ABSTRACT
Our age is clearly an age of social fragmentation, political disenchantment and open cynicism characterised by the decline of the political mutations of modern universalism—a universalism that, by replacing God with Reason, reoccupied the ground of a pre-modern aspiration to fully represent and master the essence and the totality of the real. On the political level this universalist fantasy took the form of a series of utopian constructions of a reconciled future society. The fragmentation of our present social terrain and cultural milieu entails the collapse of such grandiose fantasies. 1 Today, talk about utopia is usually characterised by a certain ambiguity. For some, of course, utopian constructions are still seen as positive results of human creativity in the sociopolitical sphere: ‘utopia is the expression of a desire for a better way of being’ (Levitas, 1990:8). Other, more suspicious views, such as the one expressed in Marie Berneri’s book Journey through Utopia, warn—taking into account experiences like the Second World War—of the dangers entailed in trusting the idea of a perfect, ordered and regimented world. For some, instead of being ‘how can we realise our utopias?’, the crucial question has become ‘how can we prevent their final realisation?…. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free’ (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309). 2 It is particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this 100crisis in a productive way. 3 In this chapter, I will try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its suffocating strait-jacket. Let’s start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to be regretted or cherished?
