the material presented in this book have interestingly pointed to the “untimeliness” of its content. The defense of revolution and political spirituality, they have told us, is outdated and “out of sync” with the current trends in Euro-American theory. We certainly do not dispute this, nor do we take offense. Beyond the book’s supposed untimeliness, however, we hope to make a geographical intervention here: to point out that what is considered passé by academics in Europe and the United States is not necessarily so throughout the global South. We thus consider this book to be closely aligned with the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s project of “shifting the geographies of reason.” Our intention here is therefore not only to “return” to supposedly dated and forgotten modes of Euro-American thinking about revolution, but to do this in conjunction with an attention to the thought that has been liminalized within the dominant cartography of knowledge altogether. This is especially the case in our thinking about the integral connection between spirituality and revolutionary politics. Indeed, many of the same commenters who have pointed to the “outdated” defense of revolution in this book have also expressed concern about our use of the word “spirituality,” especially given the renewed attachment to “materialism” that characterizes most recent Euro-American thought (see Coole and Frost 2010). One of our major points here, however, is that if one looks beyond a particular geography of reason, the words “spirituality” and “revolution” are hardly controversial or outmoded. Indeed, within much Caribbean, Africana, and Islamic thought, spirituality has long been considered an invaluable resource for thinking through how one might get past the deep traumas imposed by colonization and capitalism, as well as by the struggle against them.

To put it simply: our main argument here is that the search for a new political imagination, in Foucault’s sense, requires an extensive recharting of the geographies of reason to show that thought from the global South attributes profound meaning and importance to the ideas of, and relationship between, spirituality and revolution in ways that both enrich and challenge our understandings of which aspects of Euro-American thought are “dated” and which remain “relevant.” It is precisely for this reason that we seek to make not only “untimely” interventions in our readings of popular European thinkers against certain interpretations of them that dominate U.S. feminist and queer theory, but also to revisit these thinkers along with those from the global South. As such, in each chapter we argue against the renunciation of revolutionary possibility by rereading—creolizing—the thinkers used to reject revolution with thinkers from a different location in the geography of reason: Foucault and Ali Shari’ati, Lacan and Fanon, Spinoza and Sylvia Wynter. Engaging the work of Foucault, Lacan, or Spinoza, for instance, becomes vastly different when read in dialogue with thought produced from within a context that has never renounced revolutionary possibility or the necessity of “political spirituality.” Indeed, the very idea of “political spirituality” that we defend and elaborate throughout this book is itself the result of such a “creolization.” We take the phrase “political spirituality” from Foucault, who defined it as the “will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false” (1996: 282). While Foucault used this phrase only a handful of times (generally in his writings on the Iranian Revolution), throughout this book we attempt to deepen and extend his use of it by looking to the role of collective ritual, ceremonial, and spiritual practices within revolutionary struggles in the global South and the way these practices transform the subjects who engage in them in ways that exceed the theories of the subject within European political philosophy that Foucault was so critical of. Political spirituality, for us, thus names both the ceremonial practices involved in revolutionary movements, as well as the different forms of individual and collective conduct these practices make possible. As such, we argue throughout this book that political spirituality is an indispensable dimension of revolutionary theory and praxis—one “whose possibility,” as Foucault wrote in an editorial on the Iranian Revolution in Le Nouvel Observateur, “we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity” (Afary and Anderson 2005: 209). Such creolized readings of the thinkers who have been perennial resources in Euro-American political thought with thinkers who have been involved in actual revolutionary struggles against capitalism and colonialism, then, help us address many of the obvious and well-documented failures of “mainstream” revolutionary thinking around questions of spirituality, psyche, sexuality, erotics, as well as our relationship with the “rest” of the material universe of which we are a part.

Optimism: Duty or Cruelty?

