By Laëtitia Riss
Before I begin, I would like to warmly thank Professor Bernard Harcourt for inviting me to present my research in the framework of this seminar, Professor Étienne Balibar for agreeing to discuss the first results of my work, and the coordinator of the CCCCT, Fonda Shen, for translating the article, which notably gave its title to this session. I am very honored and I hope that the hypotheses I will formulate this evening will be up to the questions that “History puts on the agenda”, to use an expression that circulates among the philosophers and writers of our time[1]. When I began my PhD thesis in 2020, my project was entitled The Utopian Promise in the End Times, echoing the legacy of the philosopher Günther Anders, and proposed to interrogate the supposed “obsolescence” of utopia in our catastrophic times.
A few years later, my concerns remain unchanged, except that they better understand the solutions that should be avoided: the first one consists in subscribing unreservedly to the “discourses of the end”[2] and in manufacturing a concept of utopia that can correspond to these historical prophecies; the second one consists in neglecting the specificity of utopian practices and in making equivalent all forms of alternatives[3] , in the hope of finding in them the seeds of the future society. These two positions, although they are apparently opposed, are unable to think the present of the utopia : the pessimists imagine it from the illusions of the past, while the optimists project it in the arms of the future. Both are also moderns who ignore themselves, since they presuppose a continuity between History and utopia and subordinate the latter to the requirements of the former. They are thus “late” of two centuries!
Therefore, you can understand why I will adopt a different approach, already claimed by others in this seminar (I am thinking in particular of the concrete utopianism defended by Gary Wilder), where the politicization of utopia must take precedence over its historicization. A reversal which is not without recalling that advocated by Walter Benjamin in order to escape the traps of historicism[4] . In The Book of Passages, he writes this: “The Past must become dialectical reversal and irruption of the awakened consciousness. The politics takes precedence from now on the history. The facts become something that has only just struck us, at the very moment, and to establish them is a matter of remembering.”[5] To a certain extent, this is precisely the method that led me to think that it was possible to “utopize the present,” in solidarity with the utopians of the Enlightenment, and that it was not unreasonable to revive this verbal form in order to problematize the relationship between history, utopias and politics.
The reflections that I developed in my paper have matured since spring 2021 and hold today to three propositions, which I will try to clarify during my intervention: 1/ our historical conjuncture, characterized by the erosion of the philosophies of modern History, calls for a critical rereading of the utopian tradition; 2/ the history of utopia until today has only been the history of its disguise, we have been deceived on its historical function and on the verb that it is appropriate to associate with it: to Act or to Hope (Earth, Present, Men > Heaven, Future, History); 3/ utopian experiences convey a Principle of Action, rather than a Principle of Hope, and are, therefore, one of the conditions (≠ destinations) of the transformation of the world. Thus, when utopias utopize the present, they ward off our historical wait-and-see attitude and make, as of now, politics possible (and desirable).
I. HISTORY.
Our historical conjuncture calls for a critical rereading of the utopian tradition.
I will introduce this proposal by stopping, first of all, on its first syntagm: “our historical conjuncture”. In a short lecture, entitled What is Philosophy?, Etienne Bimbenet argues that “at least once in his life, a philosopher should face the Nietzschean task, taken up a century later by Foucault, of diagnosing in a quasi-medical sense his time” and that he should “answer the question: what is this present that is ours, to all of us, today?”[6] . As critical theorists, this is not just a one-time task, but a permanent one that is entrusted to us in front of the historical circumstances. In the course of the seminar sessions, you have thus established – and enriched – the diagnosis: a dystopian present in which many of us feel powerless (Bernard Harcourt, U. 1/13); a left-wing discourse that is worked by too much pessimism and realism (Gary Wilder, U. 7/13); and an inability to grasp the “alternatives” that are sometimes before our eyes. These concerns are not foreign to the discourses that have accompanied the entry into the twenty-first century: the end of history, the end of progress, the end of utopias, the end of narratives… And, although these analyses have since been contested (critique vs. ideology), it is nevertheless clear that they have made time – that they have marked a generation (yours and mine) – and that they resonate with our daily news, where “alarm bells” and “fire warnings” are set off, without anyone, or, at least, not enough, react to them. The new zeitgeist is thus synthesized by a statement, often attributed to Fredric Jameson (Archaeologies of the Future), but also found in other contemporary theorists[7] : “It is now easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism.”
