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The Ends of Utopian Thinking in Critical Theory

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Published Jul 2023

Nina Rismal

Author: Nina Rismal
The book offers a critical account of how utopian thinking became defeated as a tool of philosophy whose explicit objective has been to not only analyse but emancipate the world. While such philosophy was originally inseparable from ideas of a radically better society it aimed to realise, many of its most influential practitioners today object to the use of utopian ideas. Countering this scepticism, the book argues in favour of utopian thinking. By elucidating a concept of utopia freed of its alleged pitfalls, the book contends that utopian thinking indeed presents an important resource for achieving emancipatory social goals.

Biographical Note

Nina Rismal is a researcher, organiser and founder interested in social transformation and future thinking. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and worked for mission-driven research institutes in the US and Germany. In 2022 she co-founded Possible Worlds, a startup that integrates interdisciplinary insights into the development of AI.

Readership

The book is of interest to critical theorists, social philosophers; German Studies scholars concerned with Marx, Adorno or Bloch; and those working in the fields of utopian and future studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Note on Translations

Introduction
1 The Blow to Utopia from the Left
2 The Road Not Taken
3 (Political) Utopian Thinking
4 Critical Theory
5 A New Perspective on Contemporary Critical Theory

1 Marx’s Two Utopian Paradoxes
1 The Deployment of the Label ‘Utopian’ and Its Consequences
2 Marx’s Vision of the Communist Society
3 Utopia Cannot Be Envisaged
4 Imaginary vs. Rational Ideas
5 Utopian Visions Are Insignificant

2 The Origins of Adorno’s Utopieverbot
1 Adorno and Marxist Theory in the Early Twentieth Century
2 What Is the Utopieverbot?
3 From the Bilderverbot to the Utopieverbot
4 Marx’s Influence on the Utopieverbot
5 The Removal of Utopia into the Messianic Future
6 Culture Industry and Utopian Consciousness
7 The Problem with Identity Thinking

3 Negative Utopia?
1 Positive Utopia – a Point of Departure for Negative Thinking
2 Does Determinate Negation Make Sense?
3 The Emergence of the Positive in Constellations
4 Something Is Missing

4 Bloch’s Rejection of the Utopieverbot
1 Bloch’s Life and Times
2 Utopia as the ‘Not-Yet’
3 The Warm and Cold Streams of Marxism
4 Bloch’s Utopian Society: ‘Heimat’
5 The Utopian Core: ‘Invariant of Direction’
6 Traces  Experiences and Expressions of Utopia
7 Concrete Utopian Thinking

5 An Ontology of Processual Utopia
1 The Prefigurations of Utopia in the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’
2 Incompleteness of the World as the ‘Not-Yet-Become’
3 The Necessity of Utopian Thinking
4 Processual Utopia and Processual Utopian Thinking

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index