Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University for Social and Political Sciences, Greece. Her books include Agonistic Mourning (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Crisis as a State of Exception: Critiques and Resistances (Savvalas/Athens, 2012); Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body, and Biopolitics (Ekkremes/Athens, 2007). She is co-author, with Judith Butler, of Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press, 2013). She has published numerous papers and book chapters on questions at the intersection between contemporary critical theory, gender theory, and politics of memory.

• Acknowledgements1. Making way for critical futurities2. At odds with the temporalities of the im-possible; or, what critical theory can (still) do3. Im-possible breathing: On courage and criticality in the ghostly historical present4. Counterpublic performativity, or instituting otherwise5. Avowing the unfoundedness of hope

Athena Athanasiou elaborates a critical theory of hope in the most unhopeful of times. Discovering possibility at the site of contingency, vulnerability, impasse, even impossibility, this work addresses political struggles from the fight for a free Palestine to gender emancipation and a postcapitalist order. Athanasiou gathers and lifts us!