I leave aside the question of knowing whether these diagnoses – both in substance and in form – are relevant or not. What interests me, for the moment, is to understand how this new “era of catastrophes” that we are entering as well as this philosophical-political crisis that strikes emancipatory thought affect utopia and the reflection we elaborate on it. In your inaugural reading, Mr. Balibar, you have suggested a response to which I am not sure I fully subscribe:
The first proposition that I defend is the following: our starting point must be the fact that, while on the side of its most abstract presuppositions (in particular the phenomenology of time and the concept of history inherited from modernity on which it is based),” the category “utopia appears increasingly fragile, or destabilized, on the other side there should be no doubt that utopias exist more than ever, in a practical form, or they are implemented in the field in man y different forms.
Indeed, to say that our historical conjuncture destabilizes the category of utopia in order to better leave room for “utopias” seems to me problematic for a first strategic reason: we must not leave any chance to our adversaries to consider that “our concrete utopias” are some kind of utopias after the great utopias, in other words utopias after the progress. It is even the opposite work that we have to engage: we have to demonstrate how much the utopias have not lost anything but that they are, on the contrary, gaining everything by escaping (finally!) the scope of the philosophies of history. This is why I defend the idea according to which the obsolescence of a certain progressivism and the limitation of our historical horizons constitute a unique opportunity to reconnect with the emancipating power of utopias – which cannot be reduced to their capacity to produce projections of the world to come (but I will come back to this). The darkness of our time obliges us to identify, with greater lucidity, the practices that illuminate our present, and allow us to find our bearings, to think and to act in it. The organization of this seminar is proof of this: it is no coincidence, Bernard, that you are investigating “concrete utopias” and that you can see a “renaissance” of utopianism.
It seems to me, however, essential to consider this new age of utopia, not as a moment of radical renewal, where we should disassociate ourselves from the utopian heritage (real vs. unreal utopias), but on the contrary as an opportunity to philosophically rend justice to it. For, we must admit, critical philosophers – starting with Marx – have not been kind to utopian practices, for good and bad reasons. And this, precisely, because they considered that they were “outside” history. Ironically, they are nevertheless the ones who gave a philosophical existence to the utopian question which, until then, was rather a matter for writers, who had been careful not to “theorize” their actions. The questions that are thus (re)posed to us, today, are the following: since the philosophies of history are judged obsolete, should we not reconsider the interpretations that they have contributed to naturalize (historical/anhistorical; real/unreal; abstract/concrete)? Shouldn’t we deconstruct – in the Derridean sense of the word – the concept of utopia that has been given to us, before choosing what we keep of it? Shouldn’t we make sure that the utopian practices, of which we claim to speak, are adequately conceptualized? This series of questions constitute the background of the article I wrote, and led me to suggest the verb “utopize” to restore the honor of utopians, who have never been fantaisist dreamers, but makers of the present, in search of a future to be re-opened. I hold as proof an eloquent declaration of Auguste Blanqui, whose determination to prepare the revolution is known, who answers his accusers, during his hearing for seditious acts (May 15, 1848) before the High Court of Bourges on March 31, 1849:
There are no utopians, in the exaggerated sense of the word; there are thinkers who dream of a more fraternal society and seek to discover their promised land in the moving mists of the horizon. But the fool who would like to leap, in once, towards the point unknown rushes into the void.
