1 Global Discourse • vol XX • no XX • 1–5 © Bristol University Press 2022 • Online ISSN 2043-7897 https://doi.org/10.1332/204378921X16376650676641 Special Issue: Critical Explorations of Crisis: Politics, Precariousness, and Potentialities RESEARCH The ends of perpetual crisis Janet Roitman, Roitmanj@newschool.edu The New School, USA We now live in perpetual crisis: ‘an age of crisis’, ‘times of crisis’, ‘chronic crisis’ and so on. These expressions seem to merely describe a state of afairs, but they are foundational claims. The concept of crisis qualifes a world: it determines what gets to count as an event and what gets inscribed as history in the ongoing stream of competing phenomena. Crisis is a naturalising category that subsumes specifcity. It has colonised the life-worlds of communities across the globe and become foundational to knowledge production despite its Christian-European genealogy. Analyses that attempt to gain insights by elucidating discourses of crisis, or how people use the term ‘crisis’, and the experience of crisis, or how people narrate crisis, disregard the constitutive questions that make crisis a primary means of qualifying the observable world. Asking those constitutive questions has political import because they raise the long-standing problem of representation – of the Other, of alterity, of language and of experience. The problem of representation has been a central topic of epistemology and the principal subject of critique in the social sciences and humanities. It should not be ignored, and it compels us to ask: what becomes of the concept of crisis when we problematise practices of representation? Key words crisis • anti-crisis • epistemology • representation • decolonisation To cite this article: Roitman, J. (2022) The ends of perpetual crisis, Global Discourse, XX(XX), 1–5, DOI: 10.1332/204378921X16376650676641 The essays collected in this special issue of Global Discourse remind us that we live in perpetual crisis. This is a way of indexing the state of human afairs: ‘an age of crisis’, ‘times of crisis’, ‘chronic crisis’ and so on. These expressions seem to merely describe a state of afairs or an experience of time, but they are foundational claims: they are declarations that give structure to amorphous phenomena. In other words, the claim ‘We are in times of crisis’ qualifes history in the ongoing stream of phenomena. The concept of crisis is also a primary means to constitute the signifcance of events in this constant fux of experience (‘This is a crisis; therefore, it is a historical event.’). Put succinctly, the concept of crisis qualifes a world: it determines what gets to count as an event and what gets inscribed as ‘History’ (Roitman, 2014). Crisis is a concept. As such, it has a particular genealogy. The contemporary concept of crisis is said to have emerged, in succession, from Hippocratic medical Unauthenticated | Downloaded 05/11/22 12:21 AM UTC