ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that boredom is an indispensable moment in the experience of difference. It takes the form of an exegesis of Frederic Jameson on "the politics of Utopia." Jameson attributes a profound political function to the fact that literary Utopias tend to be so alienatingly boring. Frederic Jameson's "The Politics of Utopia" was published in the January/February 2004 issue of the New Left Review. Jameson begins his consideration of Utopias with reference to the parlous state of present-day thinking on the subject. In the wake of what Perry Anderson has described as "three decades of nearly unbroken political defeat for every force that once fought against the established order", it is hard to imagine any viable alternatives to the status quo. As Jameson has elsewhere remarked, "people find it easier today to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
