Persistent Utopia

Miguel Abensour

For the children and teachers of Izieu, arrested April 6, 1944, deported, and murdered.

Persistent utopia is not eternal utopia. To let in a bit of air, to get a bit of distance, let us turn to
the word as we encounter it in Thomas More’s 1516 De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova
insula Utopia, translated as On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of
Utopia. This word, coined by Erasmus’s friend More from the Greek to designate the island
on which the best form of political community is found, is a play on words and from the
beginning stands under the sign of ambiguity. Topia refers to τóπoσ , place, but how shall we
interpret the U? Does it refer to the Greek ευ, meaning good? In this case, Utopia or Eutopia
would signify the place where everything is good, a perfect society or one that most exactly
tends toward perfection. This sense is used by More himself in a paratext accompanying the
main work, a sestet attributed to the poet Anemolius (‘windbag’), the sailor-philosopher’s
nephew:

Utopia was once my name, I lay so far;

But now with Plato’s state I can compare,
Perhaps outdo her (for what he only drew
In empty words I have made live anew
In men and deeds, as well as splendid laws):
Eutopia they should call me, with good cause.1

Or does the U of Utopia refer to the Greek adverb oυ, which in front of a single word
(τóπoζ ) forms a sort of unique negative, in the event Ou-topos, the non-place? In this case,
Utopia means the place of nowhere inasmuch as it is isolated, set off from the world. This
is the interpretation, for example, of the great English utopian of the end of the nineteenth
century, William Morris, who wrote his own utopia in 1890 and gave it the title News from
Nowhere to make it understood that he was not describing a perfect society so much as
showing that what is different – what is other in relation to the existing society – has not yet
begun (Adorno) and therefore does not have any place. Utopia is thus a playful name, fruit
of More’s epigrammatic genius, that permanently oscillates between eu and ou, between
the place where everything is good, the place of bliss (Eutopia), and the place of nowhere
(Ou-topia).
This game, which pervades the term from the start, is essential. It calls our attention
to More’s writing, an oblique writing that, thanks to indirection and ambiguity, plays with
the prohibitions of the existing order, carefully avoiding attacking it head-on. By the same
stroke, it prevents dogmatic readings, be they Catholic or Marxist (Kautsky). In truth, this
play between eu and ou that constitutes the word Utopia aims to foster a new disposition
in the reader, a sixth sense that helps him not take things too literally in utopian matters,
introducing laughter into what seems to be the height of seriousness, namely the search for
the best political community. It is as if utopia said to the reader: it’s very serious, but not as
serious as all that.

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 Persistent Utopia: Miguel Abensour 407

The persistence of utopia is not ‘eternal utopia.’ ‘Eternal utopia’ is a conservative motif,
probably born with the bloody repression of the revolution of June 1848. According to the
counter-revolutionary publicists who used it, there is an ‘eternal utopia’ from Plato to Fourier
by way of More that is, unbeknownst to its authors, always one and the same, impermeable
to history and always affected by the same failings. The eternal utopian text would invariably
produce a closed, static, authoritarian society that negates temporality and does violence to
plurality and individual singularity. If we restore this theme to its period, we can take the
measure of the ideological blindness of those who speak of utopian invariability, for had they
only looked around them they would have seen the fierce struggles between the different
utopian schools of the day, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen – proof that the text of
utopia escapes a return to the same. Truth be told, there is no eternal utopia, but there is an
eternal denunciation of utopia, an eternal hatred of utopia, as if the defenders of different
existing orders joined hands across time to denounce the various forms of alterity to which
the desire for freedom, conjugated with the desire for justice, has given birth through the
course of history.
To the contrary, the expression ‘the persistence of utopia’ designates a stubborn impulse
toward freedom and justice – the end of domination, of relations of servitude, and of relations
of exploitation. Despite all its failures, disavowals, and defeats, this impulse is reborn in
history, reappears, makes itself felt in the blackest catastrophe, resists as if catastrophe itself
called forth new summations. The successive names of utopia are of little importance; what
matters is the orientation toward what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity
here and now. No one defined this persistent utopia, this endurance of utopia as the source
of an always-new upsurge, better than William Morris. In a text more or less concerned with
messianism, A Dream of John Ball, Morris writes: “men fight and lose the battle, and the
thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out
not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another
name . . . .”2 History would then be the theater of a permanent struggle where defeat alternates
with fulfillment. Or rather with non-fulfillment, since the non-coincidence between what was
projected and what has come about throws us back into a new struggle for alterity. This is
another way of affirming, with Walter Benjamin, a secret pact between past generations and
our own. The persistence of utopia, we see, is not due not so much to the repeated pursuit of a
determinate content as to the ever-reborn movement toward something indeterminate. It can
have many names, but its badge of virtue is to wake people up, to tear them away from their
acceptance of the established order they take for granted until the moment of awakening.
Having set out the persistence of utopia, two questions will occupy us:

I. What is, or rather are, the sites of persistent utopia? I will distinguish between two:
1. an ontological site that rests on a certain conception or thought of being with Ernst
Bloch, who wrote, persisted in writing, on utopia his whole life; and 2. a human site that
manifests itself in the encounter or relations with men, “which describe a field of research
barely glimpsed at,” according to Emmanuel Levinas,3 who invites us to consider the
persistence of utopia on the basis of what he calls the ‘utopian human.’
II. What are the forms of the persistence of utopia today? I will take up three of its man-
ifestations: 1. the ever-renewed work on the concept of utopia; 2. what I call the ‘new
utopian spirit’ and how it finds philosophical and historical consistency in the dialectic
of emancipation; and 3. the possible relations between utopia and democracy. Is the
struggle for a certain conception of democracy not one of the signs of the persistence of
utopia?


