The Refusal of Politics by Dubreuil Laurent; Browning Cory;

Author:Dubreuil, Laurent; Browning, Cory;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

3

Forms of Experience

[1]

That politics seeks to capture the space of life suggests that apolitics has no place. Utopias are the places of no place. During the European Renaissance, part of the fragmentation of the collective that marked the Middles Ages disappeared in favour of concentric governance. This moment enabled the success of the word ‘utopia’, put forward by Thomas More. The place that doesn’t exist at all, by the simple fact of its appellation, asserted itself as a point of reference in political thought. More did not invent the project of describing a different world, but the fate of his book propagated its malleable image, as well as the long shadow that went along with it. The Utopia event, which surpassed the treatise as such, is far from unitary, and I will only sketch out a few points: Utopia is not of this world; it represents a tearing away from contemporary politics, under the guise of its differences; it comes to fill in for a relative loss of marginal spaces; it thus takes a place left empty while also emptying out places; it represents the perfection of politics, which is no longer politics as usual; in this way, it is paradigmatic of all possible reform. These propositions could be set one against the other, or coordinated in a great sophism, a beautiful dialectic, or laid out as a tangled mess for those who dare enter. Utopia is as much the chance of an outside as its foreclosure. In its subsequent development, it has served more to extend boundaries and to launch again and again a plurality of politics, by inspiration or indifference. In announcing its inexistence (‘u’, the first letter of the word, transcribes the Greek ‘ou’, a ‘no’), utopia tacitly calls out for its actualisation, an undertaking that the Enlightenment would take on, in the same way that Ledoux built architectural ideals that would comprise the background of Italian paintings. Because utopia is eutopia: entering into competition with the locus of politics, it strives to be the exact expression of politics, or its slightly embellished reflection. On this point, the source of the refusal is dissolved in the exaltation of the best polis, and thus it no longer puts much into question. It builds off what Michel Foucault in a well-known conference termed ‘heterotopias’, both authorising a coherent ‘no’ and framing it within a description of the best polis.1 In the aftermath of this surreptitious repoliticisation, the common slur of ‘utopian’ doesn’t designate an exit, any exit. Rather it serves to disqualify either the evocation of the polis to come, which glistens in a distant future, or the effort to settle the terms here and now.

Utopian socialism neither holds itself to descriptions in books nor does it wait for the global metabole to introduce the new. It created Fourier’s phalanstères, coffee shops, the ‘commune’ amid arid lands, the countryside or within cities. ‘Utopian’ designates the chord struck between the project and the event of More’s book. We’d be more accurately concerned with ‘revolutionary heterotopias’.

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