Imaginal Politics Archives

Film

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, La Grazia

An interview with the Italian film director on ordinariness, doubt, and jealousy at the heart of his new film

December 8, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Paolo Sorrentino

Editorial note: This interview contains spoilers. Paolo Sorrentino’s films are grand affairs, with elaborate camerawork and stunning settings underscored by memorable music. The plots match the grandeur of the mise-en-scène. In his new film, La Grazia, the purely cinematic elements of the film remain grand—and at times knowingly bizarre, like the ...

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, <em>La Grazia</em>

Imaginal Politics

The Riot in the Rights

Fascism, freedom and the far-right

January 19, 2021 • by Rose Parfitt

The Trump presidency has been a rocky road for pretty much everyone to the left of Trump himself – and not only in the United States. Nonetheless, the efforts of the President’s supporters, at his command, to ‘stop the steal’ and overturn the election result by force really has taken ...

Imaginal Politics

“How is it Going with Being?”

Some thoughts on Santiago Zabala’s Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts

May 20, 2020 • by David Block

We are now hearing from a range of media pundits, social media figures, academics, and others, restating what has been painfully obvious: the crisis reveals (sigh, once again) the contradictions of global capitalism. There will no doubt be a great deal of reckoning in the wake of this crisis, which ...

Imaginal Politics

The New York State Fertility Mandate and Compulsory Heterosexuality

But a law expanding the right to reproductive choice is far from universal

May 4, 2020 • by Ellen Yom

While more New Yorkers will now be able to access this costly treatment to grow their families, there are many individuals and couples who are excluded from this new law, including low-income minority women, self-employed individuals, and gay male couples. Additionally, lesbian individuals, to whom the law does apply, need ...

The New York State Fertility Mandate and Compulsory Heterosexuality

Imaginal Politics

We Are Straw Dogs

Reimagining compassion, merit, and Dao in the time of coronavirus

May 2, 2020 • by Austin Burke

I write this with a heavy heart. Amid pervasive confrontation with the floods of data regarding the coronavirus, we each prepare for this abstraction to take more determinate shape in personal encounters—and yet, I was not prepared for my friend, a veteran of the Stonewall riots and a decades-long survivor ...

Imaginal Politics

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Analytic or Continental Philosophy?

February 27, 2020 • by Chiara Bottici

Prima facie, it would seem that so-called “continental philosophy,” that is, the practice of doing philosophy by engaging in a conversation with authors of the past in the humanities style, is much better situated to convey an accurate image of the past than so-called analytic philosophy, which focuses instead on ...

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Imaginal Politics

Philosophy, the Greeks, and U.S. Settler-colonialism

The Myth of an American Arcadia

February 26, 2020 • by Chiara Bottici

As I read more commentaries about the symbolic impact of such a choice for neo-classical architecture and the way in which it has been embraced by white supremacists to purports a view of the US past as “white only,” I am reminded of a striking fact that impressed me ever since I ...

Philosophy, the Greeks, and U.S. Settler-colonialism

Imaginal Politics

The Peace that Kills

Notes from the launch of the Trump & Netanyahu ‘peace plan’

February 13, 2020 • by Antti Tarvainen

If they can afford it, the Palestinians won't have to pretend to be working with the US anymore. Perhaps the security and economic deals related to the Oslo Accords framework can now be abandoned and this, yet another-peace-that-kills, rejected. It is a fool’s hope, but there might thus be a ...

Imaginal Politics

Anarchafeminism

Towards an ontology of the transindividual

December 2, 2019 • by Chiara Bottici

Yet, strikingly enough, in all the literature engaging with intersectionality, there is barely any mention of the feminist tradition of the past that has been claiming exactly the same point for a very long time: anarchist feminism, or as I prefer to call it “anarchAfeminism.” The latter term has been ...

Feature

Reproduction At The End Of Humanity

Refusing Apocalypse and Dismantling The Threat Of The New

August 28, 2019 • by Faith Taylor

My interest in this growing sense of reproductive unease has been nourished by research into the impact of housing insecurity on millennials’ intimate lives. Here, generational inequality generates feelings of thwartedness across a range of experiences -- romantic partnerships are doomed by the inability to leave a parental home, barriers ...

Feature

The New Queer

Aesthetics of the Esoteric Left and Virtual Materialisms

August 19, 2019 • by Luce deLire

The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots inspired cultural actors in Berlin and elsewhere to take stock. June 2019 has seen Puqs in Love at Gorki theater, The Present is Not Enough at Hebbel am Ufer Theater (HAU), the Queer Alms conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and other events. I used the occasion to investigate contemporary 'Queer ...