Only in the eighteenth century, when colonial powers began to conjure states into nations, did the imagination become a creative faculty and aesthetics emerge as a technique of individuation. Fantasies of the People is a new series of texts moving across different provincial histories, calling upon disputes in anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry to interrogate the notion of fantasy as one that radically challenges what is real. Emerging from a conference convened by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier at Princeton University in 2025, the series takes as its starting point radical thinkers of the early twentieth century, such as Marxist feminist Lu Märten and the anarchist art critic Carl Einstein, who deemed fantasy a communal sense against the hermetic cognition of imagination. Calling upon a wide range of contemporary artists, writers, and researchers for discussion, the series proposes fantasy as a collective material practice, rather than treating it as a private or irrational faculty, exploring the media of communal sense, past and present, that have been sidelined by individuation, privatization, and colonial violence.
—Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier, series coeditors
***
In 1966 the GDR cultural theorist Günther K. Lehmann published a book titled Phantasie und künstlerische Arbeit (Fantasy and artistic labor) that was based on a startling observation: While for more than two centuries numerous publications by “bourgeois interpreters” had identified “every fantasy as nothing but playful revelry or lofty phantasmagoria, where it wasn’t simply suspected to be directly related to insanity,” no Marxist monograph existed that offering a rebuttal, a “realist fantasy,” an understanding that fantasies “are not imaginings but performance phenomena,” “somatic occurrences.”1 As shown by the present essay and by Devin Fore’s companion essay in this issue, Lehmann wasn’t entirely correct in attesting a categorical absence of Marxist inquiries into fantasy’s metabolic reality. But he was also not entirely wrong. Lehmann’s idiosyncratic attempt to manifest an embodying (verleiblichten) character of fantasy that “reflects … the bond to the social partner, the crowd, calling upon mutual dependencies and bringing them into play” does resound in numerous earlier and later efforts to activate the fantastic fabric of social life against its modern privations.2 Yet a consistent activation of the life of fantasy against its modern irrealization is lacking. Lehmann’s own attempt remains too attached to both Marxism’s and Marx’s commitment to “modern” life to activate fantasy’s fundamentally a-modern reach. And so Devin and I are picking up historical and contemporaneous threads that, like Lehmann, we understand as leading towards the yet-to-be-fully-formulated realist fantasies of the people. For these two introductory essays, we follow variant routes that converge in our commitment to uplifting these fantasies, and in our appreciation for the author who named them, the Berlin-born writer, novelist, theoretician, and feminist agitator Lu Märten.
Common
In 1921 Märten defines fantasy as the “material sensibility of the vital working and living needs” of the people.3 Elsewhere, she establishes that fantasy is the unending Formvermögen (faculty of form) of making a life.4 Fantasy reassembles the living scraps and the deadened remains of disparate lives into a divergent synthesis. Fantasy is vitalized “morphology.”5 It socializes the replaceable commodities that have been isolated into their economic function, the binary sexes that have been secured into their stately legality, the native labors that have been ruptured by their imperial colonization, or de-actualized into being modernity’s backstory. In bringing the mutual dependencies we live on into play, as Lehmann argues, fantasy takes ever new measures of the felt differences and forced distances that relate every living form to the nexus of its material origin.6 In its concatenations, fantasy reoriginates every body in relation, over and over again. It does not offer an escape, neither to Märten nor to Lehmann, nor to us. Rather, fantasy fuels an alternative metabolism that calls on the relations that our living matters, in their current forms, have to their origin in the colonial loot from which current imperial forms were built, testifying to fantasy’s unending present and vitalities, to its living undead within us. To Märten fantasy is every body’s “Werkfähigkeit” (work-forming capacity)7 to actively reshape the origins of each of our presents—their battered forms, their broken lives—into shared reorigination. Fantasy is not built to close the ruptures, the violent “Stoffergreifung” (seizure of matter) of European making; instead, it associates the needful forms and spectral remains of what was ruptured: not “discovery,” but “combination and organization is its invention.”8 Already for Märten, fantasy picks up the threads of common sense/s that drift within the imperial coercions of her colonial times. In Berlin, after February 26, 1885. As it does now. In Berlin, after October 7, 2023.
