Productive Paradoxes: Exploring Prefigurative Practices with Derrida through a Spanish Food Sovereignty Collective

There has been a proliferation in the use of the concept of prefiguration to describe and understand many of the protest and social change movements of the past decade. However, there are key aspects of the concept that remain unexplored. In this paper I consider telos and justice, and unveil a temporal paradox arising from the thinking behind prefiguration. Rather than this temporal paradox of prefiguration being the undoing of the concept, it does in fact have the potential to be its strength. The purpose of this paper is to assert, by drawing on Derrida’s notion of the impossibility of justice, that the temporal paradox of prefiguration is not something to be resolved but instead is to be foregrounded and navigated. I use research from a food sovereignty collective in the north of Spain to offer an illustration of a prefigurative economic politics that embraces Derrida’s justice-as-an-impossibility.