PROPOSAL FOR A DISSERTATION ON THE TOPIC OF

UTOPIAN DISCOURSE IN THE WORK OF

THEODOR W. ADORNO, LUCE IRIGARAY, AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN

Heather Thiessen

December 12, 2007

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. . . and what is lacking cannot be counted.

Ecclesiastes 1:15

The document that follows proposes a dissertation on the topic of the utopian

discourse of three late 20th-century philosophers: Theodor W. Adorno, Luce Irigaray,

and Giorgio Agamben. The proposed work involves reading closely for what these

three thinkers say about utopia, how their statements differ, and how in spite of their

considerable differences they show significant similarities. Finally, it will articulate an

understanding of what this discourse could mean for contemporary utopian

reflections.

The proposal proceeds as follows: the first section discusses the concept of

utopia as a symbol for an imagined world that is an object of human desire, and the

difficulties this symbol of desire and desirability encounters. These are difficulties

that bind together religion and art, that concern language and meaning, and that

have become the obsessive concern of contemporary scholars. The next section

presents a rationale for the specific focus on the thought of Adorno, Irigaray and

Agamben, along with a preliminary thesis about the common ground that relates

their distinct utopian discourses. Besides arguing for the value of a consideration of

these thinkers’ utopian thought, this section aims to make clear that the proposed

project would constitute a unique treatment of the topic of utopia and of the thought

of these philosophers. The final sections outline a preliminary plan for the finished

project, and a timetable for its completion. A preliminary bibliography is appended.

Utopia: Desirable, or Only Desired?

The concrete focus of this project is what three late 20th century philosophers say

about utopia, how they say it, and what that might mean. This focus excludes two

kinds of otherwise interesting material that often come to mind when the topic of

utopia arises: the abundant fictional literature that describes utopia, and the history

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of actual utopian communal experiments. It leaves a third kind of material, the

famous utopian discourse of important thinkers other than Adorno, Irigaray, and

Agamben,1 while not entirely out of the picture, then mostly in the shadows of

peripheral vision, except insofar as it seems helpful for gaining a better

understanding of the discourse of the three authors under consideration.

“Utopia” in this project is understood as a concept, of “any place, condition or

state of ideal perfection,” however detailed or sketchy, precise or general its

description.2 This working understanding leaves open the question of whether, for

any particular author, the term “utopia” functions as a pejorative, as it clearly does

function for some authors, and as seems to be implied by another ordinary use of the

term “utopia,” as “a visionary, impractical scheme of social improvement.”3

Similarly, this working understanding of utopia does not presuppose anything about

whether or not this state of perfection is or would be attainable, whether practically

or in principle, or would be sustainable once attained, though how these authors

might address these points is a matter of interest.

An understanding of utopia as a concept of a place, condition, or state of ideal

perfection informs the premise that utopia is a symbolic expression of a humanly-

desired and desirable world.4 This is straightforward: the state of perfection which is

the object of “utopia” implies a situation in which no desired or desirable property is

lacking. That state would presumably be desired or desirable or both, since all its

1 Like Plato, or Robert Nozick.2 Definition courtesy of Funk and Wagnall’s Standard College Dictionary, College Edition,

1966. (As an aside, this is an old dictionary, and sometimes I will run across a new word that it doesn’t contain, but its definitions for the words it does contain are almost always felicitous.)

3 See, for instance, Paul Tillich, “The Political Meaning of Utopia,” in Political Expectation, James Luther Adams ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971); Mary Ann Stenger, “Truth and History: The Risks of Idolatrous Ecstasy,” in Truth and History – a Dialogue with Paul Tillich, Proceedings of the VI International Symposium held in Frankfurt am Main, 1996 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998)161-175. Many Marxist theorists deploy “utopian” as a negative counterpart to informed revolutionary analysis and praxis. Note that the variable use of “utopian” as a pejorative is itself part of what could reasonably be called the Discourse on Utopia, in which the three authors who figure in this project participate.

4 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990) 191, proposes a definition of utopia as the expression and exploration of what is desired. I will discuss the distinction between desired and desirable further below.