Märten insists that because fantasy invariably plays up exactly its present’s origins, it has to be inherently technological. Because origins are never forever. They are always new. At least they are to Märten, because her materialism is built on a commitment to reoriginate her present. And they are to me, because I hold on to her commitment. This need for reorigination is what motivates her turn to fantasy, because its incessant reorigination of the present is never fully nostalgic, as it cannot but be current, reaching for whichever media generates the “vital content of a society—[because it is our] impending intentions [within them] that create the forms.”9 Within the colonial horizon that Märten faced then as much as we do today, insisting on fantasy is insisting on the living, the technological, the mutable relation of all matters forced into imperial rule and ordered into their unending reproduction. Fantasy mutates reproduction, as its metabolic reorganization of given matters inevitably renews their place in both social reproduction—refiguring labors—and in individual reproduction—refiguring sexes. Following Märten, fantasy can thus never stop winning its sensuality through the current senses, or else it is destined to descend into merely mechanical reproductions.10 Economic nostalgia. Like that of whiteness. In 2025 Fumi Okiji called fantasy a standard of “noncitizentry,” a “black methodology.”11
In the art of her time, Märten apprehends an “understanding of culture [that] is based on a confusion between historical personal abilities and cultural elements that have become collective and mechanical.”12 Instead of mistaking one for the other, Märten sees both as inextricably entangled, inextricably bound up with each other. Okiji does as well, and quotes Mati Diop: “You don’t make a fantasy film in Africa … Fantasy is part of reality.”13 Our respective entanglements differ drastically. Different places are different times. In fantasy the senses break within their current sense, their linear alignment, and their imperial functions to combine and organize an ongoing series of yet-impending intentions. Following Märten, fantasy will never end. It is never new. It is also newer old. We follow Märten. We follow Okiji. Because the unfantastic subject is deadly. Not just to itself.
Psycho
Before Märten, someone else, arguably less of a Marxist, uncovered fantasy as originary, just before 1900 in Vienna: Sigmund Freud. Märten and Freud shared the conviction that every present is tied to its ongoing reorigination through the advent of fantasy. But in Märten’s materialist horizon, unlike in Freud’s psychoanalytic frame, every presently isolated form, every subject and object, firstly originates in material entanglements, the living Gemeinschaft of sense/s they were forced out of. To Märten it is this dis/identification of every object and subject from its living Gemeinschaft that renders them deployable for the purpose of mechanical economic reproduction. A production whose vitality was (and remains until this day) consequently one of imperial capitalization only. Deadly isolations. Märten’s fantasies of the people cut through these isolations. Their origins are always in what Märten calls Lebensarbeit, “the full life-work of a human.”14 They are made of the living metabolisms of every body’s lives, which are caught in their mechanical labors to drastically varying degrees. But they never end there, because it is this “ur-part of the conscience,” the part seeking its origin, that opens up the “critique of a purpose that it does not know, or that isn’t existent at all.”15 In Märten’s quote, origination is once again a social question, which, in its present form, ruptured by its isolations, loses its sense. Freud endows this isolation with sense/s, while Märten then, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney now, insists on exposing a present that “requires you to think the relation between fantasy and nothingness: what is mistaken for silence is, all of a sudden, transubstantial.”16 Okiji moves their motion onwards, where “fantasy in the hold is not only our imaginings of otherwise worlds, not only referring to our dreams of freedom, but more essentially alludes to an inherited structure of thought, our common ‘sense of being.’”17 Fantasies are “somatic occurrences,” here workings of manifesting an ours that isn’t mine.18 It is the expulsion of the somatic from reason, the making of sense devoid of senses, that secures the role of the fantastic as one of mere delusion, that identifies unreasoned bodies and makes them unreal. This is where any materialism worth its name inevitably disagrees: Lehmann’s “performance phenomena,” Märten’s Werkfähigkeit, and what Devin introduces as Nicolai Bernstein’s conviction that reason developed out of manual labor—they all understand all forms of work as potentially fantastic, and all disembodied reason as violently senseless.
Sometimes Märten too reformulates, as a political program, this nexus of multiple ours divided by senseless reason: “The drama of the proletariat cannot arise until the proletariat has despaired of its solution.”19 There is no solution for the proletariat that is not one of the proletariat. Freud’s horizon of origination, his “phylogenetic fantasy,” tells a very different story.20 His horizon is not one of the proletariat, nor is it one of the hold. But Freud’s subject comes up in the next sentence of Märten’s text. It is the subject of a “bourgeois tragedy that has transformed into universal human tragedy; if such a thing exists. It is now a problem that belongs in the natural sciences.”21 Even if Märten jokes here, Freud’s story speaks earnestly of the subject of those sciences. Freud’s fantasies are of this subject’s reproduction, unlike Märten’s, which are of its deproduction. Okiji, characterizing Nina Simone’s appearance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, writes that “she frustrates the individuation often imposed on her … Nina is not tragic.”22 Nina Simone is not Freud’s subject. And Okiji doesn’t let her be made tragic. Freud’s is a story within which the perpetuity of his origins must be secured in order to stabilize the social core of becoming the subject of those sciences. To be tragic. Mechanically. Märten derails not only her present but also our present by committing us to changing origins, to the prehistories of our vital qualities, breaking the present wide open for the varied Werkfähigkeit of all fantasies. Okiji destabilizes our present by committing us to its unchanging origins, to how its vital qualities cannot bury their prehistory, but still have to be broken wide open for the varied Werkfähigkeit of all fantasies. Freud reins in these fantasies of origin, stabilizing their repetitive traits and committing everybody’s origins to assuring this one present. His present. A natural science of who and what gets to be real that misunderstands itself as a universal human tragedy. In Märten and Okiji, all human life-work testifies to the original senselessness of imperial labor. In Freud the labor of origination binds sense to affirming the self in its imperial shape.23 Freud’s fantasy is in many ways what Märten perceives as a mechanical repetition, a cultural trope that every individual needs in order to understand their own imperially valued individuation. Märten and Okiji do not follow. But one can play around with Freud’s mechanics, like Leo Bersani did when he wrote that “psychoanalytic truth can be analyzed—and verified—only as textual distress.”24 Here Märten and Okiji might follow. I do. It needs retelling.
