Existential Utopia

New Perspectives on Utopian Thought

Michael Marder, Patricia Vieira, Michael Marder, Patricia Vieira

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441115393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Radical political thought of the 20th century was dominated by utopia, but the failure of communism in Eastern Europe and its disavowal in China has brought on the need for a new model of utopian thought. This book thus seeks to redefine the concept of utopia and bring it to bear on today's politics. The original essays, contributed by key thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo and Jean-Luc Nancy, highlight the connection between utopian theory and practice. The book reassesses the legacy of utopia and conceptualizes alternatives to the neo-liberal, technocratic regimes prevalent in today's world. It argues that only utopia in its existential sense, grounded in the lived time and space of politics, can distance itself from mainstream ideology and not be at the service of technocratic regimes, while paying attention to the material conditions of human life. Existential Utopia offers a new and exciting interpretation of utopia in contemporary culture and a much-needed intervention into the philosophical and political discussion of utopian thinking that is both accessible to students and comprehensive.

PART I

Utopia Unbound

CHAPTER 1

In Place of Utopia¹

Jean-Luc Nancy

The word utopia has a very peculiar history. It is one of those considerably rare terms that entered language through an individual invention meant for a very circumscribed usage, which was not only literary but also came under the guise of a proper name. In this respect, it is similar to the name Robinson, to which utopia is, actually, not unrelated, if only due to its insularity. Utopia, the name of the imaginary island where Thomas More places his communitarian republic, ended up assuming the real existence of a common name or a concept, an existence that is as real as that of an earthly island. It is a very small island with a perfectly contemporary meaning that is active within language and thought. Moreover, this word imposed itself across many languages, and its meaning was imprinted at the heart of a thought that was henceforth recognizable at the world scale. A thought concerned with the reality of the world as such, with worldhood as awaiting and anxiety [angoisse], as the necessity that one experiences, or as a desirable utopia.²

Let us recall that the word is composed of the Greek το πο ς(a place, in the precise sense of a determined place, a location, a particular region) and the negative prefix ου, in the same way that ου τι ςmeans “nobody, not a someone.” This artificial Greek term forged by an Englishman in the fifteenth century is used today by everyone to designate a notion or a question, the absence of which from the world horizon of the philosophical and political reflection is unimaginable, regardless of the meaning and the specific values—sometimes opposed to one another—that particular kinds of reflection associate with it. (One might say that a world where utopia would be neither a notion nor a question is for our world . . . a utopia.)

* * *

Utopia, a word that did not originate in ordinary language, that arose out of nothing in language as though by an act of creation ex nihilo, is given the task of designating a nothing-of-place [rien-de-lieu], a non-place [non-lieu], as though occupying the place of a wholly other place, or rather of an other in every place; a word that made concrete, within language, something that truly has a place in the space of meaning. It does not fail, at least, to occupy its place in all the dictionaries. From that place, it does not cease, at the same time, to pierce language, since it is one of those terms where the given signification (a chimerical dream, foreign to the real) is always susceptible to being unhinged, or contested both by an interrogation of the very function of this “dream” or this “chimera,” which precisely wants to be or to signify something else than a “dream” or a “chimera,” and by a reflection about the ties that bind “utopia” to existence and to action. For, in the end, one asks oneself: To what meaning does this kind of extraterritoriality of language lay claim?

Utopia, beyond a certain point of language and of thought, is a non-place of meaning through which, in fact, something else than a place among others in the configuration of meaning perhaps arises in thought. It is a place from which meaning escapes but in such a way that it also constitutes a non-place toward which it escapes (where it flees and takes refuge). But, in this manner, the totality of language and of thought, a totality understood according to its openness and its indefinite movement, would be utopia par excellence. Meaning only has a place within language, even though that which has such a place is always only a cross-reference [renvoi], or a sending [envoi] to the outside of language and of all places. In a word, meaning itself is the non-place or the outside-place [hors-lieu] (so that it can be interrupted by the taking-place [avoir-lieu] of truth, which announces, precisely, the impossibility of localizing meaning and of assigning to it a certain abode).

This non-place or this outside-place (is it still a place outside all places, or merely their negation? is the negation of place a place and does it take place? utopia endlessly stirs these questions) should be understood here as an outside-there [hors-là], in keeping with one of the possible interpretations of that other proper name forged by another writer, the Horla of Maupassant. Horla is eponymous with a text, where it stands for an anguished creature that visits a familiar site from an unnameable outside, which lies beyond the human, beyond our senses and perception. Utopia and Horla would thus form a couple of names posited within the same presence of absence: a couple of inverted signs, where Horla is the terrible one, while Utopia always signals a harmonious presence, a trait to which we will return. (Robinson, to whom we will also come back, could be the child of this couple and the third character of this tragic-comic mythology, the one who restarts humanity while separated from other men, lost, and left to his own devices, but, therefore, perhaps, reduced to nothing other than his shipwreck.)

