Figurations of the Future: On the Form and Temporality of Protests among Left Radical Activists in Europe

During the past ten years, protests timed to coincide with international summits have become a recurrent phenomenon in Europe. The present article describes the protests of left radical activists during NATO’s sixtieth anniversary summit in Strasbourg in 2009, paying attention to the particular relationship between form, body and time. The article establishes a dialogue between the Manchester School and the performative theory of Victor Turner, Viveros de Castro’s theorization of Amerindian perspectivism and newer theories of time and the body. The article argues that during confrontations between activists and the police a moment of bodily intensity arises, which entail a work on time. The skilful performance makes a temporal bodily perspective appear that overcomes the antinomies between immanence and transcendence, between the present and the future, that characterize much thought on social change.