In “A Phylogenetic Fantasy,” a long-unpublished essay that Freud sent to Sandor Ferenczi in 1897, he narrates his fantasy of origination, and it starts like this:
Mankind, under the influence of the privations that the encroaching Ice Age imposed upon it, has become generally anxious. The hitherto predominantly friendly outside world, which bestowed every satisfaction, transformed itself into a mass of threatening perils. There had been good reasons for realistic anxiety about everything new.25
Speaking from “realistic anxiety,” Freud leads its traces into his origin and secures it by imagining an unchanging prehistory within which his subject once lived unanxiously satisfied. There is no trace of his anxious self-originating from within the historical processes of externalizing an abundance of life into figuring as prehistory, as his prehistory. There is no original colonization. There is only the anxiety of living colonially, of having established “threatening perils” made into nature. And again, Bersani offers us Freud’s distress, explaining that this “ego is a collector who transports inert objects from the outside to the inside. Instead of desiring the world, the ego vampirizes it.”26 What will not let itself be consumed is cause for realistic anxiety. “Nina is not tragic.”27 His musings lead Freud into the narrative of an oedipal world, a phylogenetic fantasy destined to corroborate his ontogenesis consistently, that of becoming (a defensive) man.
I am not laying this out to do away with Freud. I do understand his fantasies of the colonial subject as an immensely articulate horizon of an affirmatively imperial individuation. The Freudian sense of fantasy introduces us to the reproductive senses of the binarily gendered pattern of racialized subjectivation that ruptures so violently within our present. And which goes on to share its violent fantasies generously. Its fantasies, Freud’s fantasies, are running wild. They are the social fantasies of imperial isolation. As Ana Teixeira Pinto recently remarked: “If the world is monstrous, only a monster can thrive.”28 With Maxi Wallenhorst, we can add that it is the uninterrupted extortion of “violent consolation” that makes this subject, Freud’s subject, monstrous.29 The historical fantasy of Freud’s situating of the oedipus complex within the phylogenesis of humanity as such is the fantasy of this subjugation as consolation, of this vampirization as consolation: the infinite subjugation of all life to the consoled occidental father figure. Both Teixeira Pinto and Wallenhorst construe this daddy’s deproduction. Bersani is interested in the sex of his distress. Freud’s phylogenetic fantasy generates a recursive eternity of oedipal purpose, unlike Märten, who sees all “forms originating (in) the changing purposes of life,” thereby distributing fantasy over all processes of un/making mechanical imperial oedipal sense.30 In Freud’s scenario, “the world of fantasy seems to lie completely within the frame of the opposition between subjective and objective, between an interior world … and an exterior world.”31 So wrote Jean Laplanche. He proposed replacing this oedipal property line with Freud’s earlier scheme, the seduction theory, but he also puts into question Freud’s “pre-analytical view of the child as sexually innocent until perverted by adult sexuality,” to “say that as a whole psychic trauma comes from both outside and inside.”32 Freud himself had abandoned his pre-analytical assumption in 1897, not least because he had found “phantasy” all over the child and its recollections. But Freud was “searching, behind the phantasy, for whatever has founded it,” ending up in daddy’s phylogenesis, while Laplanche went on to render seduction both unending and uninnocent, as fantasy’s original pervertedness.33 Freud’s phylogenetic origination is not only vampiric, but ultimately violently senseless, because the oedipal self fails to sense the mutuality of its origination from others. But nobody wants to be there for daddy’s fantasy. I want to agree with Laplanche in Märten’s name. I would not in Ojiki’s. But I want to ask her.