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properties are desired or desirable.5 That means, in turn, that utopian discourse is

ipso facto discourse around desire, and that to examine what a thinker says about

utopia is in effect to examine something that thinker is saying about the human

desire that corresponds to the desirability of the ideal world. Utopian discourse,

according to this understanding, need not always use the term “utopia;” other terms

or symbols, insofar as they point to whatever world would be a place, state or

condition of ideal perfection, participate in utopian discourse as well.6

This utopian discourse, which encodes desire and desirability with respect to the

human world, participates in the ancient conversation of the humanities around the

perennial question “What is the good life?” Every description of utopia constitutes a

proposed answer, partial or complete, to that question. Utopian discourse

constitutes a specific extension of this conversation about the good life, its

requirements, its participants, and its practices, to the consideration of the ideal

which both validates and qualifies every concrete answer to the question.

More specifically, utopian discourse participates in a side of the conversation

about the good life that deals with the contours of the “better world.” In so doing, it

participates in a context that has been densely elaborated by a set of religious and

quasi-religious discourses centered on symbols like the world to come, the City of

God, or Paradise,7 as well as by a vast body of artistic work that participates in this

religious discourse, either by devoting its representational skills to the service of

religious narratives and themes, or by using them to advance alternative secular

versions of romantic or revolutionary expectation.8 In other words, utopian discourse

5 This argument raises the question of whether the desirable is actually desired, to be discussed further below.

6 It will be part of the burden of this dissertation to consider whether the authors use the term “utopia,” or other terminology, and to consider the possible meaning of the terminological choice.

7 Augustine City of God; Dante Divine Comedy.8 Consider the romanticism of William Blake, or the utopianism of Casimir Malevich. for

a discussion of “expectation” as a secularization of the religious category of prophetic consciousness, see Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977) and Political Expectation.

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cannot avoid its being-situated in relation to a tradition of religious and aesthetic

reflection on the human desire for a humanly-desirable ideal world.

Moreover, utopian discourse, including that of the authors who are the focus of

this study, participates in a tradition that locates the grounds for human hope in the

significance or reality of the actual fulfillment of that hope. This applies regardless of

whether that possibility is articulated as hope for redemption, for personal

improvement, for social progress, for revolutionary transformation, for the realization

of freedom and justice, or some other ultimate vindication. From the standpoint of

Christian discourse, for instance, the ultimate location of hope in the possibility of the

vision of God and the coming of the Kingdom of God does more than make hope in

some ultimate sense reasonable; it also underwrites concrete religious practices that

aim at, act out of and further cultivate that hope. These practices might be

understood by their practitioners as actually bringing about the Kingdom, but more

often they are understood to prepare practitioners for life in it, perhaps even to

establish the just claim of the practitioner to participate in the ultimate better world,

and possibly to instantiate some elements or glimpses of that better world in the

immediate present. Some artistic practices, insofar as they emancipated themselves

from service to specific religious discourse, became themselves a kind of substitute

for religious practice, and with a similar end in view, that of the attainment of a

transcendent and transformed consciousness, the expression of that vision, the

remodeling of the immediate present. Some artists do art because they believe art

can change the world. Utopian discourse is seldom only fantastic; it rather

articulates a view of what are, or are believed to be, actual possibilities given the

understanding of the extant world that ineluctably provides the model for the utopia.

Utopian discourse, then, encodes desire and the desirable, participates in the

classical conversation of the humanities, and takes place in a context of densely

articulated religious and aesthetic influences and ideas.

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Consequently, utopian discourse is also relevant to the specific contemporary

concern with desire, with the discursive production of desire, and with the

involvement of both in the production and exercise of power. As scholars have

become more and more aware of how the rhetoric of social documents, signs, and

gestures enacts and produces both knowledge and power discursively, desire has

become a prominent focus of contemporary work in the humanities and cultural

studies, particularly in the emerging specialty of queer theory. Outside of queer

theory, that tendency in postmodern thought that celebrates the play of surfaces

without depth, an emphasis on parts over wholes, and the de-contextualization and

recombination of cultural elements in the aesthetic of the postmodern sublime also

makes desire and its arousal and satisfaction a central focus of scholarly reflection.

