Toward a new imagination of revolutionary struggle. Conversations with Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal

The imagination of revolutionary change in today’s world is said to be in crisis, or rather it has been for a while – we only need to think of the chronic reciting of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “Left melancholy.” We still struggle to make room in an imaginary of revolutionary struggle that is occupied by the historical experiences of the implication of transformative politics with violence, political oppression, guillotines and gulags. With A Feminist Theory of Refusal (2021), Bonnie Honig turns to our literary and cultural archive in search for figures and scenes that can provide us with a new register – of concepts, allegories and metaphors – upon which we can rely to imagine transformative politics today; a politics that is able to emancipate itself from the symbolic frameworks of hegemonic structural powers whilst at the same time intervening in them.