https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717722363 Political Studies 1–17 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0032321717722363 journals.sagepub.com/home/psx Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise Uri Gordon Abstract ‘Prefigurative politics’ has become a popular term for social movements’ ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: (a) an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives and (b) prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised resurfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck’s ‘process of reassurance’ in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch’s ‘concrete utopia’, and associating it with ‘anxious’ and ‘catastrophic’ forms of hope. Keywords prefigurative politics, temporal framing, anarchism, Marxism, utopia Accepted: 22 June 2017 Introduction EIMAΣTE EIKONA AΠO TO MEΛΛON (We are an image from the future) Graffiti, 2008 Greek riots. School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Corresponding author: Uri Gordon, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. Email: uri.gordon@nottingham.ac.uk 722363PSX 0 0 10.1177/0032321717722363Political StudiesGordon research-article 2017 Article