Beyond the Education of Desire

The Utopia of Councils in Abensour

Bibliographic Data

ID10830109
AuthorsPaul Mazzocchi
Year2023
Volume70
Issue176
Pages96-120
Publication date2023-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTHEORIA An International Journal for Theory History and Foundations of Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0495-4548 • E-ISSN: 2171-679X
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/th.2023.7017604
OpenAlexW4387913443
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

While critical utopias sought to rescue the political import of utopia, recently scholars have questioned their overemphasis on literary forms and a disempowering pluralism. Challenging the applicability of these claims to one of the instigators of critical utopias, I provide a political reading of Miguel Abensour's understanding of utopia and connect this to councils as a concrete institutional infrastructure. This begins with a re-reading of his influential conception of the ‘education of desire’ in relation to the simulacrum as a utopian ‘model’ that, in rejecting identity-thinking, refuses to reduce utopias to a blueprint. I then turn to conceptualising the utopia of councils through the simulacrum on two fronts: first, as a form subject to innovation in the context of the dialectic of emancipation; second, as a content that aims to both ‘democratise utopia’ by embracing plurality and ‘utopianize democracy’ by expanding the realm of democratic space

Aesthetics · Art · Blueprint · Context (archaeology · Democracy · Dialectic · Emancipation · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Pluralism (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Realm · Simulacrum · Sociology · Utopia · Critical Theory and Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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