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- We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.1
- Words exist at the frontier between the will to live and its repression; the way they are employed determines their meaning; history controls the way they are employed.2
- Anticipating elements are a component of reality itself.3
I.
1. Utopian agency seeks, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney, the "rhyming of hope and history"; that is to say, the politics of utopian agency embody a transformative function against the bad present and toward the better and more just world and life that might be possible.4 But the contemporary experience of agency is vexed, marked by what Felix Guattari and Toni Negri discern as the "unraveling" of the "connecting threads of desire and hope" in the very "fabric of human feelings" itself.5 My core concern in this essay is to explore the dynamics of political agency: specifically, I trace certain reflexive maneuvers that have the potential to reorient subjectivity in politically significant directions to enhance and affirm utopian political agency, thereby making possible the reconnection of the threads of desire and hope, and making palpable the movement of utopian hope within history. In order to do so, I draw upon two important critical resources in the theorization of agency. Contemporary political theory has recently turned toward a theorization of the affective register of subjectivity, insofar as affective modes can enhance ethical commitment and political agency. I also draw upon utopian theory, as it seeks to cultivate bold ways of knowing and acting in the world. However, the promise of the utopian theorization of agency encounters problems, in the form of nihilistic blockages of agency, to which I will shortly turn my attention. I nevertheless propose, drawing upon contemporary political theory's critical attention to theorizing affective agency, that forms of hopeful agency can be cultivated that counter such blockages. After exploring the contemporary malaise of the experience of agency's loss or denial, I turn my attention toward a counter-move, as I reorient subjectivity via a cartography of affective forms that seeks to lend itself to the articulation of utopian techniques of the self. These, then, are reflexive maneuvers that refunction subjectivity, and hence agency,...