Tracing the fictions that lie at the core of political theory's attempts to ground itself in nature, truth or knowledge of the real opens the space for a new mode of political theorizing. This new mode of (self-consciously) fictive theorizing has, McManus argues, both epistemological and ethical advantages. Methodologically reflexive, part epistemological critique, and part political manifesto, this book unfolds a creative epistemology of the possible, a utopian and deconstructive mode of political theory which moves beyond a politics based on legislative drives. This means moving from a political-theoretical mode concerned with models of governance, to a critically utopian mode, concerned with emancipatory knowledges and resistance.

Susan McManus is Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen's University, Belfast. She received her doctorate in political theory from the University of Nottingham, where she also held an Economic and Social Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship. She has published essays in Utopian Studies.