Utopian discourse around desire and desirability is of particular interest in the

postmodern context because of its preservation of the problem of the non-synonymy,

or potential non-synonymy, of what is desired and what is desirable. That potential

non-synonymy was a staple of classical discourse on desire and the good life or the

ideal world, exemplified in the concept of temptation that runs through western

letters. The concept of some distance or difference between what is desired and

what is desirable expresses the awareness that what people want, in this paradigm of

non-synonymy, may not be what they should want. This view presupposes a

standard for the desirable independent of people’s actual desire or desires, a

standard given by that which should be desired, or by that which would be rationally

desired were we to have complete knowledge or awareness or sufficiently keen

judgment, or perhaps that which would prove itself to have been rightly desired

because it ultimately would reward rather than betrays its desiring subjects and

fulfills its earlier promise of ultimate happiness.9

While what people actually desire may be an approximate or sometimes helpful

guide to the desirable in this sense, it is a clearly fallible one. The philosophical 9 How such an independent standard would be known and validated is, of course,

extremely problematic.

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tradition following Plato, along with most religious traditions and with artistic

practices designed to cultivate aesthetic judgment, recognizes that the identification

of the desirable calls for discipline and wisdom, cultivated by reason and experience,

and subject to other criteria for decision.

The difference between desire and desirability becomes increasingly difficult to

discern through late modernity and into postmodernity. In the face of a kind of

ordinary language nominalism in which “desirable” means simply “desired by some

subject,” desire itself establishes desirability.10 Those who would assert an

independent base for the assessment of the desirable – and, it might be noted, other

concepts with ethical connections – were hard-pressed to counter this assault.

Confidence in the assertion of independent standards was further undermined by

deconstructive readings that dissolve the power of language to encode or express

stable, substantive distinctions or qualities, such that it is increasingly recognized as

impossible within language to point to anything stable that corresponds to words like

“freedom” or “justice,” “slavery” or “oppression.” In the postmodern context, the

justification for the idea that there could be a standard based on the nature of the

thing that establishes what would be desirable for it has become almost synonymous

with theoretical naïveté.

This situation raises the serious question of whether utopian discourse can be

sustained in the postmodern context, if utopian discourse is “irreducibly essentialist”

as has been claimed.11 Not surprisingly, of the utopians dealt with here, Irigaray is

frequently criticized for her gender essentialism12, and both Adorno and Agamben

find themselves drawing on the Platonic concept of “the ideas” in an effort to secure

a line of thinking about how the non-existent possible might be real and significant.13

10 Adorno specifically derides nominalism in Negative Dialectics for this reason, as spelling the loss of an independent critical criterion that will permit escape from or resistance to objectively undesirable social circumstances.

11 Tillich.12 Wrongly, according to significant interpreters. See in particular Tina Chanter, Ethics of

Eros (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), on the political roots of the essentialist critique of Irigaray in the context of late 20th-century feminism.

13 cite Butler, Adorno, Agamben

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The danger of not sustaining such a discourse, however, is significant from the

classical perspective. Abandonment of independent standards of ethical judgment

threatens to collapse whatever critical distance between the present and some ideal

[better] alternative might be tenable, along with the [genuinely] liberating

possibilities associated with [however partial] transcendence.

In other words, a lot is at stake in utopian discourse. In particular, what is at

stake is the possibility of worldly transformation, which depends on the ability to

maintain a distinction between what is – the reality people encounter at present –

and a larger reality that supports the idea of something different, an alternative that

would be in reality more desirable, an improvement, something like progress, at least

vis-à-vis some relevant dimension.

Late modern and postmodern theory has radically discredited the desire for a

better world as a simple index of its desirability, as it has sought out the historical,

social and cultural conditioning operating not only in consciousness but in desire

itself. At the same time, those sources of the criteria that were supposed to act as

correctives to disordered or disorderly desire, to discipline it according to revealed,

rationally discerned, transcendently inspired or formally understood standards that

could be taken as reliable guides to the desirable, have been called into question by

the same investigation. Those standards are now understood to issue from the same

suspect streams as the desires they proposed to discipline. Erstwhile guardians of

moderation – religion, art, philosophy – now seem to be potentially as fundamentally

arbitrary, manipulative, and illegitimate as the desire from which they were supposed

to protect humanity.

