ABSTRACT
The aim of radical utopianism is to explode dominant versions of reality and to see in the falling fragments the possibility of a new world, one in which inequality and injustice are little more than shameful curiosities of the past. For radical utopianism, the future is something that humans make and can always make in ways fundamentally different from the present. Radical utopianism represents a ‘return of the repressed’. As Sigmund Freud explains, ‘The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious’. Freud is obviously referring to the dreams that haunt our sleep, but it seems to work in a similar way with the dreams that have throughout history delivered hope to our everyday lives. As Naomi Klein explains, picturing the place requires a reclaiming of the utopian tradition that animated so many transcendent social movements in the past.
