Can we imagine that crisis is not a concrete, impenetrable, hegemonic reality of conflict and suffering? Isn’t it true that within the declaration of crisis, gaps—spatial and temporal—open up? These gaps are not voids, empty abysses, but, rather, they are full and team with matter, molecules, gases. These negative chimeras are opportunities to frame a world in crisis by articulating its ghostly re
mainder. Hiss, steam, smoke, magma; all arise from the apertures of crisis. Let us move on these windows of radical framework and not find our seats fastened to the seeming “hard reality” of crisis. We have no time to waste capitulating to the tacit terms of crisis, to its requirement that everyone drop everything and focus our eyes, our attentions, our energies onto a single collapsed point at the expense of all other realities and potentialities. We must look in other directions if we are to solve ourselves out of the impatient demands of a crisis that poses itself unilaterally as the dominant and critical reality. If now is a time of crisis, then now is the time for poetics.
