The politics of homo speculans offers immanent critique where Gramsci’s interregnum sees only paralysis.

Evidence

The question that arises, then, is whether such movements merely write another page in capitalism’s manual or are actually turning the page to a new chapter altogether. How do we avoid reproducing the system these movements seek to undermine and sabotage? How can the circularity of the new rituals, as it were, be opened up (Bottici 2007)? Any effectual critique of finance cannot avoid facing this normative question. For my own part, I have attempted to move beyond a pessimism that bears the marks of Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2018) hugely influential critique in The New Spirit of Capitalism: a view that centers on late capitalism’s parasitic power to feed on counter-imaginaries and to thus integrate them into the existing social order ad infinitum. I have offered a different reading of what is typically framed as a crisis of capitalism, contending that our current state of suspense challenges the often-cited Gramscian “interregnum thesis” that the old is dead and the new cannot be born. There is no deceased homo politicus to be revived, but a world of immanent possibilities in the politics of homo speculans. I have thus aimed to unveil a mode of critique that is already here, in present practices of resistance that do not shy away from the darkness by wishing uncertainty away. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 363

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core statement positioning homo speculans against both the interregnum thesis and Boltanski-Chiapello capitalism’s absorption critique — central to the reader’s task of defining this figure.
• QUESTION: The reader wants to assess whether counter-speculation reclaims speculative imagination for the left or concedes too much; this is the author’s own framing of that move, so worth testing against the evidence he marshals.