Abolition and the Prophetic Imagination

Abstract

There is something prophetic about abolition; some element of the elsewhere that marks its practice, and its discourse. In the work of undoing, there is a crack. In the refusal, a moment of imagination. Abolition is driven by definitive demands as much as by what is yet to come and what is still unfinished.3 For some, Michel Foucault is a prophet. He is a prophet in exile and a prophet in extremity.4 As the “power-thinker,” he offers a diagnosis of oppressive power formations and a vision of resistance—always at the edge of what is and in the hope of what is to come. But Foucault himself has a certain allergy to the prophetic, a certain visceral intolerance for the word. “I never behave like a prophet,”5 he insists, and “the role of the