The only fools we inherit are therefore, in reality, those who confused utopia with progress, as I explain in my article, and whose current descendants repeat, to anyone who will listen, that we are living the “end of utopias”. This diagnosis is not only false, but it is also misleading for us who “rediscover” utopianism.
II. UTOPIA.
The history of utopia until today has only been the history of its disguise.
I then come to my second proposal: the history of utopia until today has only been the history of its disguise. We must therefore rewrite it. As you may know, among specialists (and representatives of the emancipatory tradition), there is no consensus about the birth of utopia. Two Thomas M. – another irony of fate – dispute its kinship: Thomas More, a humanist scholar, to whom we owe the invention of the word “utopia” and of the story of the same name in 1516; Thomas Müntzer, a revolutionary theologian, who roused the peasant masses in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century. This fascinating controversy illustrates many difficulties, which I am trying to clarify in my PhD thesis, and I will try to give you my position on this subject. It seems to me that it is Thomas More who should be preferred, because he singularizes the utopian gesture and formalizes its method (of which Fredric Jameson has delivered brilliant analyses in Archeology of the Future). Utopia is recognized by its radical humanism. It establishes the primacy of the earthly city over the celestial city and upsets the order of things: the other world can be of this world. The geographical arrangment imagined by Thomas More exemplifies it: it is henceforth “the elsewhere” rather than “the beyond”, which counts to reform the existing order; the terrestrial rather than the celestial which determines the possible ones; the men rather than the gods which know “the place of the good” (Eutopia, on the edition of Basel of 1518). From this point of view, utopianism is an agent of secularization: it intends to substitute the desire of a better world to the expectation of the world after. The Christian theologians did not fail to condemn Thomas More’s Utopia and to write, in response, numerous anti-utopias which put in scene “hells on earth” (cf. Corin Braga, Du paradis perdu à l’antiutopie[8]). The violence of their counter-attack indicates how threatening Utopia was and how it was not a harmless story for idealists.
Indeed, I hypothesize that, beyond this reversal of orders (which was already highly sacrilegious), utopianism is rooted in a struggle against what I propose to call “eschatological alienation”, and constitutes one of the unfinished works of my PhD thesis. What does it mean to be alienated in this way? It is to be deprived of the finality of our actions, to be convinced that the other world does not (or not only) depend on us; it is literally to believe in Heaven, in the future, in History, and to have been deprived of our capacity to make history by what we retrospectively qualify as “grand narratives”. But what do these have in common? The Christian representation of time that supports them : a linear time conceived as a structure of expectation and hope (cf. F. Hartog. Chronos, L’Occident en prise avec le Temps[9]). In this temporal framework, the other world is only conceivable in the light of a certain verbal grammar: to wait, to precipitate, to hope – as if something had already begun. This is precisely what the millenarianism of a Thomas Müntzer embodies: he is impatient. He does not want to establish the primacy of the earthly city over the heavenly city, but proclaims the imminent coming of the heavenly city into the earthly city. And what happens when the Kingdom comes down to earth? The eternal comes into the temporal world. This is truly the Parousia, the end of time, the merging of the field of experience and the horizon of expectation, as historian Reinhart Koselleck puts it[10] . Consequently, millenarians do not utopianize the present, they do not transform it into History, in accordance with the definition I give of the verb utopize; on the contrary, they aspire to eliminate the difference (between this world and the other world) so that it becomes purely present to itself. This is the reason why I do not consider them as the first “utopians”, who prefer to take the sea, as Thomas More teaches us. If this detour through the history of utopia seems important to me, it is precisely because it engages our current work on utopia: we must apprehend the utopian gesture with full knowledge of the facts – that is to say, with knowledge of what is utopian and what is anti-utopian. And it is not by chance that we return today to utopia, in its most spatial forms[11] , because the utopian tradition seems to me to carry what we are infinitely lacking today: the map of places from where to begin.