In their 1964 essay “Primal Fantasies, Fantasies of Origins, Origins of Fantasies,” Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis see every body’s fantasy originating not within the frame of opposition between subjective and objective, but exactly where this frame collapses. Enter the nursery. Meet the infant making up properties. Laplanche proposes that every infant’s relation to its surroundings is nothing but fantastic, full of what he calls “enigmatic messages,”34 of impressions that appear dissociatively and in which “nothing indicates that at the beginning the subject finds her place in the word daughter; it could equally well be in the word father or even seduces.”35 In Laplanche’s revision of Freud’s theory of seduction we find ourselves in a scenery without negative space: seduction is everywhere. The infant finds itself in a traumatic scenario, because enigmatic messages keep piling up, and its only way to take action within them is fantastic. The same goes for the adult who cannot but treat the infant fantastically. Individuation is a fantastic (self-)relation, depending on every body’s capacities for making up properties. Reproductive relations are originarily traumatic. Laplanche frees fantasy from Freud’s oedipal mechanics and locates origination where Märten sees it too: situated within a world of in/voluntary communions, within which individuation is invariably originating in the presence of others. We originate without exception in someone else’s space. With a lot of needs and no sense but fantasy. Still, Laplanche’s nursery assumes a space of proprietarian privacy. The space which Freud inhabits too. A space within which Okiji sets Black standards of “self-consciously posing our unreality.”36 Okiji’s our isn’t Freud’s and it isn’t Laplanche’s, and yet it has to be. In “An Agony: As Now,” Amiri Baraka spells out the perpetual unreality of his properties, the unceasing contestations of the enigmatic messages he answers: “I am inside someone / who hates me.”37 Writing a phylogeny through the hold.
Laplanche makes psychoanalysis attend to the fantastic sense/s of its original sociality. The fantasy of the colonial family.38 Still, Laplanche’s infant enjoys its modern mechanics, the consistent coercion of its individuation. Laplanche does not assume the possible homology of the infant’s individuation and deindividuation, as Okiji does, as Baraka does. If “as a whole psychic trauma comes from both outside and inside,” then what happens if we transpose this scenery from the nursery into the school, into the prison, into the camp, into the war zone, in which dehumanization follows familial and imperial hierarchies?39 Baraka’s sense is not unprecedented. Rather, he, like Okiji, resets the precedent, reoriginates it as a fantasy of the people, through the hold. Laplanche’s fantasies of origin do not speak to the concurrence of de/humanization. His subject mistakes itself for an object; it isn’t projected to be one while being coerced into the very shape of subjectivity that has its base in its objectification. Laplanche’s enigmatic vitality is not, like Okiji’s, “about impossibility.”40 Baraka’s and Okiji’s senses bear multiplication. They bear differentiations, differentiations of the historic, the geographic, the somatic, the countless life-works of not being Freud and of yet being projected into him. Not only Freud needs his phylogeny to be every body’s primal fantasy. Laplanche also needs every body’s fantasy to reoriginate his phylogeny. They both need their frames broken. Played. We do too if we are their subjects. Märten understands fantasy as the original Werkfähigkeit of every body making joined sense/s that are inevitably, like Okiji’s, “about impossibility.”
Played
The colonization of fantasy is central to Märten’s sense of it, because her “people” are never indiscriminately modern. They cannot be because the fantasies of the people lead back into their preowned sense/s. Our preowned sense/s. The fantasies of the people are undoing our properties. But within the narratives of imperial rule and its scientific segregation of dis/functional matters, fantasy was compartmentalized. And while Laplanche assents that fantasy is situated “at the very foundations of artistic or scientific interest … representing not only a content in a scene but the way in which it is itself produced,” this, in art as in (the psy) sciences, leads into isolations, insides and outsides, vampirisms and privacies.41 Following Märten, in art too our fantasy, our common Werkfähigkeit, runs into a vampiristic origination problem, as artistic autonomy was built as a space of social delusion. As Lehmann laconically overstates in his 1966 book: “As allegedly art blooms far away from life—no consequences of fantasy should be expected for the real life processes of society either.”42 This is why Märten remains more invested in the originations of the different arts and their crafts than in art’s alleged modern autonomy, which renders it and fantasy within it as a private fancy. Fantasy rendered uncommon. Extra. This is where Märten picks it up, and with it its isolated carrier, the modern artist, this “leftover Formarbeiter” (worker of form). In deproducing art’s vampiristic relation to its outsides, Märten sense/s her present’s fantastic unmodernity, like Okiji, who finds in it the “folkic comportment [that] offends the frugality of individuation, upsets the desire for exclusivity, which ‘originality’ supposedly supplies.”43 This is how Devin and I too sense our present’s unmodernity with Märten, and with Okiji, following the “production and recognition of correspondences,” of standards and metonymic rhythms, with their living transitions. “Both those that are readily available to us through our sensory apparatus as well as those that must be felt, … [since they are] impossible-to-anticipate moments of embodied insurrection, are political action, committed exclusively to bringing itself about.”44