There is little to hope for in a retreat into unreason, either. The National Socialist

state in Germany was clearly desired by many, at least in its rhetoric and appeal to

the symbols of folk, tradition, religion, and the aesthetic of nationalistic kitsch. It

constitutes but one of the dramatic recent examples of the betrayal of desire by the

desired. The history of socialism in the Soviet Union provides another case in point,

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of particular interest to Adorno. In looking at utopian discourse, then, we are looking

at two sides of the complex problem of the relationship of desire to the desirable

human world, the appropriate setting for the good life. On one hand, we want to

make a distinction between the desirable and that which simply is desired, a

distinction that empowers a critique of falsely utopian desire itself. On the other

hand, it seems desirable to empower desire sufficiently, and in the appropriate ways,

to permit it to author a critique of immediate extant reality, not to fall prey to the

nominalist tendency to equate or conflate what is at present with what must be,

when it is a false necessity that prematurely dubs every creative imagination as

fantastic and impossibly utopian.

What is at stake, then, in utopian discourse is the same thing that is and always

has been at stake in religion and art, and perhaps also in philosophy: the possibility

of human resistance to the premise that the way things are is the way things must

be. That resistance lives on the possible reality, or the possible realization, of

something different, that would also be a realization of something preferable,

something actually better. This is the resistance of the symbolic imagination and its

sense of solidarity with the [alternative] real, whether in the various unseen realms of

the world’s religions, in art and its creation of a reality alongside reality, and in

philosophy, with its dissatisfaction with existing descriptions of reality, and its efforts

to discern the really real from the mixed evidence presented by immediate reality.

What is at stake is whether or not it is possible to think the possibility of liberation, in

thinking it to believe it, and in believing it to act on behalf of an actually better world.

In short, in light of the relevance of the topic of utopian discourse among these

late 20th century philosophers to both classical and postmodern work in the

humanities, its relationship to an understanding of religion and art, and its

connection to practically important questions, it seems clear that the topic would

constitute a substantial but also reasonable dissertation project in the humanities. It

is clearly informed by concerns central to the classical humanist perspective; in

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drawing on theorists who bridge modernist and postmodernist commitments, it aims

to extend those concerns in useful ways. Its relationship to religion and art, and their

mutual relation, creates several openings for multidisciplinary investigation, and

makes possible an integration of various forms of supportive evidence as

appropriate, including religious and secular literary texts, visual art, ritual studies,

and history.

Why Adorno, Irigaray, and Agamben

This project has come to revolve around the work of three particular late-20th-

century philosophers, Theodor W. Adorno, Luce Irigaray, and Giorgio Agamben.

Although the members of this group differ in various ways, they also are linked in

important ways as well. All are distinctly late modern and postmodern thinkers. This

historical proximity is relevant for at least two reasons. They are acutely aware of

the role of history in the formation of human consciousness and, beyond that, of the

subconscious, the wellsprings of desire. The idea that desire itself, the inner nature

of the human person or individual human subject, is affected by history. both

personal and social, is a given for these authors. Most of us share this condition, and

it is this condition that makes the discussion of utopian possibilities even more

complicated than it already was for the early modern utopians.

All are also sensitive to and interested in the role of language in the process of

conceptualizing the desired. In this regard, Adorno, though sometimes identified as

the quintessential high modernist, already points towards the “linguistic turn” that so

pervasively haunts the postmodern age. All these thinkers accept that consciousness

is shaped and given to us in and through language. All also affirm that there is

something that nevertheless escapes the net of language. They each embrace the

simple but devilish notion that language communicates, or arises for the possibility of

communicating, something beyond language that eludes representation within it. It

is their refusal to abdicate this position that unites all these thinkers, and that impels

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them to ultimately utopian positions. All are committed to the position that there is

something language is trying to do, or that people are trying to do with language,

and that as much as language itself constitutes the organizing perceptual apparatus

through which we approach and endeavor to make sense of the world that lies

beyond language, we cannot simply embrace the position that what we have access

to through ordinary language constitutes reality. All would regard that position,

which is quintessentially anti-utopian, as a form of collusion with fundamentally

oppressive forces. All would agree that the human ability to imagine more desirable,

even ideally desirable, alternatives to the present is – at least possibly and at times –

a form of knowledge, as well as the indispensable condition of hope for human

freedom.

