Inhabiting the impasse: on care and ambivalence in Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring Time and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which conditions of increasing socio-economic and ecological precarity unsettle people’s perception and expectation of the ordinary and engender a sense of the present as a time of impasse. I turn to Baraitser’s Enduring Time and Nelson’s The Argonauts to explore this sentiment. Instead of drawing on critical registers of rupture and transgression, their writing suggests that it is the experience of living in and through the present-as-impasse itself, that can (paradoxically) teach us something about change. Where theorists, like Andreas Malm or Lee Edelman, valorise practices of radical defiance or refusal, thinkers, such as Baraitser and Nelson, reclaim the time of the chronic and the pedagogy of ambivalence for thinking about processes of social transformation. Shifting the conceptual framework from the event of rupture to the non-event like event of the impasse, I argue, allows us to attend to other stories or other sides of stories that risk being overlooked or displaced by critical strategies geared towards limit events or experiences.