The pitiful transition of the artist, the leftover Formarbeiter, from common fantasy to individual imagination was in full swing when Märten scandalized it in the early twentieth century. The transition had been propagated widely by enthusiastic abettors, like the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth century. And it is still. By many. Colonially. Defensively. Coleridge made some seminal advances to secure art’s desocialization. In 1817 he gifted the “imagination,” freshly lifted from fantasy, with an adjective, “esemplastic,” especially crafted for it, “the living power and prime agent of all human perception.”45 He also dedicated some linguistic efforts to fantasy, renaming it as “fancy,” to underline that “it is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.”46 Immanuel Kant’s 1789 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View had set a similar intention—to define the aesthetic properties of fantasy. “Imagination,” he wrote, “insofar as it involuntarily produces imaginings, is called fantasy.” Only “fantasists,” he continued, will “mistake these [imaginings] for [inner or outer] experiences.”47 The aesthetic realm of imaginary properties that Kant and Coleridge stand by cannot be fantastic if it wants to house a subject that will not be not subjected. Märten understands subjection as latent in every body’s origin and manifest in most. Okiji understands it as manifest in every Black body’s life-work. As Kant adds: “We often and gladly play with the imagination; but the imagination [as fantasy] just as often and sometimes very inconveniently also plays with us.”48 For Märten and Okiji, only sensing how who is played with, how we are played, and who we play brings any form of Werkfähigkeit into our radically unequally colonized lives. Kant and Coleridge want their imagination to be in vampirical play only.
Imagination, Coleridge’s esemplastic inner experience, is tied inextricably to the ruling orders of space and time, the sober division of inner and outer that Freud needed phylogenetically secured and that Laplanche ontogenetically replayed. Imagination was crowned with the role of training the sense/s in
“disenchantment”—implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred … a salient feature of the modern epoch … partly linked to the growing habit of reading imaginative literature—being enclosed within and by it—so that images of a “pre-modern” past acquired in retrospect a quality of enchantment.49
Fantasy was made fancy. Psycho. What and who was played became literally prehistoric.
The forging of imagination out of fantasy was unmistakably an effort to deflect all those origins that had been made unruly, and was carried out against those who were “self-consciously posing … [their] unreality.”50 Fantasy got corralled into what J. R. R. Tolkien would call, in 1928, a genre of “imagined wonder … In fantasy … man becomes a sub-creator … of Other-worlds.”51 Other-worlds of imperial imagination. Think back to Baraka and read Okiji again: “Fantasy in the hold is not only our imaginings of otherwise worlds, not only referring to our dreams of freedom, but more essentially alludes to an inherited structure of thought, our common ‘sense of being.’”52 This sense of being renders the segregated world of imperial reason—which is run by a “mind,” to quote Coleridge once more, that is “affected by thoughts rather than by things”—as simply monstrous.53 Run by a mind that is more affected by reasoning with colonization than by experiencing its subjugations. A mind that controls its imagination. It rules still.
But it is still being unruled. Ligia Lewis’s piece Still Not Still, a ninety-five-minute choreography for seven performers who address one another throughout the play by their first names—Damian, Justin, Jolie, Cassie, Corey, Bogi, Darius—was first staged in 2021.54 Throughout Lewis’s play, spectators see the performers dying. This is what their lives are dedicated to. They share their undead energies, their vitalities wrested from death. But they are disidentified from one another by what forms of death their lives hold for them. They are all leftover Formarbeiter of death, “deactualized to the point of … death.”55 On the bright yellow but rarely lit Dogpark-meets-Riotsville stage, Lewis created the living and dead forms of the casually clad performers, who are unavoidably tethered to one another, without an imaginary horizon offering them or us an inside severed from an outside. No state. No law. We see lived unreality. Subjects who aren’t the subjects of law. Subjects who are otherworldly within this one. Rearticulating the choreographies of their deaths again and again, they are communal, but they are not social. Not to us. They are not for us. Just in front of us. Impossibilities. Damian, Justin, Jolie, Cassie, Corey, Bogi, and Darius are both deadly to one another and to themselves. Repeatedly they address the audience: grouped together into a figure of lamentation, they tonelessly yearn for help. And we, the audience of their deaths, are of no help. But between 2021, when Lewis’s piece premiered, and 2026, when Lewis staged it again in Vienna, death changed. In 2021, the performers who pass as white seemed to either individually articulate that help would be needed, or embody their deaths tragically, as an unending cry. The nonwhite performers appeared to follow a different routine: they matter-of-factly explained their deaths to the (majority white) audience at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. In 2026 in Vienna, at Tanzquartier, the nonwhite performers were pointing at the white-passing performers, and at us, the spectators, laughing, refusing to explain their life’s death. But even if Märten’s assumption that “the drama of the proletariat cannot arise until the proletariat has despaired of its solution” still seemed to apply to the white-passing performers in 2021, their despair had been rendered impossible.56 In 2026, Lewis’s performers do not become indistinct, but their shared stage of unending death no longer offers dramatic difference. In Lewis’s play, individuation now fully figures as an inescapable form of dying. Yet dance still figures as a somatic medium—in Märten’s words, a “type of expression of sensibility that confronts us collectively, but which is not absolutely bound to collectivity.”57 In “Fantasies at Work,” Devin examines Aleksei Gastev’s differentiation between “striking … [as] a swift and sharp work motion that is primarily executed at a remove from the object being processed” and “pressing … [as] a smooth motion that is always executed in contact with the object being processed.”58 Lewis’s piece could be renarrated as a performance of that exact transition. But while Gastev aims to qualify the “future of Soviet labor,” as Devin writes, Lewis qualifies the present of imperial death. In dying, the performers press each other’s limbs in acts of undead love.
