Critical Possibilization: An Essay Towards the Grounding of Not-Yet Determined Futures

Abstract

This paper intervenes in a central tension within queer theory between antisocial refusals of futurity (Edelman) and utopian, relational horizons of the “not yet” (Muñoz, Ahmed). It proposes an inbetween position grounded in a phenomenologically rereading of the Critique of Pure Reason: queer futurity becomes neither a negation of future nor a guaranteed utopia, but a practice of “critical possibilization.” First, building on Muñoz’s concept of trace and Ahmed’s concept of orientation, I argue that traces and orientations must be “met halfway”: neither idealist projections nor merely given, they demand reflective, embodied modification. Second, I reconstruct the Critique’s framework as beginning from the duality of sensibility and understanding and resolving their mediation through imagination’s preconscious, synthesizing activity already operative in perception. Recasting the Critique’s theoretical tools as amounting to an “ordinary acquisition” of both the evidential force and the actual taking shape of the a priori shows how the a priori exhibits, in practice, a realization of not-yet possibilities – what I term the transhistorical, quasi-transcendental character of the a priori based on a plastic structure of experience. Third, I diagnose a “straightening” tendency in the Critique, even as historical and conceptual factors queer this trajectory, revealing a third, indispensable yet not fully thematizable place of imagination, judgment and reflective feelings. Fourth, I reframe experience as a possibilizing structure animated by a drive “hunting for meaningful units” (Zhok 2016), Finally, through Kant’s deployment of the “focus imaginarius”, I show how critical metaphysics institutes an imaginary point within the real, freeing experience from strict (physical) determination and cause as well as opening a space of “determinable indeterminacy” within experience. “Critical possibilization” names this disciplined, felt, and embodied mode of realizing not-yet possibilities: concepts are quasi a priori invitations to engagement that can become futures without being fixed by them. This modest middle path aims to enable theoretical work at the edge of emergent possibilities while remaining faithful to contextual as well as historical conditions and the productive character of individual acts.