Humanity is not made of creatures in the process of redeeming themselves, but of wills in the process of emancipating themselves.
— Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend, p 160
The micro-fascisms that feed our sense of security — existential and social — operate by way of a judgement: am I worthy of my self in its relation to the community of other self-judging souls. Any judgement is a force of expectation and the flawed superposition of one ‘proper’ moment upon the next. The future becomes shackled to the poverty of proper expectations. The proximity of a future that is not mortgaged by the sum total of our injustices and expected failures of expectations, is not in front of us, but beside us, just out of reach, and without direct correspondence to the present. It resides in the moments of surprise within which we find ourselves. Joyous events of realised sadness that force us to grasp the ungraspable and represent the unrepresentable. In such confusion, of love and loss, there is peace knowing one is alive, that the yearning for this impossibility is a privileged way of living. The force of opportunity for emancipation needs to be recognised first as a struggle for the possibility of opportunity, the oppurtunity to imagine the impossible and to live for love and loss in a single movement. Such is the privilege of being human.