In letting death be its overall “enigmatic message” and in hammering its different forms of deactualization into the audiences’ senses, Still Not Still offers a form of vitality that replaces any horizon of its dramatic resolution. In the moments of enthusiastic communion that break through their deaths, the performers are joined in a shared mayhem of fantastic reorigination on stage. The vitalist assumption of colonization—its lively externalization of death into the Other-world, which Freud builds on and Laplanche individualizes—is now suspended in Lewis’s play. Like Märten, like Okiji, Lewis understands fantasy to be undead. And so her performers aren’t dramatic, since at this point in time, in 2026, the imaginations of colonial rule as a process of modern consciousness have been largely replaced by variations on an openly genocidal theme, by whiteness as a raging death cult, and by, with Teixeira Pinto, a monstruous program of eradicating any semblances of life that do not uphold an imperialist mirror stage. Eradications of Other-worlds. If Freud is natural science, Lewis is realist fantasy. For her performers, as in Märten, it is the deproduction of their present that leads to their possible reorigination. They carry on their deaths and they live fantastically, again. Lewis’s performers enact the fantasies of the a-modern people.
In Still Not Still, difference in life is difference of death, and this difference is not flattened but mutually replayed as a difference seen, as Lewis says, “through a black lens.” Cassie, Boti, and Cory each demonstrate their deaths while commenting, “I know my fate,” but in 2021 Cassie’s later attempt to escape from its facticity, her melodramatic onset of pleading with the melodrama of her demise, is sharply told off by the others. Tragedy. Drama. And lastly melodrama. They all fail. In 2026 Cassie’s plea has vanished. There is no pleading with imagination. Its subject is fixed. It is Freud’s. Its imperial states might sometimes pride themselves on accepting walk-ins, but only ever temporality. Not for life. Frantz Fanon reacted to Freud’s self-contained cycle of phylogeny and ontogeny by placing the ruptures, the living forms that are unrealized within his playing field, right at its center, at its origin. In Fanon, modern life originates in the negative metapsychological space of every body’s “sociogeny.”59 Fanon does not offer an addition to Freud’s world, his psychoanalysis, but introduces a vital qualifier to it. Fanon specifies that Freud’s is a sociogeny whose “real fantasy” is “negrophobia”—in other words, a life that premises white vitality on Black death.60 Within Freud’s scenario, “the world of fantasy seems to lie completely within the frame of the opposition between subjective and objective, between an interior world … and an exterior world.”61 Lewis’s play was recentered by the time that had passed since it was first staged: the interior world assumes totality, no exteriority; no Other-world remains tolerated. A monster’s world. A vampiristic feeding frenzy. Lewis stages a life that breaks with drama and tragedy in playing with them. Not playing in them. Playing them. Lewis has called Still Not Still a piece of lamentation. In 2026 the audience turned into this lamentation’s indefensible bystander. Lewis stages a reorigination that presents as deadly throughout while fleshing out an immense Werkfähigkeit within the horizon she prepares to take down. The (white) audience is steered off of its, off our, white empathy: there is no room for mourning the victims of the “real fantasy” of our imagination. The dead return. They live. The fantasies of the people were never purely reproductive. Today it is arguably their reproductive elements that perpetuate death. Lewis centers her piece’s life right at its center, discarding phylogeny and ontogeny to turn sociogeny into the somatic core of each “performance phenomena,” of each fantasy.62
Epic
During the years when Tolkien evacuated fantasy and turned it into a literary curriculum at Oxford, Alfred Döblin, Anna Seghers, Johannes R. Becher, Lu Märten, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Lukacs were aiding and enlivening the morphology of the very genre that was the obscured origin of Tolkien’s fairies: the epic. Seeing the proletarian drama as unlived and the bourgeois tragedy as scientific, Märten added that the failure of “modern consciousness can only be depicted in epic form; it needs historical space, not the vacuum of the theater, because it is currently incommensurable—a concept that is still vague in many respects.”63 To Märten the epic cannot be a staged form, only a lived form. Lewis demonstrates this in her dissociation of the tragedy, the drama, the lament, in binding their impossible subjects to a stage that is not made for their death, in front of an audience that needs to see its imagination broken.
