(2000). For Utopia: The (limits of the) Utopian function in late capitalist society. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 25-43.

ABSTRACT This article examines the temporal rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future to discuss how the new generation of climate movement organizations offers ideas of an open future that can be acted upon. Research has shown how climate organizations create economic and social disruptions. However, as the article shows, they also create temporal disruptions. Taking theoretical inspiration from critical utopian studies, the article states that the climate activists should be understood as utilizing a disruptive utopian method that aims (...) to disrupt the present and thereby open the future. The method relies on utopias that are relational and open, not static or absolute. Hence, the utopianism employed by these groups is not about closure and perfection, but rather about openness and offering alternatives. (shrink)

This is an edited transcript of a keynote paper given at IACR's 2021 Annual Conference. The paper outlines a critical realist approach to critique and illustrates its application to the contemporary economy. It argues that responsible, constructive critique depends on ethics, on causal explanation, and on the development of utopian visions. Utopias are tools, and concrete utopias are not visions of whole alternative ready-made societies, but rather partial models that can be built in practice as elements of the larger social (...) world. The argument is illustrated with three cases of digital utopianism, which help to demonstrate the practical challenges facing utopian schemes. Concrete utopias are a vehicle for combining our theoretical understandings of possibilities with an ethical analysis of needs in order to offer practical schemes for improving human flourishing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The category of the right to the city, conceptualized over five decades ago by the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, is currently experiencing its second life. It has become a significant political slogan, which – in its counter-hegemonic aspirations towards social change and transgressing the existing order, primarily in the fight against the reality of neoliberal urbanization – rallies together various socio-political movements most often defined under the umbrella term of urban social movements. In my analysis of (...) Lefebvrian notions, I utilize the increasingly widespread category of ‘real utopia’. Additionally, this real utopia treats the right to the city in epistemological terms: as a peculiar type of knowledge co-produced at the intersection of academia and social activism, which remains a relatively rare interpretation among readers, interpreters and practitioners following Lefebvre. I search for these themes both directly in Lefebvre’s work as well as that of his continuators, observing the practices of producing knowledge useful to contemporary Polish right to the city movements. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strong—but, I argue, contingent—association that holds between hope and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justification of social hope; one which appeals to a notion of unfulfilled or frustrated natural human capacities, another which invokes a providential (...) order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justification, turning instead to a notion of ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briefly consider their relevance for the project of critique today. (shrink)

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch claims that the Russian Orthodox Christian Church was theologically more open towards the ideas of October than its Western counterpart. The remark is intriguing, but Bloch does not offer any detailed explanation except to say that Orthodoxy considers the revelation “unconcluded.” This article is an attempt to provide a slightly more detailed background to Bloch’s remark and present some elements of Orthodox Christianity and its utopianism by way of comparative critical hermeneutics, a method (...) that looks at the interpretative differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity with respect to some basic shared dogmas and their de-alienating and alienating effects. (shrink)

This paper looks at the concept of themessianic as a means of understanding theMarxist tradition, particularly therelationship between the ethical and thepolitical. It examines the positions of JacquesDerrida and Ernst Bloch, whereby both utilisethe messianic as a means of upholding anethical space which is not reducible to being,while at the same time emphasising the need anddemand of the messianic to be brought intobeing. This contradiction operates as the basiccharacteristic of the messianic and it isasserted that Bloch, rather than Derrida,offers a (...) stronger version of the messianic andthe relationship it constructs between ethicsand politics, by attaching a notion of thegood, that of human dignity which operates toguide the ethical command. While Bloch'sdignity may lead to the position of sacrificewhen engaging within the political, theco-ordination of the ethical by dignity doesnot itself sacrifice ethics as a totality. (shrink)