In their own way, utopians are also impatient, they don’t put off action until later, and they want to encourage us to act – not to do as they do, on a mimetic model, but to explore these spaces that they open up in our present. Perhaps they also allow us to elaborate the “critical concept of time” that you called for, Mr. Balibar, in an article entitled: “Eschatology/Teleology. An interrupted philosophical dialogue and its current challenge” (2007)[12] . In the course of my research on the utopian tradition, I have come to think that nothing better defines the utopians’ relationship to time than this sentence by Maurice Blanchot, written about René Char’s La Parole en archipel: “The future is rare and each day that comes is not a day that begins.”[13] As if we must always presuppose that nothing will happen tomorrow if we do not begin now. This measure of a radically different time, of a profoundly anti-eschatological and anti-teleological time, unleashed, more or less consciously, the wrath of the anti-utopians. Then they discredited the utopians precisely from what they tried to fight (the eschatological alienation): they ventured towards the promised lands, they were reproached to be a paradise on earth; they planted the seeds of socialism, they were considered to be “anticipating the future dogmatically”[14] ; they demonstrated the reality of the possible, they were answered that they asked for the impossible. And if the genealogy of anti-utopianism remains to be done with more finesse (I endeavor to do it in my work, by trying to understand how thinkers of the transformation of the world have been lead to abandon the utopians), we have to admit that this long quarrel gave both right and wrong to utopianism: wrong historically because anti-utopianism won this first battle, by imposing its disqualifying labels, and right politically, because utopianism is coming back in force now that only apocalypses without a kingdom remain[15] , and we are forced to admit that History is a nightmare, from which we have to wake up (Joyce, 1920). The time has come, therefore, for anti-anti-utopianism and to reread with attention the end of Thomas More’s account, which, with regard to the better world, states: I rather wish than hope for it.
III. POLITICS.
Utopian experiences convey a Principle of Action, rather than a Principle of Hope.
I will end with a commentary on Günther Anders’ text[16] , which I suggested for our session today and which will allow me to defend my last proposal: utopian experiences convey a Principle of Action, rather than a Principle of Hope – and you will recognize in this formulation, the re-actualization of a lively debate that began between Günther Anders and Ernst Bloch, in the twentieth century, around the despair of the former and the “hopefulness” of the latter. And I would add, as a precautionary measure, in view of last week’s discussions in Berlin, that I am convinced, Bernard, that you are more of a neo-Andersian than a neo-Blochian – you’ll tell me right afterwards. Let’s go back to this short fable, entitled “You Must Not Accept Fortune”, which is taken from Anders’ great philosophical (and anti-fascist) novel, The Molussian Catacomb, written in the 1930s, published just before Anders’ death in 1992, and recently translated into French. Olo and Yegussa, the two prisoners locked up in the underground prisons of Molussia, seem to be discussing our problem of the day: how to make sure that no one hopes things will get better on their own, and in the meantime resigns to the world as it is, even when times are catastrophic. To answer, Olo tolds Yegussa a story : some sailors covet an “island of legendary fertility”, but they berthed there by the chance of a storm (“through no fault of their own”), and end up realizing that it was just another island. Unfortunately, they can no longer leave because they burned the ship – and killed the captain – with which they had arrived, because the captain demanded that “once they arrive on the island, they transform the ship into the one with which they could have berthed by their own means!” So the sailors have little choice but to “settle miserably” on this island. The fall of this story, however, suggests a possibility to avoid the worst of all possible worlds. Here is what Olo concludes: “Years later, a few men tried to build a ship to leave the island, in vain. The others laughed at them and called them “utopians” because they awakened a humiliating memory.”