In his 1929 “The Construction of the Epic Work,” Döblin launched an attempt to reoriginate the epic from reportage.64 Off stage. Döblin’s epic is “a description not of a real event but of a true event, or Überrealität (extrareality), which encompasses reality and fantasy.”65 It calls for the undivision of the arts into the fantasies of the people, their epics. Märten had already observed that while
the sum of bourgeois intellectual creations contains the difference between their individual educational factors, … the epic is not only a narrative form that derives its coherence from the meaning and character of a particular historical concept, but it is also … guided, not inhibited, by certain facts in abstractions and speculations—precisely what the original folk sensibility, unaware of “art” in the conscious sense, still understands … loves and practices today in its last vestiges.66
The epic is the living fantasy that precedes art’s discriminations, since it is, as Lukács declared to its detriment, not committed to an individual fate but to that of a community.67 This is where Märten sees the fantasies of the people. This is where Lewis stages their vital death. This is where Okiji enters “in counter-Odyssean empty-handedness, calling for and offering no sacrifice.”68 There couldn’t have been any other fantasies than the fantasies of the people because every thing and every body originates over and over within their communities of materially changing sense/s. But to Märten and Lewis, these are broken communities, communities made from their breaking. Their, our, fantasies are “somatic occurrences,” not by choice but by struggling to understand the present mode of imperial, Freudian, Coleridgeian, Kantian, Tolkinian reproduction as an imagination of unending death. The epic is, as Märten writes, vague, its historical space ruptured. Its personal space is too. Laplanche’s enigmatic message appears hostile. It causes the performer’s death. His enigmatic message is death. In fantasy it can, it arguably must, be reconceived as death, originating in the trauma of Fanon’s “real fantasy.” A death that spreads from its origin. In these last genocidal years, its vampirism devours, degrades, and disgorges the fantasies of the people perpetually, all too obviously.
Lewis and Baraka materialize the disgorging of the people, and Okiji adds: “This common ‘sense of being’ is what Frantz Fanon performs in his phenomenology, recognizing himself to be an ‘object in the midst of objects’ rather than the anticipated meaning maker—this denial ultimately setting him on the path of invention.”69 Märten understands that it is fantasy’s “combination and organization [that] is its invention.” This epic of the present is one of genocide. It is arguably this epic of death that now serves as an origin. But if the epic form, with Märten, still “contains … all those different elements from which, later, under certain economic and class divisions—among which one must always think of the spiritual as a division within the sensual and the material content of life—individual special genres of the arts arose,” then fantasy’s task today seems all the more pressing: it is one of Rückbau (Unbuilding) all our artistic and psychological genres of imagination, which are all colonial in their origin.70 All epically fantastic. Okiji pays no mind to their separation. She maneuvers via their “somatic occurrences.” Märten dissolves them into their origins, into the working “performance phenomena” of the fantasies of the people. Art’s genred division of the senses still fortifies an inside and an outside that fragments the Werkfähigkeit of its subjects, that lets them lose their sense/s of genocide. Lewis’s epic deaths don’t allow Tolkien’s “unreality” to split from “the primary world.”71 The work of combining this primary world with Okiji’s “counter-Odyssean emptyhandedness,” within our Überrealität of perpetual death, consists of mutating the genocidal order of reproduction. Off stage. The division of the people into owners of imaginative sense/s and fantastically sense/d communions is foundational to the divided arts, and has to be continuously renewed, materially reinforced, to secure the unrealization, the unmetaphoric death, of a-modern forms, which are stigmatized as fantastic, existing outside of the reasonable realms of imagination. In 1921 Märten wrote that while our “will pushed toward epic poetry and folkic poetic forms, … history … produced the drama as an autonomous, specifically bourgeois—and fatalistic—genre.”72 This remains fundamental to how Devin and I perceive the life of fantasy today. We are presently caught up in fantasy’s undead epic. It cannot be unending.