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I. Sites of the Persistence of Utopia

The persistence of utopia constitutes a question. Not in the sense of a problem to be solved
and by the same stroke suppressed through one or more determinate solutions, but in the
sense that in the economy of the human condition we observe that utopia, directed toward
social alterity, a completely other social, is unceasingly reborn, reappears despite all the
blows it is dealt. As if the resistance of the human took refuge in utopia.
To be sure, we can link this persistence of utopia to an irrepressible desire for freedom and
a centuries-old struggle against inequality. In “Materialism and Morality,” Max Horkheimer
writes:

In this history of humanity, in which inequality constitutes such a fundamental trait, a

certain human reaction has repeatedly become apparent, whether as inequality’s other side
or as its effect. The abolition of inequality has been demanded at different times and in
different places. . . . The equality which was to be brought about . . . has been understood
in the most various ways. . . . All of them make reference to the point that happiness . . . is
not to be determined by fortuitous, capricious factors which are external to the individual
– in other words, that the degree of inequality of the life conditions of individuals [should
be reduced to a strict minimum]. That is the universal content of the concept of Justice;
according to this concept, the social inequality prevailing at any given time requires a
rational foundation. It ceases to be considered as a good, and becomes something that
should be overcome.4

If we want to narrow the analysis, we should mark a difference, as Ernst Bloch invites us to
do in Natural Right and Human Dignity, between two emancipatory traditions, two impulses:
on the one hand, that of utopia, turned toward happiness; on the other, that of natural right,
in search of human dignity – even if they meet and cross in history. Bloch writes:

It is just as urgent suo modo . . . to raise the problem of a heritage of classical natural law as
it is to speak of the heritage of social utopias. Social utopias and natural law had mutually
complementary concerns with the same human space . . . . Although they were in accord
on the decisive issue, a more humane society, there have nevertheless long been important
differences between them. Those differences can, much abbreviated, be formulated as
follows: social utopia aimed at human happiness, natural law at human dignity. Social
utopias depicted relations in which toil and burden cease, natural law constructed relations
in which degradation and insult cease.5

Beyond these transhistorical elements that appear on the sociological level, the persistence
of utopia does not cease to constitute a question. Two thoughts that take different paths can
help us respond: Ernst Bloch on one side, Emmanuel Levinas on the other.
1. According to Ernst Bloch, the author of The Spirit of Utopia (1921–23) and The
Principle of Hope (written in the United States 1938–48, revised in 1953 and 1958, published
in 1959), the persistence of utopia through time comes from an ontological site, in other words
a site that has to do with Being. To the extent that Being is thought at once as process and as
incompletion, utopia and its persistence are inscribed in the very economy of Being. Let me
briefly summarize Bloch’s approach in The Principle of Hope.
• Bloch sets out from the ontological category of the Not (Nicht), which we find for
example in the expression ‘not yet.’ The Not is the origin. It is at the beginning, it is
the beginning: “The Not with which everything starts up and begins, around which every


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Something is still built.”6 A double movement can be observed in the Not: at once lack and
escape beyond this lack. If the Not is a Void, it is at the same time a push to escape this void.
“The Not is lack of Something and also escape from this lack; thus it is a driving towards
what is missing.”7
• For this reason the Not sets beings in motion in the form of drive (Trieb), need, tension.
Bloch pays particular attention to a ‘Not-Having’: hunger. Here the Not must be carefully
distinguished from the Nothing: the act of the Not sets in motion; the act of the Nothing is
annihilation. In hunger, the privation of the Void is revealed as horror vacui, the Not’s aversion
to the Nothing. The hunger that is a ‘Not-Having’ is at the same time a movement beyond
this ‘Not-Having,’ beyond this privation, a movement toward having, toward the production
of having. This is Bloch’s essential difference from Heidegger. In a highly critical fashion,
Levinas says that the Heideggerian Dasein is never hungry, that it does not experience hunger.
To the contrary, according to Bloch being-there is in the first place a being that is prey to
hunger. The privilege accorded to hunger shows how Bloch’s elaboration of categories is
based in the senses and relates to what he calls a “science of affects,” which permits concepts
and affects to reciprocally clarify one another.
• Bloch takes another step when he moves from the Not to the Not-Yet. The Not-Yet
“characterizes the tendency in material process,” i.e., the tendency of the origin (as lack
and a push to leave lack) to look for an exit, a tendency “towards the manifestation of its
content.” In hunger, privation is translated into a horror vacui. It is this horror vacui that is
the determining factor, setting off the initial impulse, “the intensive realization-factor which
sets the world going and keeps it going.”8 Hunger’s struggle to leave the state of privation
is invention, the construction of means of production. In this movement toward the exit, the
Not-Yet is the experience – a sort of repetition of the origin – of the non-accomplishment of
Being.
• It would therefore be in the non-achievement of Being, in the Not-Yet, that utopia
finds its inextinguishable source, the secret of its persistence, its surest principle. It is as if
utopia, the utopian impulse, by aiming at the “Surplus, the essential,” set itself the task of the
achievement, the accomplishment of Being. So it is that, carried, lifted by this ontological
tension, utopia is unceasingly reborn – in short, persists. “The Not as Not-Yet,” writes
Bloch, “passes straight through Becomeness and beyond it; hunger becomes the force of
production on the repeatedly bursting Front of an unfinished world.”9 And, crucially for our
determination of the site of the persistence of utopia: “The Not as processual Not-Yet thus
turns utopia into the real condition of unfinishedness, of only fragmentary essential being
in all objects.”10 Utopia would thus be the exit, the escape of Being, not as Being, but only
insofar as Being has become and is unfinished in its becoming. It is in this non-achievement
of Being, in its gap in relation to essence, that the persistence of utopia resides, the engine
of enigmatic rebirth that all the world’s conservatives try to conceal by invoking an eternal
utopia. It can be noted that, following Bloch, the accomplishment of Being would coincide
with the true end of utopia, or rather would necessarily bring it to an end since it derives
its force from non-accomplishment. With the achievement of Being, the Principle of Hope
would dry up. Bloch writes:

Only if a being like utopia itself (consequently the still completely outstanding kind of
reality: successfulness) were to seize the driving-content of the Here and Now, would the
basic state of mind of this driving, hope, also be totally included in the successfulness of
reality.11


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This hypothesis is certainly conceivable, but is it not, beneath its agreeable appearance, full
of awesome assumptions about the self’s complete coincidence with itself? In waiting for
this return to itself, this return home – a notion we must still interrogate – utopia resists and
perseveres. And for Bloch (or part of Bloch) it is this ‘waiting’ that is essential, for while
the gap between the utopian intention and its realization remains, utopia necessarily persists.
Having envisaged this problematic hypothesis, he immediately adds:

Until this possible fulfillment the intention waking-dream-world is in progress; no part

payment allows it to be forgotten. No making absolute of a mere presentiment may allow
us to forget the mindfulness of this intention. . . . [A] realization has never yet been made
absolute without a final part of its waking dream being left over, and therefore moved
on further beyond the attained to its possible Being-even-better. . . . Anyway the duration,
the non-renunciation of the image of hope, have their origin in the enduring problem,
realization, and in the reasons for this problem itself.12

Perhaps here we grasp, between the hypothesis of the accomplishment and the possibility of
something still better, the Blochian figure of the ambiguity of utopia.
2. We owe the determination of another, non-ontological site to account for the persistence
of utopia to Emmanuel Levinas. We know that in a famous 1951 article, “Is Ontology
Fundamental?,” he questioned the classical primacy of ontology by emphasizing the relation
to the Other, which as such escapes ontology, against the understanding of Being. Levinas
too chooses to situate the source of utopia elsewhere than in Being, in the non-achievement
of Being, in Not-Yet Being, but on the side of human relations, which, he explains in Totality
and Infinity, are a field of study that has barely been glimpsed at. The source of utopia can be
assigned to the human all the more since, following Levinas, the human is utopian in its very
texture – or, better, it is utopia. “The Utopian Human,” he writes in the Preface to the French
edition of Martin Buber’s Utopie et socialisme,13 or again, “The utopia of the human.”
• Levinas’s first decisive step is to invite us to think utopia under the sign of the encounter,
the relation to the Other in its incomparable uniqueness. There is for Levinas an irreducible
specificity of the encounter. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?” he labors to circumscribe it:

Man is the only being I cannot meet without my expressing this meeting itself to him. This
is precisely what distinguishes the meeting from knowledge. In every attitude toward the
human being there is a greeting – even if it is the refusal of a greeting. . . . This impossibility
of approaching the other without speaking means that here thought is inseparable from
expression.14

We should understand that thought is inseparable from the institution of society by and in
a relation that cannot be confused with understanding. The relation to the Other escapes
ontology. Levinas also extracts utopia from the order of knowledge and its effects of power
in order to assign it to the order of sociality, or better, of proximity – the fact of the next
– so that utopia fully becomes what it is, a thought or form of thought that is “otherwise
than knowing.” What does this mean? During an evening devoted to Levinas, Jean-François
Lyotard pointed to the latter’s inestimable contribution in breaking with the tradition of
Western philosophy:

All thought is not knowing. This is very clear. And philosophy is not necessarily, and in any
case not exclusively . . ., a genre of discourse that is a matter of knowing. . . . My admiration
for the thought of Levinas comes from this: it is that suddenly it discovers a domain known


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as experience or reflection that is not an object of knowledge, but about which we can say
something, even if this can never be knowledge.15

Levinas responded:

In evoking the possibility of a thought that is not knowledge, I wanted to affirm a spiritual
[un spirituel] that before everything – before any idea – is in the fact of being close to
someone. Proximity, sociality itself, is ‘otherwise’ than the knowledge that expresses it.
. . . This sociality is not an experience of the other; it is a proximity to the other.16

• Having established this situation of utopia, Levinas would explore the passage from
utopia to what he calls the ethical fact: “The Relationship where the I encounters the You
is the original place and circumstance of the ethical coming [avènement].”17 The fact of the
encounter is thus common to utopia and ethics. This leads to the exigency of trying a new
intrigue for utopia, of orienting it toward another destination: it is no longer a matter of
seeking an accord between Being and man through utopia under the name of the Essential,
which echoes that of essence, but of thinking and practicing utopia as a manifestation of the
human, as an exit from Being as Being, as an escape (to take up the term from his great text
from 1935) beyond essence. Utopia would be indifferent to or otherwise than being. It would
be the appearance of the human, no longer in the form of the conquest of an at-home or a
return home, but as the discovery of the non-place (ou-topos) that doubles and haunts every
place. At the end of Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes: “This book escapes the reproach
of utopianism . . . by recalling that what took place humanly has never been able to remain
closed up in its place.”18 As if for the human, utopian in itself, its effectivity only came in a
given place as an implicit or explicit relation to an exteriority; as if effectivity, the entrance
into effectivity, turned out to be indissociable from a movement of escape.
• Is this exit toward the other man an exit?, Levinas asks. For this “step outside of man,”
to borrow Paul Celan’s expression, this suspension of essence, this halting of the conatus,
of the movement that for every being consists in preserving in its being, leads back “into
a sphere directed toward the human – excentric.”19 It would be like a utopian de-leveling
(dénivellement) that manifests itself beyond ideologies, in a breakthrough toward alterity.
Levinas asks about the possible conjunction between this suspension of the conatus and
the push toward a society that is not indifferent to justice: “Does not the visible face of
this ontological interruption – of the ēpochē – coincide with the movement ‘for a better
society’?”20 In order to account for the utopian de-leveling proper to the sphere of the
human, Levinas proposes the following hypothesis: “As if humanity were a genus allowing
within its logical space (its extention) an absolute break; as if in going toward the other man
we transcended the human, toward utopia.”21
• Utopia, far from being presented as a vacuous dream without orientation or a “bad
infinity,”22 is thought as the clarity in which man reveals himself, for in fact the clarity of
utopia is needed for man to show himself beyond the night in which he struggles – the night
of the there is, the night of the neutral. To the light of intelligibility, of ontology, the poet,
relayed by the philosopher, opposes another source of orientation: the clarity of utopia. The
relation to the Other is not ontology, it is utopia, the appearance of utopia, the movement
toward the beyond of utopia. This is the sense in which we could say that man is a utopian
animal, or an animal for-utopia.
Ernst Bloch’s opposition of man and Being, a remarkable intellectual movement according
to Levinas, thus opens up an alternative for thinking the persistence of utopia. Either utopia


