Abstract of Debbie Lisle: What is the futurity of failure? In this paper, I trace how a common-sense imperative to learn from failure has come to govern our efforts to solve global crises. I am interested in how the humiliations and dangers of failure are corrected, redeemed and anticipated in ways that make it no big deal. Solutionism makes failure productive by turning it into something else – a minor error, a lesson to be learned, a future path to avoid. That foreclosure produces a distinct political terrain in which certain bodies, life-worlds and trajectories are made available for redemption and futurity, whilst others are dispossessed and consigned to the wastelands of failure. Drawing on an ‘archive of the already-failed’, I examine what else is going on as the juggernaut of productive failure drives forward. Many have written about how to escape from the wastelands of failure – striving to return to a world driven by progress and success; succumbing to abjection, suffering and death; or building a new revolutionary movement. For me, all of these escape-routes miss the register of everyday life in the ruins in which people navigate, manoeuvre and muddle through a dominant normative infrastructure not oriented to their thriving. To make sense of the political terrain of failure, I explore two related questions: (a) what is done in the name of learning from failure, and (b) what possibilities for living, persisting and dying well emerge when we dispense with the desire to make failure productive.

Vortrag auf Englisch von Prof. Debbie Lisle, Queen's University Belfalst

Mittwoch, 7. Oktober 2026, 17:45-19:45 Uhr
in der Universität Hamburg
Flügelbau West - ESA W 221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg

Der Eintritt zur Veranstaltung ist frei.

Anmeldung erforderlich unter: https://adwhh.de/nextcloud/index.php/apps/forms/s/fRyR3QGBabHJpDyAgJLizFbF