The presence of absence, the taking-place of the non-place, or of the outside-place, as a condition of meaning itself—such is perhaps the profound and general nature of utopia, as well as the reason for the exceptional fate of its linguistic invention. A reason that is itself immersed in an originary constitution of history, which we have hitherto named Western but which is becoming global: the constitution of an unfamiliarity of meaning. History, in fact, is nothing other than the movement that commences with the suspension of a given truth (of the world of myth and of a mythic foundation) and proceeds to a truth to be discovered or produced. History, therefore, is both meaning and direction [sens]: signification and trajectory—the trajectory of a truth that is fulfilled or that ceaselessly transforms itself and escapes from itself. In its deepest sense, utopia is contemporary with history, and is, at bottom, its first effect. No doubt, Antiquity already evinces important features of utopia, even though they take the shape of dreams or of nostalgia, rather than the Judeo-Christian forms of awaiting and promise. Modern utopia simultaneously represents the fulfilled signification and this fulfillment as an outside of history, which, nevertheless, also presents itself as the extreme edge and as the subsumption of a historical process. Utopia is always suspended between a representation of progress and a representation of an imaginary or symbolic leap, in the course of which no progress would be attained. Consequently, utopia is the tearing of history and of historical meaning: at once its glorification, its mobilization, and its paralysis or discredit.

This is why today, at our historical moment, utopia reaches a sort of extremity: we live in an age that was represented, in various ways, as the possible, or, rather, probable age of a fulfilled utopia (that of machines and/or that of fraternity, that of knowledge and/or that of the complete production of the human). As opposed to this representation, our age appears to itself as that of a derailing, which opens the path to the implosion of the world, or at least as the trigger for a mutation beyond which it would no longer be plausible to think in terms of history and/or of utopia, just as it would no longer be possible to return to myth (it is not by chance that the experiment of returning to myth was made in the past century and we all know where it led). If, as one might think, the mutation of our age is only comparable to that which engendered the West (the one that gave rise to a post-sacrificial world between the tenth and the sixth centuries before Christ, along an arch that stretched from the Mediterranean basin to the shores of the Ganges), then this mutation will make us leave behind history, utopia, and meaning or truth, such as they function in our configuration of thought. Utopia represents, therefore, something like a limit upon which we are touching today: as a figuration of a fulfillment, it becomes a thing of the past, but as a designation of the outside-place or of the non-place, it assumes, perhaps, a new value.

* * *

To grasp more precisely what may be at stake here, one needs to characterize utopia more precisely, a task that can be best accomplished by noting the necessary links that bind it to two other concepts, namely representation and the world.

1) Utopia is always a fiction avowed as such. It fashions itself as representation, at least from a perspective, according to which it implies the irreality of the represented. The invention of the word already contains this feature: it is the name of an island that proclaims that this island does not belong to the earthly geography. It is not insular in the world, but in relation to the world. For the European world, “the Islands,” as one used to say in absolute terms and with a capital “I,” or the idea of an island in general, were for a long time a privileged figure of extra-territoriality, of a place situated at a distance both of desire and of isolation, a virgin and protected land where one staged the possibility of a new world. The fiction of an island turns utopia, from the outset, into a Ur-topia, a term to be pronounced in German: a place of origin, of a new and pure origin (the prefix ur, so familiar to German metaphysics—Ursprung = primordial outpour, origin; Urteil = judgment, elemental division—means “outside of, coming out of”; it has been compared to the English out, and we could also link it to the privative Greek ου). Furthermore, this fictional function of an island could be followed through the movement of the Western world in its detachment from its Mediterranean archi-pelagic cradle, where there were, at first, multiple neighboring islands, still not lost in oceanic distances (even though there was already the idea of a far-away mythical island that was pre-utopian, such as the island of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey (with the gardens of Alcinous), the Atlantis of Plato, the islands mentioned by Euhemerus, or the Islands of the Sun in Diodorus Siculus). Utopia means that it exists nowhere, and that it has no other place than its own representation, which does not refer to a possible referent but, rather, represents an explicit non-reality using elements copied from the real. And yet, it is a place. This non-place is not simply atopic: if it is not another place, it is a place that is other, a place otherwise local and localized, and this outside-place is, in itself, a topos or a figure.

In this sense, Utopia is a literary exercise: it is a fable or an allegory of the same type as the ones we define, sometimes all too hurriedly, as Platonic myths (among which are Atlantis and the Cave, which is also, in the end, a kind of island), because in this hasty definition we keep the Greek word, to which Plato attached, in this case, a very different connotation from the one he gave to the µυ θο ιof the priests and the poets. (The imitation of Plato is obvious in More’s book.) Thus Utopia is a double fiction and representation: first, insofar as it is the explicit invention of that which it presents (the utopian community) and, second, insofar as its spectacle is transparent (all the names are made up, following the model of the title: Without-people, for example, is the name of the king and, most importantly, the name of the traveler-narrator is “Teller of fables”). The spectacle of utopia unfolds, clearly, in order to translate an idea, which, as it happens, is the idea of a communitarian state free from tyranny and injustice. (Needless to say, one can find analogous traits in later utopias.)

