Since the 1960s, progressive social movements have increasingly embraced “prefigurative” politics. As a strategy, prefiguration entails modes of organization in which people seek to reshape society by cultivating the kinds of persons they aspire to become and informing their relationships with themselves, their peers, and their environment with seeds of the sought-after future they are committed to creating. From the early 2000s on, prefigurative politics has gained popularity, putting personal politics on stage and demanding the theorization of how humans engage with what does not yet exist. However, critical scholarship on political subjectivity inadvertently assumes that past economic deprivation, structural inequalities, unconscious drives, and repressed desires exert a fatalistic and deterministic impact on people's capacity to project and enact alternatives. Scholars do so through etiological perspectives tailored to scrutinize the chain of past events that have governed the current form of human subjectivity and imagination, often in historical or mythological terms. Unfortunately, teleological approaches, which highlight intentions, purposes, and desired outcomes, have not yet received proper attention in the study of people's experiences in politics. This paper invites scholars to explore the political and theoretical benefits of theorizing the human condition not only as a product of its societal past but also as an active product of collective foresight. I argue that combining the two perspectives will help researchers escape the pessimistic ethos haunting various forms of critical scholarship by allowing theorists to focus on excavating the past as much as on mapping the future.