ABSTRACT
There is a strong conceptual link between utopianism and hope, not least given the centrality of Ernst Bloch's mammoth The Principle of Hope to utopian studies. A similarly anti-anti-utopian perspective can be found in Ilya Kabakov's installation 'The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment', made in Moscow in 1985 and first exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York in 1988. Utilizing the 'good' and the 'no'—the affirmative and the negative—simultaneously introduces a constitutive ambiguity to utopia. In positioning the flights of the Mephi and The Man as utopian, then, there is a slippage between the embrace of the unknown future on the one hand and the renunciation of place on the other, as if temporal change and place are opposed. The association is made between place and (unjust) authority: a form of topophobia repeated in some contemporary anarchist approaches to utopian studies. The chapter presnets an overview of key concepts discusses in this book.