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is nourished in the realm of unachieved, unaccomplished Being or it is born and reborn from
the human itself, from care for the other person and the movement it engenders. But do we
really face an alternative? Levinas rather tends to bring out the ambiguity of Bloch’s work,
which situates utopia at once in the field of ontology and in that of ethics to the extent that
beneath the ontological text another text circulates that is more on the side of the human than
on that of Being.

II. Present Forms of the Persistence of Utopia

A. The first manifestation of the persistence of utopia is the work, always necessary, always
to be done, on the concept of utopia. The concept of utopia is not just playful, as we can see
in Thomas More’s creation. He who describes the island of Utopia bears the name Raphael
(like the angel, he cures blindness) Hythloday, the teller of tales. But it is also an agonistic
concept, which is to say that the concept of utopia, its content, its signification, its orientation,
is the object of a struggle that is unrelenting, in a sense interminable.
To understand this better, let us begin with a fundamental banality: there is an obvious
relation between the content of the concept of utopia and the position of the person who
announces it in the existing society. In other words, the concept of utopia has a completely
different meaning depending on whether the one who uses it favors or opposes the existing
order. A position in favor of the existing order produces a concept of utopia that is at once
broad and derogatory; in this case utopia becomes synonymous with chimerical, unreason-
able, ‘unrealistic,’ impracticable, and even impossible projects, with a marked tendency to
confuse natural impossibilities – the law of gravity, for example – with historical ones, like
the institution of private property. In short, it appears that here there is the attempt to trans-
form history into nature in order to disguise, through this naturalization of history, a new,
rigid, untouchable map of impossibilities.
Conversely, a position critical of the existing order completely transforms the situation: it
is now possible to reach an inventive concept of utopia by making it the object of theoretical
or philosophical elaboration. This produces a concept that is at once narrow and specific,
allowing us to understand anew the consistency and singularity of utopia. In this case, the
inventive concept of utopia is the first stone of a work that consists in rethinking utopia,
revealing the plurality of traditions that constitutes it, and drawing out a new problematic of
utopia under the sign of an interrogation.
There is thus a war of language around the concept of utopia. This was well understood
by Auguste Blanqui, nineteenth-century revolutionary and author in 1871 of an astonishing
work, L’Éternité par les astres [Eternity through the Stars]. He responded to the prosecutor,
the defender of order who in May 1849 denounced “impossible and culpable utopians,” guilty
of questioning the essential institutions of bourgeois society – family, property, marriage,
work, etc. – by in turn denouncing “the old baggage of conservative objurgations” and
pointing to the existence of a uniform, quasi-anonymous language of accusation:

Utopia! Impossibility! Devastating words nailed to our foreheads by our enemies that mean
murderous. A homicidal appeal to the egoism of the living generation, which does not
accept being cut down in bloom and buried in order to fatten future generations . . . This
weapon is terrible, we know something of it; but it is disloyal. There are no utopian thinkers
in the overdrawn acceptation of the word; there are thinkers who dream of a more fraternal
society and seek to discover their promised land in the shifting haze of the horizon. . . . Of
these thinkers, some, like Moses, remain immobile, ruined in the contemplation of this
far-off land . . ., others say: Let’s march, here’s the way! They traverse unknown climes.


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We follow, breaking a path, following the undulations of the earth, eyes always fixed on
the star that guides us . . . I am one of these travelers; yesterday revolutionaries, today
socialists.23

An inventive and specific concept, as in Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia, for whose French
translation Levinas supplied a Preface. Against those who uphold the existing order, he knew
how to discover in utopias, assisted by the Hegelian distinction between the state and civil
society, a specific method of transforming society. Contrary to Jacobinism and the Jacobin
method, utopia does not seek to transform society, to revolutionize it, to “move house” [la
déménager], as Baudelaire would say, by recourse to the state. It reconstructs the social
destroyed by capitalism and the state, multiplying small communities “behind the state’s
back” and against the state in order to remake the social fabric, to reconstitute it, to remake
the social bond. Similarly, Karl Mannheim, in a sense a pale reflection of Ernst Bloch, had
deliberate recourse to a narrow concept in his Ideology and Utopia – the better to prevent
conservative manipulations. First defined as “wish-fulfillment,” utopia, which cannot be
reduced to a spatial project of desires, receives a more precise definition. What deserves the
name utopia, according to Mannheim, are “situationally transcendent ideas (not only wish-
projections).”24 Thus, sociology, far from its habitual conservative condemnation in the name
of impossibility, of a lack of applicability, recognizes in utopia a specific, active function:
that of breaking the bonds of the existing order. It remains to be seen how a given social
group incorporates this utopian function in an individual projection. Seeking the singularity
of utopia, Mannheim displaces space into time. “This wish,” he writes, “is the organizing
principle which even moulds the way in which we experience time.”25 It is on the basis of
this temporal orientation that Mannheim distinguishes among the different configurations of
the “utopian mentality”: the orgiastic chiliasm of the Anabaptists, the humanitarian-liberal
idea, the conservative idea, the socialist-communist utopia.
The interest of this construction is debatable. Does not defining utopia as a mentality
immediate lose its specificity and dissolve its consistency? Be that as it may, when an author
manages to propose an inventive concept of utopia, by the same stroke he allows us to escape
the rejection of the defenders of order, and more precisely the bugbear, the catch-all (if it
is still a matter of a concept) that seeks to discredit under the name of utopia everything
that threatens that which reproduces itself as such. It is then up to the reader to assess the
relevance, the qualities of the specification of the new concept. To this basic banality, which
is often ignored, I add some complementary theses:
• First Thesis. It follows that there is a complete break between the critique of utopia made
from the point of view of the established order – rejection pure and simple – and the
critique formulated by those who are engaged in practices of historical transformation.
For the latter, if utopia can be affected by certain weaknesses, it nonetheless presents
its own qualities which can help in the transformation of the world by investing certain
determinate spheres of the social totality.
• Second Thesis. Historically, in the nineteenth century there was a radical inversion
of the concept of utopia. Originally a product of the conservative or liberal camp,
it was taken up and converted from its original use by progressive or revolution-
ary critique. To ignore this inversion is to risk falling into all kinds of ambiguities.
While conservative or liberal critique belongs to what Michel Foucault called a history
of limits – with the double movement of determining a positivity and excluding or
censuring heterogeneity – progressive or revolutionary critique speaks not from the


