“In the prisons of the possible, there’s a different kind of gamble: using philosophy to expose a paradox. The paradox already foreshadowed the irresolvable tragedy that has brought us to this point: a world in which everything was possible, except transforming it.”
The prisons of what’s possible are not a description of the state of the world. Nor do they name an intricate and curious intellectual problem. They are the many faces in which a world that has been left alone unfolds. The “prisons of possible” name a problem that permeates our shared current experience: everything is possible, yet no real transformation occurs. Everything can be said, but there is nothing relevant to add. More of the same awaits us, a repeated confirmation of what already exists. How is it possible that the obviousness of the same world is reproduced in every option, alternative, or choice we make?
At a time when new emancipatory discourses are reclaiming the concept of the possible as a horizon of hope, it becomes urgent to thoroughly explore the place this concept occupies in our discourses, in the relationship we can maintain with reality, and with the production of other realities. This is what this book sets out to do.
Using philosophical tools that do not shy away from the difficulty of some of the central concepts of Western thought (necessity, contingency, reality, possibility), this work analyzes how the notion of the possible has served, since its origin, to organize changing reality and make it thinkable, justifiable, and navigable.