In times marked by fragmentation and crisis, theoretical psychology faces an urgent task: to rethink its relationship with mortality. This paper proposes “theorizing mortality as resistance” (a mode of thought that confronts death anxiety not as a private neurosis, but a as a political and ethical frontier. Drawing from existential and humanistic traditions (Becker, Yalom, Arendt, Butler), this work argues that awareness of finitude can serve as a radical form of consciousness, unsettling the cultural mechanisms that deny vulnerability and sustain domination.

Modernity’s obsession with progress and permanence has produced a psychological alienation from death, yielding collective defenses (distraction, consumption, and technological transcendence) that suppress our shared fragility. By contrast, to think with death is to recover the capacity for humility, compassion, and ethical imagination. This paper situates theoretical reflection as a moral act: a practice of staying awake to impermanence in a world that encourages numbness.

Through analysis of narrative, art, and philosophical discourse, the presentation contends that mortality awareness can generate new forms of solidarity and meaning-making. In this sense, theory becomes vigil (an ongoing commitment to preserving humanity amidst decay. To theorize mortality, then, is to resist despair by not denying darkness, but by learning to swell within it, creating the conditions for ethical renewal and collective hope.

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.

In moments of deep political crisis, imagination becomes a battlefield. The futures we envision—whether hopeful or dystopian—can heal our democracies or hasten their erosion. This presentation asks: When does political imagination act as a cure, and when does it turn into poison?

Drawing on political imagination—the ways groups envision their socio-political reality, its boundaries, limits, and possibilities (Taylor, 2004)—I explore its power both to preserve rigid social orders and to create alternative ones (Castoriadis, 1987). In times of crisis, this capacity is amplified: imagined futures can expand democratic possibilities or produce destructive visions that erode them (Castoriadis, 2012; Fry & Tlostanova, 2020).

My doctoral research examines these dynamics through the Jewish–Arab encounter in Be’er Sheva, focusing on Jewish and Arab community members linked to the bilingual schools founded by the Hagar Association. Based on in-depth interviews with educators, community staff, association leaders, and influential parents, the study addresses both their engagement with Hagar and their broader social and political experiences in a context defined by segregation, inequality, and ongoing war.

By analyzing these experiences through the framework of political imagination, the talk will map conditions under which the Jewish–Arab encounter acts as cure or poison—when it fosters imagining democratic futures, and when it forecloses them or fuels the imagining of anti-democratic ones. It will invite the audience to consider how theory can serve not merely as description, nor to interpret the present and past, but as an active force in shaping political futures.