And if this conclusion is not without ambivalence – one should question this “in vain”, which would be a sign of a possible failure, while keeping in mind that utopian narratives are also characterized by the capacity to formalize their own self-criticism –, it is nevertheless certain that it proves how much utopians do not hope, but try and build ships, even when it is necessary to start again from zero. They are thus the guardians of a “morality of action”, which is exactly what Günther Anders defends against Ernst Bloch. In an eminently polemical discussion opened in 1986, about the reasons for acting and the means of acting, on the occasion of an article entitled Violence: Yes or No[17] , which provoked numerous reactions in Germany, Günther Anders wrote:
I think “hope” is just another word for cowardice. What is hope, really? Is it the belief that things will get better? Or the will that they will become better? No one has ever produced an analysis of the act of hoping. Not even Bloch. Hope should not be created, it should be prevented. For no one will act out of hope. Every hopeful person abandons the improvement to another instance. Yes, the weather is getting better, maybe I can hope. The time does not get better like this; nor does it get worse. But in a situation where only individual action counts, “hope” is only a word for giving up personal action.
You can hear why these sentences were like a bomb. Perhaps this is exactly what Anders was trying to provoke, as he had understood, before many others, that we were entering the end times, that is “the time when we can bring about the end of the world every day”[18]. But to really grasp what Anders meant by the end times, we have to rename them and call them by their secularized name: the desperate times. The question that Anders leaves us is therefore the following: How to live without hope? How do we mobilize without the comfort of sunny horizons? In The Obsolescence of Man, he argues that we must have “the courage to stop hoping”[19] . Where can we find this courage? By frequenting assiduously the utopians who, I am convinced, are courageous men, who utopize the present, and teach us, on a daily basis, that desperate times are not despairing.
Notes
[1] See for example Étienne Balibar, “Eschatologie / Téléologie. Un dialogue philosophique ininterrompu et son enjeu actuel,” Lignes, 2007/2, 183-208; Alain Badiou, Le réveil de l’Histoire, Paris: Lignes, 2011; Éric Vuillard, L’ordre du jour, Paris: Actes Sud, 2017.
[2] Jacques Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie, Paris : Galilée, 1983.
[3] A tendency that can be observed in recent publications on the subject of utopia, where it is more often a question of reconstructing a “utopian imaginary”, similar to that of past centuries. See for example: Julien Vidal, 2030 Glorieuses, Utopies vivantes, Paris: Actes Sud, 2021.
[4] The historicism that Walter Benjamin attacks is that practiced by historians when they write history. Now, the materialist historian must be able to “retain the image of the past that unexpectedly offers itself to the historical subject at the moment of danger. See Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Concept of History [1940], Paris: Gallimard, 2001. In the same way, it is possible to warn against the historical bias that harms the work of critical conceptualization.
[5] Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the 19th Century. Le Livre des Passages, Paris: Cerf, 2021, 405.
[6] Étienne Bimbenet, What is philosophy, Monaco: Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, 2019.
[7] See for example: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative?
[8] Corin Braga, Du paradis perdu à l’antiutopie aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris: Classique Garnier, 2010.
[9] François Hartog. Chronos, L’Occident en prise avec le Temps, Paris: Gallimard, 2020
[10] Reinhart Koselleck, The Past Future, Contribution to the Semantics of Historical Times, Paris: EHESS, 2016.
[11] See in particular: Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres”, Empan: vol. 54, n°2, 2004.
[12] Étienne Balibar, “Eschatology / Teleology. Un dialogue philosophique interrompu et son enjeu actuel “, Lignes: vol. 23-24, n°2-3, 2007.
[13] Maurice Blanchot, about René Char, La parole en archipel, Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
[14] Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843, quoted in: Haug Guégen, Laurent Jeanpierre, La perspective du possible, Paris: La découverte, 2022, p.76.
[15] Michaël Foessel, ” L’apocalypse sans la promesse “, Recherches de Science Religieuse: Tome 108, n°1, January 2020.
[16] Günther Anders, “There are no coincidences”, La Catacombe de Molussie, Paris: L’Échappée, 2022.
[17] Günther Anders, Violence Yes or No. A necessary discussion, Paris: Fario, 2014, p.30.
[18] Günther Anders, The Time of the End (1960), Paris: l’Herne, 2007.
[19] Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of Man (T. 2), Paris: Fario, 2011, p.20.