Hope Makes Strange: Affect, Hope and Strangeness

As an affective force hope signals a relation with what remains yet-to-come; it becomes-with in crossing and moving relational realms of assurance and contingency, present and future, and stasis and change. The work of hope flushes the present with the strangeness of our entanglement with what remains to come. I argue that hope is an invitation to contend with the strangeness of entangled becomings, with the manyfold compositional strangeness of our familiar worlds and their unfamiliar trajectories, and not least of all hope’s own estrangement from any sense of definable outcomes. Drawing from affect theory, and specifically building upon Ben Anderson’s framing of affective hope, I propose to explore how hope’s looming possibilities move bodies to bring the ‘outside’ in, to become-with what is always uncertain and yet-to-come, and thus examine how the becoming of hope illuminates the uncanny strangeness that informs worlds.