Perhaps predictably, all of these thinkers struggle with issues of essentialism, its

possible and necessary limits and possible and desirable retention. Tillich has argued

that a certain irreducible minimum of essentialism is a requirement for utopian

thinking, and these thinkers endeavor to find the liberating core of essentialism that

at the same time escapes the rigid imprisonment of necessity, that exhibits

possibility. All three thinkers draw in complex ways on the Platonic notion of the

ideas.

All three thinkers confront the basic dilemma of how much to rely on human

desire in formulating strategies for and in thinking about what would be the desirable

human world. More precisely, perhaps, all three struggle with how, precisely, to rely

on desire. For as we have seen, we probably must rely on desire, but at the same

time, we have to know that desire is to some degree – an unknown degree – and in

some ways – unknown ways – unreliable and potentially treacherous. Since every

treatment of desire – reliance, suppression or repression, cultivation – proves

treacherous, a central problem becomes how to proceed when both trusting and

mistrusting desire, how to desire and simultaneously to temper desire by various

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practices that also cannot simply be trusted, that is, how to cultivate something like

“wisdom.”

These thinkers are primarily concerned with focal projects other than utopia: the

theorization of the relationship of subject and object, the systematic interrogation of

the androcentrism of the western philosophical paradigm, elucidating the root of bio-

power-politics in the very notion of political sovereignty. Nevertheless, their

attendant utopian reflections disclose this problematic. Their efforts to resolve the

difficulties associated with it, and in the course of this resolution, to establish some

reason to believe that there might be hope for processes that could bring about a

world that does not yet exist, in which certain pressing problems are resolved,

engage all three thinkers in utopian discourse.

A critical comparison of Adorno, Agamben and Irigaray that focuses specifically on

the utopian dimensions of their work makes sense in the context of current scholarly

interest on these thinkers. That each of these thinkers displays utopian features is

well-known. That this utopian thinking crucially informs their projects is appreciated

to differing degrees, but deserves to be more widely and deeply appreciated in each

case. Moreover, a comparison of these thinkers’ approaches and insights in thinking

about the possible human world has not been undertaken, but would be of genuine

interest to scholars concerned with the work of each of these thinkers individually,

and to scholars interested more generally in contemporary thought in the areas of

aesthetics and religion.

Adorno invokes the category of utopia explicitly, and is on record as having been

indelibly influenced by the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch, but Adorno’s own utopian

thought has not attracted the full attention it deserves, and has not become the

subject of study in its own right. The relative neglect of Adorno’s utopian thinking

among utopians may be the consequence of a commensurate focus on other, more

accessibly utopian, German thinkers by scholars of utopia: Marcuse, Adorno’s fellow

Frankfurt School theorist, has been more accessible to English-speaking readers, and

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has posed a clearer case study in utopian thinking, while Ernst Bloch can hardly be

ignored as the central and influential German Marxist theorist of utopia.14 In spite of

Bloch’s explicit and acknowledged influence on Adorno15, and in spite of Adorno’s

own significant reflections on utopia and his nuanced and precise alternative to

Marcuse, there has yet to be a dedicated focus on Adorno as a utopian thinker.

Adorno’s own rhetoric is sufficiently pessimistic that early readers identified him

more as a dismal nay-sayer than a seeker after hope. This, indeed, is Gillian Rose’s

guiding thesis in her study of Adorno. For Rose, Adorno is driven to the study of

philosophy not because it offers deep and abiding hope for the future of humankind

in desperate times, but because it is the only possibility, and because Adorno is

looking for something that has the promise of effectiveness, in spite of not finding it

yet.16 This is the Adorno remembered for denying the possibility of poetry after

Auschwitz.

But as the brilliant and dedicated Adorno scholar Lambert Zuidervaart points out,

this admittedly prominent side of Adorno’s social thought is not the only one.

