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

This article begins by reflecting on crisis and democracy, arguing that the claim that democracy is in a state of crisis is a normative fiction that sustains rather than transforms extant self-other-world relations. An alternative is to frame the present as ‘the time of emergency’, which implies scope for ‘emergent’ possibilities. With a view to 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 (via a genealogical encounter with normative fiction) to the work of Denise Ferreira 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.