The power of critique in the time of emergency: on normative fiction and critical fiction

This article begins by reflecting on 'crisis and democracy' as a normative fiction that sustains extant self-other-world relations. An alternative is to frame the present as ‘the time of emergency’, which implies scope for ‘emergent’ possibilities. In teasing out such possibilities, the article makes a case for critical fiction as a way of radicalising our relationship to the present, looking initially to Foucault’s writings on critique before turning to the work of da Silva, who reads the present through the lens of a past that is not past, thereby troubling a future that need not come to pass.