>What I'm talking about is recovering a certain
>openness that I actually associate with
>the foundations of radicalism or leftism. This
>openness often collapses soon after the left
>or a radical justice project attaches itself to
>a certain vision, to a certain end or to a
>certain
>practice. What we might need to give now, or
>what we might need to inhabit now, is that
>founding openness to possibility, to seeing the
>world differently, to seeing power differently,
>to seeing the future differently. This involves
>a brave and humble intellectual and political
>openness. It also means refusing the dichotomy
>between the local and the global, the national
>and the transnational, the intellectual and the
>practicalŠ I actually think that it's the only
>way through or out of the melancholy that has to
>do with the lost objects and attachments
>of the left and the despair for the possibility
>of change. I think that the only way out of that
>kind of melancholy and that kind of despair is
>not by darting towards yet another answer but
>by opening up to a different reading of the
>present, a different reading of our attachments
>and possibilities.
>
>Here is where Foucault's notion of genealogy is
>so important. It is a way of refiguring
>the present through a past, telling the
>present's story differently. This democratic
>future
>that we're after is actually a future that we
>will only be able to make by opening the present
>differently. I think that many of us experience
>the present as terribly closed-not just closed
>because certain options have been foreclosed,
>but also closed because of certain stoppages in
>progressive history. I think the opening that we
>have to cultivate is a kind of affective and
>intellectual opening to political possibility
>that would help us read the present differently.
<http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/6January2006/brown.pdf>