Zuidervaart cites rhetoric like Adorno’s stirring paean to the folly of art in the closing

metaphysical meditations of Negative Dialectics and insists that “[i]f the ongoing

assessment of Adorno’s social philosophy does not address such passages, it will not

truly have begun.”17 Zuidervaart’s wide-ranging and comprehensive work, in fact,

organizes central currents in Adornian scholarship, from Menke’s efforts to read

Adorno’s aesthetics through the frame of Derridean deconstruction,18 through the

gathering critiques of Adorno’s views on popular culture and the limits on his

14 Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987); Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

15 Adorno himself identified Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia as a lasting influence on his own thought. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977) 4.

16 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science (publication data).17 Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy After Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007) 201. He cites Adorno’s statement that “Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth” (Negative Dialectics 404, as translated by Zuidervaart)

18 Christopher Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (

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wholesale dismissal of popular culture as oppressive, to a consideration of Adorno’s

relationship to Heidegger on one hand and Habermas on the other.19 Most central for

a consideration of Adorno as a utopian thinker, however, is Zuidervaart’s assessment

of the efforts to read Adorno as a postmetaphysical thinker and to recontextualize his

metaphysics as a dialectic of suffering and hope, as well as his lengthy and (it must

be suspected) theologically-motivated critique of Adorno’s success in combining

these elements in a philosophical treatment of the late 20th-century situation.20

Zuidervaart’s implicitly theological critique of Adorno’s metaphysics points to

another aspect of contemporary scholarly treatment of Adorno, which is less explicit

in Zuidervaart, namely, the identification of religious themes in Adorno’s work, and

the difficulty of treating these themes. O’Connor notes them, and is at pains to

distinguish between religious rhetoric and religious commitment in Adorno’s work,

noting that his use of religious thematics is made more possible by his strictly secular

philosophical commitments.21 Hent de Vries somewhat similarly identifies Adorno as

approaching the limits, in the context of a secular philosophy, of the boundaries of

subject-object experience, which drives his philosophy in a theological direction. For

de Vries, this imperative is similarly evident in the thought of Levinas, working with

the same fundamental philosophical problem within a different philosophical

framework (phenomeonology vs. dialectics).22

This latent and troublesome religious dimension in Adorno’s work has been noted

before, in particular by Susan Buck-Morss in her early work on Adorno’s Negative

Dialectic. There Buck-Morss traces the influence of the “early Benjamin, ” which

“incorporated structural elements from such seemingly remote sources as Jewish 19 Zuidervaart, passim.20 Zuidervaart, Chapter 2 “Metaphysics After Auschwitz,” in Social Philosophy After

Adorno, 48-76. Zuidervaart identifies one difficulty with Adorno’s thought as his provision of a strictly “negative utopia.” In this he echoes his contemporary critics as well, notably Kracauer, who faulted him for inadequately utopian thinking. See Lorenz Jager, Adorno: A Political Biography, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004).

21 Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2004), see especially 165-173.

22 Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno & Levinas trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

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mysticism, Kantianism, Platonism, and German Romanticism,”23 on Adorno’s mature

masterwork. Martin Jay, however, goes further and attributes a direct influence of

rabbinical Judaism on Adorno’s later philosophy.24 From the standpoint of a

consideration of the utopian dimensions of Adorno’s thought, in particular, this

element of his thinking becomes significant, as utopian theory itself is significantly

thematized, at least in western European culture, through the symbols and texts of

Judaism and Christianity, the thematics of the world to come and the City of God.25

More recently, a resurgence of interest in Adorno has focused most intently on his

aesthetics and his social thought. Brian O’Connor, one of the leading lights in this

resurgence, attributes it to the new availability of more reliable texts in translation,

which has led a rise in the popular reception of Adorno’s work in the American

academy. O’Connor stresses the transcendental form of Adorno’s philosophy, and

makes much of his affinities with, and at the same time, highly specific differences

from, Heidegger.26 O’Connor’s analysis presents Adorno as addressing the same

central philosophical problem as Heidegger – that of the structure of experience –

from the epistemological rather than the fundamental ontological side. O’Connor

shares Adorno’s conviction that the epistemological approach succeeds, in the end,

where Heidegger’s ontological approach fails.27 This conclusion is significant for an

assessment of Adorno’s utopian discourse, because it suggests that Adorno’s utopian

thought must be understood as pointing towards praxological, world-transformative

activity oriented towards arriving at understanding, rather than under the rubric of a

different mode of being. 23 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter

Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), xiii; see also S. Brent Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetic: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), who attributes Adorno’s “monadic” concept of the work of art to Benjamin’s theologically-influenced aesthetics.