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perspective of “so-called reality” and its conservation, but from the perspective of its
transformation. The new question is: what can utopia’s relation be to socio-historical
transformation?
• Third Thesis. It follows that revolutionary theory can invent novel relations to utopia.
With both situated on the same side of the barrier – the subversion of the bourgeois
order – it is now possible to explore differential relations between them, for example
between the morphological anticipation of a better form of society and utopia. In the
case of Marx, we meet an extremely differentiated critique of utopia. In effect, Marx
distinguishes between utopias that fail through their lack of radicalism, so that they are
only the shadow cast by the present society (Proudhon), and utopias that are the “vision
and imaginative expression of a new world” (Fourier, Owen) and as such have a part
to play in the revolutionary process.26 What relation should now be thought between
utopia and revolution? We should also attack the myth of a radical separation between
Marx and utopias. Without getting into the complexity of the Marxian critique of utopia,
which in truth ends up rescuing utopia by “transferring” it into an ontological dialectic,
let us recall Adorno’s formula, which has the merit of alerting us to this complexity:
“Marx and Engels were enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realization.”27
• Fourth Thesis. For those who choose a narrow, inventive, specific concept of utopia,
examination of the great utopian traditions reveals a fecundity that provokes them
to rethink utopia. The sympathetic anticipation of the Saint-Simonians versus the
scientific anticipation of Auguste Comte, the absolute break of Fourier, the thought of
association against domination and the experience of ecstasy in Pierre Leroux are so
many invitations to think utopia otherwise.
To return to the table of contrasts I proposed above (the two possible sites of utopia, Bloch
and Levinas) related to ontology or the utopian human, we see that each time it is a matter
of a deeper philosophical elaboration that affords us an inventive and renewed concept of
utopia. Either, rooted in the non-achievement of Being, utopia is a reply to this ontological
tension, or the fact of proximity, the fact of the relation to the Other, is the movement toward
utopia. In both cases, these inventions keep their distance from the vulgar appropriations
of the concept of utopia, manipulations of the term in public opinion meant to conjure up
every apparition, every appearance of the new, in order to crush every aspiration for a better
society.
B. The second manifestation the persistence of utopia is what I call “the new utopian spirit”
as a response to the dialectic of emancipation.
Elsewhere I have distinguished between three utopian constellations in modernity:28
1. the “in many respects revolutionary”29 utopian socialism I presented more with Pierre
Leroux than with Engels by attributing a common trait to the trio Saint-Simon, Fourier,
and Owen – namely replacing domination, the result of the division between the
dominant and the dominated, with association;
2. neo-utopianism, be it with the disciples of one of the three founders or in an eclectic
enterprise that aims to erase the break of utopia and transform it into a political program;
and
3. the new utopian spirit after 1848 that took note of the criticisms of utopia, not to put an
end to utopia, but to launch it on a new track. This new spirit is manifest both among
utopians (Joseph Déjacque, William Morris) and thinkers of utopia (Ernst Bloch, Martin
Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, André Breton).


