“The figure of the raging revolutionary or angry activist teaches us something: those who fight for alternative futures are seen as committing acts of senseless violence, which stops and hearing of the ways in which revolution makes sense … if the exposure of violence is read as the origin of violence, then the violence that is exposed is not revealed” (170). How do we differentiate violence exposed by revolutionaries from violence created by revolutionaries? Does the type of protest (nonviolence, civil disobedience, destructive, etc.) play into how the revolutionaries are perceived?
“To be pessimistic would involve a commitment to unhappiness as the endpoint of human action, as being what all promises of happiness lead us toward. To be optimistic would involve commitment to happiness as the endpoint of human action, as what all experiences of bad feeling enable us to reach … maybe the point is that there is no point that points to some future horizon. Feelings may be perverse because they don’t always have a point” (177). What would it look like to live without any telos? Do you think this mindset is liberating? Would this be a form of nihilism?
In her critique of hope, Ahmed critiques the “other who suffers and works in order that we can have “the good life.” Their lack of hope is converted to our hope for the future … we have a political economy of hope … where hope is unevenly distributed.” Do you think this is a critique of hope itself, or a critique in how hope manifests in our world? Must hope have this exploitive quality? Is Ahmed’s critique of hope too dependent on our conception of the “good life” being essentially capitalist and materialistic?
“In imagining what is possible, in imagining what does not yet exist, we say yes to the future. In this yes, the future is not given content: it is not that the future is imagined as the overcoming of misery; nor is the future imagined as being happy. The future is what is kept open as the possibility of things not staying as they are, or being as they stay” (197). Even though Ahmed critiques a telos centric form of hope, might this notion of open possibilities be its own form of hope?
Shared by: Dylan Brown
Image Credit: https://london.ac.uk/senate-house-library/exhibitions-and-events/exhibitions/utopia-and-dystopia