24 Martin Jay, Adorno 25 Dorothy F. Donnelly, Patterns of Order and Utopia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).26 Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: philosophy and the possibility of critical

rationality (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2004).27 This analysis, if correct, points to one possible source of the tensions between Adorno

and his erstwhile professor Paul Tillich, with whom he nevertheless shares some significant insights and commitments, in particular views about the centrality of the category of expectation and the role of “the critique of idolatry.”

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Adorno’s aesthetics is another area in which his utopian leanings are widely seen,

but less widely analyzed. Robert Hullot-Kentor in particular notes the utopian

contour of Adorno’s thought in Aesthetic Theory, and links it to Adorno’s sense of a

clear value ordering with respect to aesthetic works. According to Hullot-Kentor,

Adorno’s vision of aesthetic order gives us permission and motivation to “. . . act on

the impulse to protect ourselves, or our imagination anyway, as the power over

possibility, from what otherwise uses that power, second by second almost, to break

in on us and to defeat that possibility.”28 (196)

The works of Giorgio Agamben, an Italian thinker, have only emerged in English

translation during the last ten or so years. Scholarly commentaries in English on

Agamben’s work are scarce, and those that exist outside the periodical literature deal

primarily with his later political works, like Homo Sacer, rather than his earlier works

on aesthetics.29 It is clear nevertheless that Agamben’s work struggles with the same

themes as Adorno’s: the nature of the relationship between subject and object; the

possibilities for metaphysical thinking in an allegedly post-metaphysical era; the

aesthetic and theological legacies of Benjamin and Heidegger; the possibility of a just

politics; the contribution of artists and thinkers to the pursuit of that politics. While

Adorno’s position vis-à-vis the linguistic turn might be questioned, Agamben’s cannot

be. Agamben’s project centers on the identification of philosophy, at least since

Plato, with the struggle to comprehend the elusive matter of the unnameable

creative possibility that seems to lie just back of what goes by the name of

language.30 The comparison of Adorno’s and Agamben’s modernist and decidedly

28 Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 181-197.

29 See Andrew Norris ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). Two book-length studies of Agamben’s thought are slated for publication in 2008.

30 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), in particular “The Thing Itself,” 27-38 and “The Idea of Language,” 39-47.

17

postmodernist approaches to the conceptualization of a possible world promises to

be exciting.

Commentators who have approached Agamben’s work have generally ignored its

utopian dimensions. More typically, his treatment of sovereignty, and his approach

to passivity, have attracted attention. This is remarkable. Agamben points in The

Coming Community31 to possibilities for transformation of the political realm; that he

is attempting to work out an understanding of these possibilities that preserves the

diversity of their singular human subjects seems beyond question. Similarly, the

glaring religious dimension of his thought, from his treatment of Pauline messianism

in The Time That Remains 32 to his invocation of Talmudic and Trinitarian thematics in

the Coming Community has so far produced little published comment, in spite of a

growing recognition of the phenomenon of “post-secular” thought, to which Agamben

clearly contributes.33 An explication of Agamben’s utopian thinking, which proceeds

in a profoundly negative way that would be appreciated by the author of Negative

Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, is long overdue.

Neither Adorno nor Agamben devote sufficient attention to gender. If for no other

reason than the fundamental inadequacy of a consideration of utopia, the horizon of

human possibility, that fails to consider the role of gender, it would be necessary to

raise the issue of gender vis’à-vis these thinkers. Beyond that consideration,

however, the work of Luce Irigaray bears significantly and prolifically on precisely the

matters being considered by both Adorno and Agamben in their different registers:

the constitution of the subject, the subject-object relationship, and the implications of

the structure of that experience for human knowledge – both of what is, and of what

might be or become; the role of language as the mediation of this experience; and

the possibilities for the reality, or realization, of a better world of human experience.