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This new utopian spirit could be described as the presence of a movement of suspicion
of utopia within utopian culture, as if utopia had integrated its enemies’ arguments into its
approach without renouncing its primary aim or resigning itself to the end of utopia. What is
at play here is the project of continuing the movement of utopia either by creating new figures
or by elaborating new speculative gestures that would allow it to give birth to another utopia,
to think utopia otherwise. The spirit of this new intelligence of utopia can be grasped in the
following proposition: only a thought of utopia that does violence to itself, that includes the
critique of utopia, acquires the hardness necessary to destroy the myths that ruin utopia.
Moreover, the new utopian spirit takes its sense and philosophical consistency from
its relation to the dialectic of emancipation, the paradoxical movement by which modern
emancipation turns into its opposite. The work of the new utopian spirit would consist in a
new type of intervention against this dialectic of emancipation, aiming to break its circle of
repetition. This intervention can be broken down as follows:
• first of all, access to a more or less acute awareness of this reversal of emancipation,
thought on the model of the dialectic of Enlightenment;
• then the will to locate the blindspots of emancipation or the sites from which the
reversal occurs and repetition sets in;
• finally, investment in these sites giving rise to a work of deconstruction and critique,
opening a new career to utopia by unveiling what Adorno calls “lines of flight.”
The dialectic of emancipation should be thought on the model of the dialectic of Enlight-
enment proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. The initial question, formulated between 1942
and 1944, is: why does humanity, which is oriented towards emancipation, fall back into a
new barbarism instead of committing itself to truly human conditions? Why this reversal of
emancipation into the self-destruction of humanity? Or, again, through what internal process
does reason come to self-destruct through inversion into a new mythology? It is in fact from
within reason that this mythology that destroys reason, which has nothing to do with archaic
vestiges or concerted manipulations, emerges. Far from reassuringly holding reason apart
from myth, Critical Theory shows their proximity – worse, their affinity. Critical Theory also
takes the opposite problematic to that of the Enlightenment, which made reason the declared
adversary of myth. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, there is, to the contrary, a secret
complicity of reason and myth, for there is a rational essence of myth and a mythological
essence of reason.
To better understand the mechanism of this reversal, let us linger on the opening sentence of
Dialectic of Enlightenment: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, Enlightenment
has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty.”30 The
relationship between these two propositions precisely defines the dialectic of reason. The
legitimate project of freeing man from fear – fear of the gods, fear of death – gives rise
to a reversal when it is written under the sign of sovereignty. It is with this identification
of liberation from fear with sovereignty that the proximity, the complicity of myth and
reason sets in. For by diverting liberation from fear toward sovereignty, i.e., the domination
of nature and men, reason, instead of freeing itself from mythical fear, internalizes or
suppresses it by turning it into the will to sovereign domination. Horkheimer and Adorno
write: “Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men.”31 At the same
time that critique marks one of the sites of the reversal, the libido dominandi, it points
toward another figure of reason that, while freeing men from fear, at the same time, by
renouncing sovereignty, welcomes exteriority and alterity. It is on this model that the dialectic
of emancipation can be conceived. The equally criticizable program of modern emancipation


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could be defined in these terms: ‘The goal of emancipation is to free men from servitude as
well as suffering and make them sovereign.’ The components of this dialectic are easy to see:
first of all, illuminating an internal causality of nature to account for the reversal of modern
emancipation into its opposite. There is an “impurity” of the modern project of emancipation
that prevents us from taking it up as such or simply realizing it. Whence the obligation of a
self-reflection of emancipation to prevent the same causes from producing the same effects.
To speak of an internal causality is to say a search for the sites from which the reversal of
emancipation occurs, despite and against the will of historical actors.
It is with Walter Benjamin, who repeatedly sought a new intelligence of utopia, that we
meet the acutest thought of a dialectic of emancipation. He elaborates the mechanism by
which utopia is opposed to the dialectic of emancipation with the greatest rigor in “On
the Concept of History” (1939–40). Here Benjamin isolates three sites of the reversal of
emancipation, which he makes so many targets for the assaults of utopia: the valorization
of work, the belief in continual progress, and the orientation toward the happiness of future
generations. Let us recall the first, the valorization of work. It is those who feel they are
“moving with the current” who exalt work and technological development. Can we not
see here in secularized form the revival, the repetition of the old Protestant work ethic?
This exaltation of work, the savior of new times especially for Social Democracy, rests
on a blind disjunction between progress in the domination of nature and social regression.
Worse, such a conception of emancipation betrays the hold of the model of production,
which valorizes the exploitation of nature without discerning that such a “victory” bears
within itself the possibility of the domination of man over man. Thus Benjamin, against this
reversal of modern emancipation, turns to utopias that in and through their extravagance
seek another relation to nature that can liberate its virtualities. He too chooses the utopia of
Fourier, which, unlike that of the Saint-Simonians, is connected to what Benjamin calls “the
second technology” whose birthplace is the game and aims “at a true harmony of nature and
humanity,” not the domination of one over the other. Benjamin writes:

Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been
ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient
cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede
from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s
bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of
delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials.32

Here we see a new task for utopia emerge against the catastrophe produced by the dialectic
of emancipation. Once the sites of the reversal of emancipation are isolated and located, utopia
is given the function of investing them and orienting them otherwise, apart from the idea
of progress, the valorization of work, and the will to dominate nature. It falls to utopia to
undo the reversal of modern emancipation by giving free reign to the excess that carries it,
beyond the limits of the established order, to search for “lines of flight” as novel as they are
extraordinary.
C. I will only briefly evoke a third sign of the persistence of utopia in our present, namely
the relation between utopia and democracy. To show that there is a relation, a possible
comparison, we should remove two preliminary obstacles:
• On the one hand, we must straightaway reject the worse than unfair identification that
equates utopia with totalitarianism or makes it the cradle of this form of domination.


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If we deliberately inscribe utopia on the side of emancipation, of a centuries-long

movement for emancipation that connects justice and freedom, we can dissociate
utopia from totalitarian forms of domination by recalling only that the totalitarianisms
of the twentieth century were built by annihilating everything that even approximately
resembled a utopian inspiration or experience. Rather than, following the spirit of the
times, associating utopia with totalitarianisms, we must disassociate them to understand
how totalitarianism constituted itself against utopia.
• On the other hand, utopia and democracy have difficulty meeting to the extent that
they have different aims. Democracy amounts to a certain form of political institution,
whereas utopia is apolitical, even antipolitical, insofar as it is a search for a harmonious,
reconciled society, to the point of getting rid of the political. According to the doxa, in
France 1968 corresponds to the age of utopia and 1981 to that of democracy, or more
precisely to the victory of democracy over utopia.
If we refrain from adopting the doxa, as we should, it appears to the contrary, considering
for example the exceptional utopian flourishing of the nineteenth century, that essential
encounters have taken place between utopia and democracy. The two in fact have proximate
emancipatory projects: on the side of democracy, the establishment of a collective power,
a political community whose nature is permanent struggle against the domination of the
powerful; on the side of utopia, the choice of association against hierarchically structured
societies based on domination. In their projects as in their application, utopia and democracy
work to establish – by different paths, to be sure – a condition or situation of non-domination.
This is evident in the career of Pierre Leroux (1797–1871). The inventor of the term socialism,
or so it seems, Leroux’s peculiarity is precisely to have worked at the intersection of these
two sources of inspiration. He strove, on the one hand, to democratize utopia, to break with
utopia’s authoritarian forms of communication, like Saint-Simonian preaching, and thus to
do justice to democracy’s critical inspiration and its spirit of free inquiry. On the other hand,
he strove to ‘utopianize’ democracy, to turn away from a moderate form of democracy à la
Tocqueville or its reduction to a political regime in favor of radical democracy, which the vis
utopia could separate from the market, the constitutional state, and the forms of authoritarian
degeneration that stalk it. Indeed, would utopia not be the active force that allows democracy
to resist the corruption that ceaselessly threatens it?33

