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afterword: not similar to something, just similar One of the most conflicted legacies of the New Left has been the perception that radical politics requires advocates to maintain a perpetual state of outrage and sadness. In the foregoing section, I have given some reasons why I think melancholy came to dominate social movements that originally had a diverse affective composition. It does seem true that political imagination involves (or springs from) perpetual dissatisfaction with the present, a constant need to be dividing the present and producing events that affect the form of individuality and collectivity. On the other hand, this dissatisfaction need not be the result of sadness, guilt, or hatred. If Arendt is right that the ultimate purpose of the state and public spheres is not just to coordinate satisfactions, but to give an open-ended, critical image of the future, then there is a kind of dissatisfaction that has nothing to do with need, but with the way we are individuated in relation to one another. One way of introducing division into the time of the present, releasing possible actions or one’s own actions and the actions of others, is to recover and remember historical struggles. The effect of problematization on everyday practices at the aggregate level is rarely as dramatic as people hope or fear—even the ways we suffer and harm each other are fairly stable. The materiality of people’s bodies and their public spaces consists in this inertial quality, which can be reflected upon in different ways and lends itself to different schematizations or perceptions of identity. When historical struggles are suppressed, however, this reflective and reconstitutive work is impossible to carry out, and historical struggles themselves can be dead-ended by desires to avenge the loss of a particular organization of social space. Every body that acknowledges this tension, including Kant’s (I imagine) is stretched through many spaces at once and feels crazy half the time. Like Roger Caillois’s legendary psychasthenic, the mad critic ‘‘tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He 300 afterword feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just ‘similar.’ And he invents spaces of which he is the ‘convulsive possession’’’ (Caillois 1984, 30). He (or she) inhabits a melancholy body that is caught in and between a multiplicitous imagination, rather than actively differentiating and thereby producing a body that would be adequate to a better society. Our bodies should always be better than the societies we currently have. One can construe this process of transformation as risking or rejecting who one is, but it can also be thought as risking or rejecting previous understandings of our ‘‘natural’’ differences and affinities with other thinkers. John Brown’s madness, like that of Eleanor Bumpurs, could not be easily dissociated from the expectations and governing technologies of the state in which he lived. What sanity would correspond to a feeling of kinship with single women on public assistance? What kind of nonempirical pleasure arises between Americans who see the prison as a paradigmatic product of contemporary capitalism as well as racism and public fear of drug users? Such a point of view enables the ‘‘body politic’’ to be reconceived in terms of its ‘‘carceral’’ management. Likewise, the thoughts and acts identified as ‘‘homosexual’’ became the basis for rethinking ‘‘heterosexuality ’’ as a norm, not to mention (in the age of aids) the political and economic function of the family and health care services across national borders. These are forms of aesthetic apprehension like the one recognizing factories and bodies destroyed by capitalist exploitation as problems demanding reorganization of the liberal political field as well as immediate resistance to work—through strikes and machine-breaking. But they are also styles of perception that allow us to recognize Marx’s revolution in thought as one of many possible acts of resistance, one of many possible deployments of ‘‘critique,’’ and thus one which can be repeated, set free amid ‘‘similar’’ deployments, rather than considered the inevitable horizon of all oppositional political thought. So when I say that the body matters for political imagination, it is not the empirical body taken as an object by medicine, but the body as a matrix enabling us to establish affinities and differences from others in a range of public spaces, as well as to develop a notion of privacy. Understood in this way, the body...

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