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title = "The Imaginary in the Long Extinction"
glassblowers = ["olgagoriunova.md"]
+++

How not to become paralysed when faced with catastrophic problems of such scale as climate change and mass extinction intertwined as they are with a system of such flexibility and domination as capitalism? Thinking about such future 25 years down the line, the question is not one of depression or weakness, but one that relates to how Varlam Shalamov wrote about his life in the camp versus how Solzhenitsyn wrote about his. When the latter talked about certain redemption, a rediscovery of humanity and in that, a certain good that the camp showed, Shalamov wrote that a camp is something that should not have happened. This is not something humans should ever experience; such experience has no redeeming qualities. His is a position of contemplating pain (Simone Weil’s malheur?) that arrests in the tracks and that refuses such spiritual and rational solutions as redemption and (logical) causality.

To go from here to the long extinction, to live and act is first of all to be able to carve the space for the imaginary. The imaginary of the world that is not linear, deterministic and unavoidable. This is not the imaginary as a dominant practice, a collective ‘figuring out’ based on a certain consensus or a symbolic foundation of a society. This is the imaginary that is composed of multiple threads of possibility, some realised in the past - some ongoing, some private - some public, some local and atomistic - some large-scale. Such imaginary is supported by the project of the library.