Conclusion
Let us return to question of the persistence of utopia. Can we not imagine a utopia whose
persistence would affect its very texture? Was one of Thomas More’s strokes of genius not
to have conceived Utopia under the sign of the persistence of utopia? Beyond access to a
better society, is not the virtue of utopia to give birth, among the inhabitants of Utopia but
also among readers – and is the space of reading not in turn a sort of island? – nothing
other than a utopian disposition, an affective tonality proper to the inhabitants of Utopia?
And perhaps all the more so to the extent that his readers let themselves be won over by
the utopian game, which consists not in choosing such-and-such a “solution,” but in being
able relentlessly to imagine new figures of a free and just political community? Utopia, far
from a closed society, shut in on itself, static – in short, guilty of all the sins of which it
is charged by received opinion – would be open to time, to the event, to the appearance
of the new – in a word, to adventure. Such is the persistence in persistence that More was
able to inscribe, soberly but effectively, in Utopia: “Once stimulated by learning, the minds


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of the Utopians are wonderfully quick to seek out those various arts which make life more
agreeable and convenient.”34 Here is More’s heroism of the mind: the author of the “book
of gold” connected utopia and books, as if the task of books, beyond their materiality, was
to transmit the good news of the possibility of another society through time. So the book of
Utopia allows us to perceive “the utopia of books.” Whence the warm welcome the Utopians
reserve for traveler-philosophers.
This utopian disposition, the disposition toward utopia that is the utopia within utopia,
to change the essential thing, “life,” invites us to interrogate the status of persistence in
persistence. Does the obvious relation between utopia and travel not lie in privileging the
idea of displacement? In this sense the reader, instead of rushing for the “solution” apparently
proposed and adopting or rejecting it, has to let himself go on a trip, to abandon himself to its
tempo and in so doing discover that it is not the result that counts so much as the way of getting
there. Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what
is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”? A displacement
of the real: in other words, the function of the utopian hypothesis would be to relieve the
weight of the real, its massiveness, its density, in order to render it suddenly problematic,
to deprive it of its absoluteness in the name of an “unsurpassable horizon” and allow us
to glimpse through the prism of this problematicity, at the heart of this escape, a plurality
of possibilities. For this displacement or escape produces effects that cannot be mastered:
the real thus shaken, set aside, reveals the lines of flight it hid or foreclosed. Moreover, we
uncover another way of putting displacement to work. At this point utopia seems to arrive at
a crossroads in the form of an alternative between being otherwise and otherwise than being.
We in fact have reason to take up again the Levinasian opposition suggested in On Escape
between finite being, the limits of finite being as it is, and being as such, the being of what
is.35 Transposed to utopia, this opposition resolves into the contrast between a socially and
historically determined real, taken in its limits, and the real as such, the being of the real.
Here we find again our initial diptych: either utopia is conceived of as an escape from
the being that has become (Bloch) or it is thought as an exit from being as such (Levinas).
In short, to take up Gustav Landauer’s terms from Revolution, would human history be a
movement destined to remain a movement, from one utopia toward a new topia and from this
topia toward a resurgence of utopia, and so on?36 Or would displacement mean interruption,
exit? It would no longer be a matter of initiating a movement toward a new real, a new topia,
so much as of being otherwise, of pursuing the questioning of the real itself and orienting
oneself toward an otherwise than being. In this case, once we have drunk from the cup of
utopian displacement, any enclosure, any installation in a place would become inconceivable.
Perhaps here we have a distinctive criterion for the two forms of utopia: those that tilt the
initial displacement toward a new topia and those that privilege the displacement of the real
to the point of seeing it as the quintessence of utopia, paradoxically making the place of
nowhere part of its sojourn until it leaves the real as such and goes in search of an otherwise
than the real in the name, in the absence of anything better, of plasticity and fluidity. As
if the persistence in persistence of utopia consists at once in the displacement achieved,
in withdrawing from every petrifaction, every coagulation, to a new real and lingers in an
element that, by its very fluidity and plasticity, allows it to resist every process of reification,
of constituting a new real, of a new imprisonment in the real. As if for utopia persisting
meant taking note of its fragility, of ephemeral but nevertheless interminable lines of flight
that open breaches. Do the poet William Morris, whose News from Nowhere is set on the
river Thames, and the philosopher Theodor Adorno not meet when they situate themselves
‘on water,’ the placeless place of utopia?37


