Failing Is Not an Option, It Is the Only Option: Critical Politics as a Time of Contradiction and Failure

Abstract

Abstract Questions regarding the political significance of international relations (IR) and how scholarly practice relates to/constitutes a political practice appear newly resonant, but are longstanding concerns. This article utilizes the growing literature on temporality within international politics to analyze the political potential of these intellectual interventions and generate new ways of framing scholarly practice. We observe two trends within the field. First, IR as a discipline remains largely—although not exclusively—imagined as an English-language discipline generated by scholars in the Global North. Each area's political discourse is currently dominated by fears surrounding foundational political and institutional change due to the rise of racialized authoritarianism within these self-imagined democratic societies. Despite these purportedly dramatic developments, there has not been a similarly dramatic shift in the scholarly relationship with politics. Scholars continue to successfully intervene in their collective presents, but scholarship itself remains oriented toward enduring claims that accumulate knowledge and resist the possibility of “failure.” This paper theorizes the temporality of critical intervention to better relate positively to the bodies that co-constitute our political present. Ultimately, this paper concludes by arguing for a reconsideration of contradiction and failure as frames for thinking scholarly practice in time.