Thanks to this double characteristic, the representation of utopia announces that it does nothing but represent, but that it really represents what is desirable. It, consequently, states that the desirable is undoubtedly only the desirable (unrealizable), but that it is, still, no less desirable, namely something that would be worth looking for or inventing in the real and, at the very least, that its representation deserves to be opposed to an unsatisfactory and contestable reality.

In fact, similarly to many other essays of the time (Rabelais or Campanella), More’s book aims first of all to criticize concrete politics, and its fictional presentation is also a means of dissimulation in the eyes of established powers (a method that is successful up to a certain point). With utopia, a decisive feature of modern political consciousness is introduced (already present in Plato, in a certain way), one that we could name the trait/trace [trait] of the impossible. Despite the fact that the ideal city is unrealizable, it is nonetheless this very city—its idea, its image—that we must resolutely oppose to the real city. Utopian spirit appears in its radical and revolutionary character: it demands the overturning of the established order so as to found a new one. But, at the same time, insofar as utopia appears qua utopia (and becomes neither a project nor a program, since that would change its nature), it demands that the established order be faced with a representation, the obvious impossibility of which does not diminish but, on the contrary, sharpens its critical virulence. Utopian representation appears as fictional but not as unrealistic: one should rather say, cum grano salis, hyperrealistic. It calls forth a real that would conform to the laws of this representation.

Yet, this call is made, at the same time, in the guise of an injunction (“it is necessary”), in the guise of a wish (“it would be necessary”), and in the guise of a premise (“let us act as if”): in these three different modes, what we are talking about is a link between the unaccomplished and the accomplished, a link between a finite and an absolute being. Utopia is, in and of itself, an evidence of finitude: but not of finitude understood as simple limitation; on the contrary, of finitude insofar as the finite being exists precisely at its own limit, where it opens itself to the unlimited, to the simultaneously active and passive power of an unlimitation [illimitation]. Utopia is modern, precisely in that it encompasses this structuring of the finite around its infinity and/or around its finitude [finition].

In a sense, this is how Rousseau sees pure democracy and (despite certain differences) how Marx sees realized socialism: they view it in light of a demand, the regulatory character of which precedes and renders secondary the exigencies of feasibility. (One could come back here, on a long detour, to the Kantian, and, later, the Nietzschean motif of the regulatory idea or fiction.) Utopia does not simply set up its non-place in the imaginary, but, rather, in a polemical negation of the real, a negation that, in and of itself, represents the reality—or the “hyperreality”— of necessity (of justice). Utopia is the impossible, not rendered possible, but shown as necessary.

Utopia is, therefore, doubly representative, according to the two meanings of this term. First, it is a figure or a painting of a possible, verisimilar, and recognizable reality (a place, a State, of laws and of mores): a representation in the sense of a reproduction with a monstrative or demonstrative function (one should recall, here, certain models of the utopian architects of the eighteenth century, as well as the scenes and narratives from Sade and Fourrier). Second, it is a presentation, evidencing that which is not in itself present (this is the first meaning of the word “representation,” its theatrical or politico-moral meaning); specifically, it puts on display and makes present the impossible itself, but the impossible insofar as it constitutes an Idea and, as such, a law, a principle, and an injunction. With the figure that has been put forth, it is, then, the unfigurable that takes shape (e.g., the communitarian Idea) and this shape, rather than outlining a scene, opens up, through that scene, a breach of thought and of desire in the real, a breach we could also name the absolute, the true, or the unconditional.

In utopia, reason puts the rational above the reasonable, as the demand of an outside-place opened in and by reason: the infinite excess in reason of its own truth. Utopia is the representation—in the two senses of the word—of this infinity.

2) Second trait: utopia is always the representation of a world. The representations of technical accomplishment, such as those of da Vinci’s machines or others in science fiction, are not utopias as long as they do not explicitly entail a world, that is to say, a totality of existence and of meaning. All this, furthermore, does not mean that technology does not entail such a totality; quite the contrary is the case. But it is necessary to represent this totality as such (for example, neither Star Wars nor 2001, Space Odyssey offers a utopia, for these works describe extrapolations from our world).

Utopia is always, above all, social in the broadest sense of the word: it places itself in the order of a sharing/partitioning of meaning [partage de sens]— that is to say, of meaning itself, absolutely, given that meaning is nothing other than a sharing/partitioning [partage]. It is “ur-topia” in a new sense, that of its novel apparition.

It is always a world that is utopian: a regime of sharing/partitioning, of division, and of connection of those who exchange and convert meaning. If the model of utopia, at least in its broader sense, is political, it is because politics itself has been the name of a combination—that also began with the history of the West—of relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction  Utopia: A Political Ontology
• Part I  Utopia Unbound
• Part II  Putting Utopia to Work
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Copyright page