More recently, further objections have been made within queer and affect theory in particular to the normativizing tendencies inherent in politics in general: perhaps political optimism or revolutionary hope are simply ways of interpellating queer subjects into compulsory affective circuits in which “negative” feelings and emotions must be renounced in the name of “positive” ones, or into certain hetero- or homonormative visions of the “good life” that is to be sought in revolutionary movements. Such a process, according to some queer theorists, thus installs a form of affective normativity into politics, which demands certain investments and obscures the distribution of “positive” and “negative” feelings across gender, sexual, racial, class, and national axes (see Duggan and Muñoz 2009 and Berlant 2011). As such, much recent queer theory has drawn on certain forms of psychoanalysis to advocate the political use-value of precisely these “negative” and “non-normative” affects and feelings—including hopelessness, melancholia, shame, unhappiness—in the name of queer resistance (see Eng and Kazanjian 2002, Duggan and Muñoz 2009, Ahmed 2010, Halperin and Traub 2010). In its most extreme form (which we take up extensively in Chapter 3), queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) has argued that any politics whatsoever is always already both heteronormative and conservative insofar as it imagines “the Child” as the horizon and beneficiary of any political action. The focus on the future inherent to any political agenda, according to Edelman, involves a compulsory renunciation of the present in the name of the children who will inherit that “better” future. Queers are, according to Edelman, those not fighting for the children and are thus figured as the death drive of the social order—a status Edelman forcefully exhorts queers to actively take up in the “insist[ence] that the future stop here” (2004: 31).

So does all of this mean that we are, to use Lauren Berlant’s (2011) term, “cruel optimists”?³ We would answer this simply: there is surely nothing crueler than to say that there is no way out of the horrific and brutal exploitation of advanced capitalism that leaves the majority of the world’s population in conditions of dire poverty and targeted for extinction. Embracing the death drive, or what amounts to the same thing, abandoning oneself to the impending doom of the species and the planet when you have no possibility of life is not such a big deal, and is certainly not an act of “queer” or “posthumanist” resistance. Centuries ago, Immanuel Kant argued that we have a duty to be optimistic, not because things are necessarily going to get better, but because they might. For Kant, we are not obligated to believe in any particular vision of the future or its possibility, but the fact that ideals such as perpetual peace (and we would add: the end of capitalism) cannot be proven impossible obliges us to live as if (not necessarily believe) they were. To quote Kant:

for there can be no obligation . . . to believe something [i.e., a specific end]. What is incumbent upon us as a duty is to act in conformity with the idea of that end, even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood that it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either. Now morally practical reason pronounces in us its irresistible veto: there is to be no war . . . So the question is no longer whether perpetual peace is something real or a fiction, and whether we are not deceiving ourselves in our theoretical judgment when we assume that it is real. Instead we must act as if it is something real, though perhaps it is not . . . and even if the complete realization of this objective always remains a pious wish, still we are certainly not deceiving ourselves in adopting the maxim of working incessantly toward it. For this is our duty . . . (1996: 490–1, emphasis added)

And, moreover, as spectators (if not participants) in revolutionary struggle, we actually shape the way those struggles will be read. So for Kant, the spectators who cheered on the French Revolution played a role in history in that the significance they gave to that revolution became part of the new reality that that revolution constituted. And cannot the same be said for those who cheered on the “Arab Spring,” as well as those who heroically participated in it? Can it not be said of those who stayed up all night watching the votes be counted in recent elections in Greece, Spain, and South Africa to see if new socialist parties would be voted in? The deep irony of much recent feminist and queer theory is that it effectively tells us that, in the name of “queerness” and “posthumanism,” everything must ultimately remain exactly as it is, given that the hope for a different future is heteronormative and any idea of transforming the world is humanist delirium; that we should instead embrace ephemerality, extinction, and the death drive (all of which capitalism has conveniently made readily available); and that anyone who writes or claims otherwise is nothing but a nostalgic, humanist fool providing deluded idiots with cruel optimism. How do these thinkers know that we are fated to fragility, death, extinction, poverty, war, capitalism, depression, melancholia, and unbearable sex?