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But has this persistence of utopia not been struck, implacably, by the catastrophes of
the twentieth century? As Bloch showed many times, death is the anti-utopia itself in the
sense that it is the impossibility of possibility, in Levinas’s terms. Whence the question
imposes itself here and now: the death camps, the extermination camps, the Holocaust in its
uniqueness, the genocides that have followed – did they not forever put an end to utopia, to
its persistence, to the very idea of utopia?
If we turn to Etty Hillesum, Levinas, Adorno, it would seem not. The very opposite
would seem to have happened. Instead of catastrophe forever nullifying the idea of utopia,
its persistence, it paradoxically gave it new life. For from catastrophe itself arises a new
utopian summation, the “never again” that immediately expresses, beyond the banality of the
formulation, the exigency of utopia, as if catastrophe had a contrario revealed the necessity
of utopia. But be careful: it is not a matter of a triumphant persistent utopia. Far from it.
The time of history is not homogeneous, empty material; it bears forever inscribed in it,
despite forgetting, the wounds of the past, the trace of rupture. This is to recognize that the
emancipated society, if there is an emancipated society – and there must be – will necessarily
bear the stigmata of the sufferings of past generations, the trace of sufferings inflicted, the
broken, annihilated lives. Whence, perhaps, access to a persistent utopia under the sign of
non-sovereignty.
Perhaps the utopian summation that emerges from catastrophe suggests to us as imper-
atively as possible that we search for another form of life where it will be possible to free
people from fear, from domination, without throwing them, recruiting them, into the deadly
search for a new sovereignty. A persistent utopia that in the same movement that it perseveres
in its being, unseats sovereignty, puts an end to the very idea of sovereignty. Is not indeed one
of the definitions of persistent utopia freeing people from fear, from everything fear brings,
in order to give birth to a condition in which liberation is conceived, practiced, sought, by
shaking off sovereignty, dissociating itself, emancipating itself from the grip of sovereignty?
A utopian summation that finds in extreme suffering not a foundation but a historically
specific impetus. In this case, the perenniality of utopia depends on what Hegel called
“unhappy consciousness.” What Adorno writes of philosophy also holds for utopia: “The
undiminished persistence of suffering, fear, and menace necessitates that the thought that
cannot be realized should not be discarded.”38 Far from any resignation, it is equally important
not to discard utopia, despite the many invitations to do so. Are we not indebted to Adorno
for a sketch of a possible figure of this new utopian summation? It is not precisely because
Adorno chose a maximal interpretation of ‘never again’ by suggesting a connection between
the possibility of something other (now thwarted) and the avoidance of catastrophe,39 which
he introduces in his essay “Education after Auschwitz” with the utopia and the name of
Fourier? The coldness of human relations and the social reasons of his existence have to do
with catastrophe. Whence the summation that puts an end to this coldness, introducing a new
warmth into human relations:

Probably the warmth between people, which everyone longs for, has never been present at
all, except during short periods and in very small groups . . . . The much maligned utopians
saw this. Thus Charles Fourier defined attraction as something that first must be produced
through a humane social order; he also recognized that this condition would be possible
only when the drives of people are no longer repressed, but fulfilled and released.40

I have noted that utopia is destined to undergo a qualitative leap: whatever alterity is
achieved, utopia will bear the trace of past sufferings. It is through the test of the fragility


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that results from this that utopia is devoted to practicing a persistence in persistence, perhaps
through the encounter with some of the figures I have tried to outline here.

(Translated by James Ingram)

NOTES
This article originally appeared as “Persistante utopie” in Mortibus 1 (Spring 2006). It appears here with
permission.
1. Thomas More, “Six Lines on the Island of Utopia Written by Anemolius, Poet Laureate, and
Nephew to Hythloday by his Sister,” a Latin poem included in some early editions of More’s book,
translated in Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 121 (tr. mod.).
2. William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (London: ElecBook, 2001), 31.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 79.
4. Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected
Early Writings, intr. G. Frederick Hunter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 39–40.
5. Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), xxix (tr. mod.).
6. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 306.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 307.
9. Ibid., 308–9 (tr. mod.).
10. Ibid., 309 (tr. mod.).
11. Ibid., 188 (tr. mod.).
12. Ibid., 188–89 (tr. mod.).
13. Buber, Utopie et socialisme (Paris: Aubier, 1977); English ed.: Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon,
1966).
14. Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998),
7.
15. Lyotard, in Levinas, Autrement que Savoir (Paris: Osiris, 1991), 19f.
16. Levinas, in ibid., 89.
17. Levinas, “Dialogue,” Of God Who Comes To Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998),
147.
18. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Marinus Hijhoff, 1981), 184 (tr.
mod.).
19. Levinas, “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other,” in Proper Names (London: Athlone, 1996), 44,
quoting Celan.
20. Levinas, “Ideology and Idealism,” Of God Who Comes To Mind, 9.
21. Levinas, “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other,” 44.
22. Ibid.
23. Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes. L’Éternité par les astres, ed. Miguel
Abensour and Lalentin Pelosse (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2000), 181–83.
24. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, ed. Louis Wirth (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1968), 185.
25. Ibid., 188.
26. Marx, Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, October 9, 1866, Marx-Engels Collected Works (New York:
International, 1975–2005), vol. 42: 325.
27. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1995), 322.
28. Abensour, “L’Histoire de l’Utopie et le Destin de sa critique,” Textures 6/7 (1973): 3–26 and 8/9
(1974): 55–81.
29. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, pt. 3 (“Critical-Utopian Socialism and
Communism”).
30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming (Herder and Herder,
1972), 3.
31. Ibid., 9.
32. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History,” in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968), Thesis 11.


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33. For a fuller development of this, see Abensour, “Utopia et démocratie,” in L’Utopie en question,
ed. Michèle Riot-Sarcey (Saint-Denis: PUV, 2001), 245–56.
34. More, Utopia, 79.
35. Levinas, On Escape/De l’évasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
36. Gustav Landauer, Die Revolution (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, c. 1912).
37. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1972), “Sur l’eau” (§100).
38. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy,” Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005),
14.
39. Adorno, Negative Dialectics: “Today the thwarted possibility of something other has shrunk to
that of preventing catastrophe in spite of everything” (323).
40. Adorno, “Education After Auschwitz,” Critical Models, 202 (tr. mod.).

Miguel Abensour is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at the University of Paris

VII (Jussieu). His books include Hannah Arendt contre la philosophie politique (2006),
La Démocratie contre l’État. Marx et le moment machiavélien (second edition, 2004), and
L’Utopie de Thomas More à Walter Benjamin (2000).


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