Productive Paradoxes: Exploring Prefigurative Practices with Derrida through a Spanish Food Sovereignty Collective

Abstract

There has been a proliferation in the use of the concept of prefiguration to describe and understand many of the protest and social change movements of the past decade. However, there are key aspects of the concept that remain unexplored. In this paper I consider telos and justice, and unveil a temporal paradox arising from the thinking behind prefiguration. Rather than this temporal paradox of prefiguration being the undoing of the concept, it does in fact have the potential to be its strength. The purpose of this paper is to assert, by drawing on Derrida’s notion of the impossibility of justice, that the temporal paradox of prefiguration is not something to be resolved but instead is to be foregrounded and navigated. I use research from a food sovereignty collective in the north of Spain to offer an illustration of a prefigurative economic politics that embraces Derrida’s justice‐as‐an‐impossibility.

Disaster recovery and structural inequalities: A case study of community assertion for justice

“…The feminist critiques of neoliberalism [ [3] , [45] , [47] ] lament the shrinking of alternative imaginaries and are skeptical about acts of externalizing rights and identity claims as they lend limited possibility for political action, foregrounds deeper identification with one's marginality and dependence on the very oppressors [ 3 ]. However, the proponents of ontology of possibility [ [29] , [30] , [31] ] bring forth the possibility of subversively co-opting neo liberal rationalities to counter the vulnerabilities of being exposed. Cvetkovich [ 48 ] identifies counter cultural expression of trauma and injury as an alternative form of expression that prevent the internalization of the pain.…”

“…Peraccini [ 28 ] problematizes the preoccupation of theories of justice on “how” and “what” can be distributed, instead of focusing on understanding how an unjust distribution really takes place and the constraints which weaken the institutions of distributive justice. To be able to make this shift proponents of ontology of possibility or potentiality push for a change in gaze from formal actors and institutions to that of lived experiences of marginalized subjects at the local and every day scale [ [29] , [30] , [31] ]. These scholars believe in the potentiality or possibility of learning from subversive and radical practices and thus overcome the hopelessness created by the critical literature regarding the unchallenged hegemony of neoliberal government rationalities and stiffening of alternatives.…”

“…These scholars believe in the potentiality or possibility of learning from subversive and radical practices and thus overcome the hopelessness created by the critical literature regarding the unchallenged hegemony of neoliberal government rationalities and stiffening of alternatives. Hence we draw from scholars outside the discipline of disaster studies who focus on issues of structural inequality and injustice from the critical lens of the politics of neo liberalism [ 3 , 4 , 19 , 20 , 32 , 33 ] and that of the ontology of possibility and potentiality [ [29] , [30] , [31] ] to understand lived experiences of structural inequality and injustice and the community's initiatives to address it in the post disaster recovery context. Spaces beyond the public arena where everyday social relations and processes that create categorical social positions, privileging one over the other play out, are key to understanding and addressing structural inequality and injustice [ 20 ].…”

La soberanía alimentaria en el desarrollo local

“…Las iniciativas y movimientos que desean establecer y anclar la Soberanía alimentaria como una práctica cotidiana están trabajando para democratizar la forma en que se producen, fabrican y distribuyen los alimentos. Se trata de asumir la responsabilidad del estilo de vida, de las generaciones futuras y el estado actual del sistema agrícola y alimentario a nivel de países desarrollados o en vías de desarrollo (Gordon, 2020).…”