In this book, we want to show that the “truth” they tell us about the ultimate impossibility of a more just future can, and should, be deconstructed in the name of a queer-feminist future beyond Man, a future that by the very appropriation of the word “queer” tells us that nothing is ever what it seems and that the psychic and bodily prisons that we live in are always in the process of being undone by collective revolutionary processes. Indeed, as the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz insisted in his disagreements with much recent queer theory, queerness is itself a form of utopianism or “revolutionary consciousness.” As he put it:

It is difficult to hold onto a phrase like “revolutionary consciousness.” It seems stark, out-moded, universalizing, and prescriptive. Yet I nonetheless deploy it because I want to link it specifically to the world of affect and feeling . . . It is not about announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be. (Duggan and Muñoz 2009: 278)

We do not wish to rehearse here the hope versus hopelessness, future versus anti-future debates that have dominated queer theory over the past decade. We do, however, want to point out the resonances of Muñoz’s contention that “queerness is an ideality” (2009: 1) with the Kantian duty of optimism, explicitly putting queer politics on the side of revolution: that we can imagine beyond what we can know both enables and obligates us to live according to ideals of freedom as we also struggle to bring such a world into existence. Certainly, Kant’s point is that as we put ourselves into the story, we are part of it and thus pessimism becomes just as much a part of that story as optimism. And moreover, as we will discuss in Chapter 4, these stories have a profound power to materialize and rematerialize the world that we live in together. Thus, if what many contemporary theorists tell us is not truth, then it is just their own conviction—itself a form of political faith. And why have the faith that we are thoroughly fucked if there is any way for us to queer ourselves out of it? It would thus seem that many theorists have their own form of cruel attachment—a cruel pessimism?—to the idea that revolution is something we (can) no longer desire. Perhaps this is a form of immunity to the inevitable disappointments of political struggle: we can no longer be disappointed if we no longer hope for a more just future or believe it is possible. And yet, as political theorist Jane Anna Gordon eloquently said at a recent event in New York City, “Political theory is incoherent if we accept that we are in a post-revolutionary time. All we can do then is poetically discuss resignation and impossibility.”⁴ The philosophy of the limit means that the very limit to any idea of “the impossible,” that is, to any metanarrative of postrevolutionary doom, leaves us with the responsibility to fight for a politics that is both revolutionary and that is constantly challenging the reign of Man in the form of colonialism, capitalism, racism, phallocentrism, and heterosexism (see Cornell 1992). As we have suggested, and will argue throughout this book, thinkers in the global South have been engaged in precisely this project for centuries. These thinkers, however, have been too involved in revolutionary struggles themselves to spend too much time hand-wringing about the humanistic arrogance of politics and the failures of feminism and socialism, or debating the value of hope versus pessimism, because there is simply too much work to be done in the struggle for total decolonization. They, in a deep and profound sense, are on the side of life, understood not as abstract “life itself,” but as part of political spirituality: the struggle for different ways of living individually, collectively, and with the other beings with which we share the planet. And perhaps it is precisely to these thinkers that we must now look for the spirit of revolution and for a new practice of the human beyond Man. We close this introduction and open our book with the words of Gilles Deleuze castigating the so-called “New Philosophers” of the 1970s who critiqued Marxism and socialism for manipulating the supposedly ignorant masses:

What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses . . . But there never would have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity. Resistance fighters are usually in love with life. No one was ever put in prison for powerlessness and pessimism—on the contrary! From the perspective of the New Philosophers, the victims were duped, because they didn’t yet grasp what the New Philosophers have grasped. If I belonged to an association, I would bring a complaint against the New Philosophers: they show just a little too much contempt for the inmates of the Gulag. (2007: 144–5)

With very little adjustment, could these same words not be said of our new prophets of queer hopelessness, posthumanist renunciation, and postrevolutionary pessimism?