Günther K. Lehmann, Phantasie und künstlerische Arbeit: Betrachtungen zur poetischen Phantasie (Aufbau-Verlag 1966), 5, 6, 13, 11.
Lehmann, Phantasie und künstlerische Arbeit, 30.
Lu Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches über Wesen und Veränderung der Künste: Eine pragmatische Einleitung,” in Lu Märten, Formen für den Alltag: Schriften, Aufsätze, Vorträge, ed. Rainhard May (Verlag der Kunst, 1982), 64. Unless otherwise specified all translations are my own.
Lu Märten, Wesen und Veränderung der Formen/Künste: Resultate historisch-materialistischer Untersuchungen (Taifun, 1924), 9.
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 64.
On the question of origins, see Anselm Franke, “Limits to Cosmology,” in Ceremonies: Burial of an Undead World, ed. Franke et al. (Spector Books 2022).
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 35.
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 64.
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 35.
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 64.
Fumi Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford University Press, 2025), 16.
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 64.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 39.
Lu Märten, “Die künstlerischen Momente der Arbeit in alter und neuer Zeit” (1903), in Formen für den Alltag, 14.
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 29.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Fantasy in the Hold,” chap. 6 in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 95.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 44.
Lehmann, Phantasie und künstlerische Arbeit, 11.
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 282.
Sigmund Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy, ed. Ilse Gubrich-Simits (Harvard University Press, 1987).
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung , 282.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 78.
Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence, 1916 →.
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (Columbia University Press, 1986), 90, emphasis in original.
Freud, Phylogenetic Fantasy, 7, emphasis in original.
Bersani, Freudian Body, 95.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 78.
Ana Teixeira Pinto, “When I Was President, No One Ate the Cat,” Berlin Review, October 25, 2024.
Maxi Wallenhorst, “The ‘Crisis of Masculinity’ Crisis,” e-flux journal, no. 159 (December 2025) →.
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 12.
Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis “Primal Fantasies, Fantasies of Origins, Origins of Fantasies,” in Laplanche: An Introduction, ed. Dominique Scarfone (Unconscious in Translation, 2015), 76.
Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1973), 407; Laplanche and Pontalis, “Primal Fantasies,” 83, emphasis in original.
Laplanche and Pontalis, Language, 406.
For an introduction to this aspect of Jean Laplanche’s work, see Dominique Scarfone, “A Brief Introduction to the Work of Jean Laplanche,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 94 (2013).
Laplanche and Pontalis, “Primal Fantasies,” 107.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 2.
Amiri Baraka, “An Agony: As Now,” 1964 →.
On the colonial value of marriage, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents (Duke University Press 2015), 27.
Lowe, Intimacy of Four Continents, 83, emphasis in original.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 2.
Jean Laplanche, “To Situate Sublimation,” October, no. 28 (Spring 1984): 8, emphasis in original.
Lehmann, Phantasie und künstlerische Arbeit, 5.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 77.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 14, emphasis in original.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, excerpted in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. D. R. Stauffer (Modern Library. 1951), 263. In 1690 John Locke made a similar argument in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” in which he dedicated a whole subchapter to “Real and Fantastic Ideas” and their sharp hierarchical opposition. See →.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, xviii.
Quoted in Jochen Schulte Sasse, “Phantasie,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 4 (J. B. Metzler, 2003), 786.
Quoted in Sasse, “Phantasie.”
Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (Columbia University Press 2018), 13.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 2. See Leonora Hanson on Coleridge’s “plea for the Oppressed, not to them” in The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (Stanford University Press 2022), 39.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 1928 →.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 44.
Quoted in Hanson, Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation, 14.
See →.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 1. The full passage here is: “a counterhumanism made to the measure of the / colonized-nonwhite-black-poor-incarcerated-jobless / deactualized to the point of starving to death.”
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 282.
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 39.
Aleksei Gastev, “Vosstanie kul’tury,” in Kak nado rabotat’, ed. N. M. Bakhrakh et al. (Ekonomika, 1972), 51, 34.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 1967), 4.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 106. David Marriott has written extensively on this relation in Wither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018).
Laplanche and Pontalis, “Primal Fantasies,” 76.
Lehmann, Phantasie und künstlerische Arbeit, 5.
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 282.
Alfred Döblin, Der Bau des epischen Werks (Fischer Klassiker, 2013). See also Devin Fore, “Döblin’s Epic: Sense, Document, and the Verbal World Picture,” New German Critique, no. 99 (Fall 2006).
Hunter Bivens, Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933–1945 (Northwestern University Press), 36.
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 68.
Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik (Paul Cassierer, 1920), 58.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 88.
Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow, 44.
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 64–65.
Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories.”
Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches,” 66.
