Epilogue: The Ends of Crisis

Crisis has no end. Or at least, it might seem like it, with the term ‘crisis’ qualifying all spheres of life: from climate, politics, and health to economy and education. It might be tempting to declare that ‘all is in crisis.’ While capturing the sense of urgency and the necessity of attending to the overlapping crises, the very notion of crisis can also foreclose critical analysis and action.
This book’s unique contribution to understanding how ‘crisis’ operates as “a blind spot for the production of knowledge” (Roitman 2014, 14) is in outlining some concrete chronotopes of contemporary crises and reflecting on the logic of their production. We approach these chronotopes as grammars, genres, modes of experience, and forms of critique, and inquire into the possibilities they create or close off.
If crisis today often works to minimize choices and dissent and narrow the space of the future, producing a present without alternatives, this book traces crisis in time-space configurations that, to speak with Hamlet, are “out of joint” with the present: in this porous out-of-jointness, that is, the untimeliness of crisis, alternative chronotopes, present, past, and future, become manifest.