31 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

32 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

33 Philip Blond ed., Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

18

Significantly, Irigaray is explicit in her inclusion of corporeality and desire in her work,

both of which dimensions are unavoidable in the work of Adorno and Agamben as

well. According to at least one reader, the consequences of this inclusion are far-

reaching. “Woman becomes visible in her absence, disrupting and instigating the

rereading of the whole discursive history of subjectivity.”34 That would seem to make

Irigaray required reading for scholars interested in the utopian dimensions of thinking

about the relationship of subject and object.

Scholars repeatedly note Irigaray’s utopianism.35 Huntington, in particular, draws

on Irigaray specifically as a utopian thinker, with a significant debt to Heidegger, and

argues that Irigaray “repeats . . . two Heideggerian mistakes in attentuated form,”

namely, a lack of a dialectical approach and a perpetuation of a model of

transgression as a “negation of what is.”36 If she is correct, there is much to be

gained by setting Irigaray into dialogue with Adorno in particular.

Like Adorno and Agamben, Irigaray draws on religious and theological resources

in her work, famously so;37 unlike them, she celebrates the possibilities of re-

conceptualizing the divine “in the feminine gender” as an explicit dimension of her

pro-utopian project.38 In so doing, Irigaray makes explicit the religious implications

and involvements of utopian discourse. The religious dimensions of Irigaray’s work

are, again, commonplaces. Nevertheless, a sustained consideration of the

relationship of her religious thought to the utopian content of her philosophy seems

34 Simon Patrick Walter, “Situating Irigaray,” in Philosophy and Desire, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 111-124, 111.

35 See Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991); Patricia J. Huntington, Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998); Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), Rachel Alsop, Annette Fitzsimmons, Kathleen Lennon and Rosalind Minsky, Theorizing Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

36 Huntington, xxx.37 Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon, French Feminists on Religion: A

Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).38 Alison Ainley, “Luce Irigaray: Divine Spirit and Feminine Space,” in Post-Secular

Philosophy: Between philosophy and theology, ed. Phillip Blond (London & New York: Routledge, 1998) 334-345; Serene Jones, “Divine Women,” . . .

19

not to have been undertaken by scholars, who seem more likely to be interested

either in Irigaray’s possible relevance for secular politics, or for Irigaray’s relationship

to feminist theology, but not the relationship between the two.

Critiques of Irigaray as essentialist39 and clandestinely heteronormative40 may

require tempering. More appreciative readers perceive Irigaray as pragmatically

utopian41 and strategically hyperbolic in her extravagant claims about feminine

jouissance.42 Tina Chanter and Margaret Whitford, from different angles, insist that

Irigaray’s fabled essentialism is more apparent than real, an artifact of literalist

misreading on the part of her second wave feminist critics.43 More recently, Penelope

Deutscher has extended this line of reading to a consideration of Irigaray’s

implications for multiculturalism, and the politics of diversity, concluding that

Irigaray’s project involves the effort to rethink egalitarian politics from the standpoint

of differences rather than sameness.44 A critical comparison of utopian discourse

seems precisely the context in which to examine these claims and possibilities.

There is arguably an irreducibly essentialist element to any utopian thinking,45 which

may speak to the purpose behind Irigaray’s apparent essentialism of sexual

difference. At the same time, the perils of a misspecification of the human essence

that underwrites the possible rationality of utopian thought are vividly illustrated in

the all-too-long discourse about the possibility of man’s [sic] pursuit of the good life.

The inclusion of Irigaray’s frankly provocative work centering on the philosophical,

linguistic, poietic, religious, and political implications of sexual difference should

39 Alsop et al., Theorizing Gender.40 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble41 Cornell, Beyond Accommodation.42 Dorothy Leland, “Irigaray’s Discourse on Feminine Desire: Literalist and Strategic

Readings,” in Philosophy and Desire, 125-139.43 Tina Chnger, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York and

London: Routledge, 1995); Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

44 Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

45 Paul Tillich, “The Political Meaning of Utopia,” in Political Expectation (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 137.

20

counterbalance the neglect of gender46 in the work of Adorno and Agamben. Thus,

the possibilities for insight in bringing these deeply related and strategically different

thinkers together, focused on the practically as well as theoretically important

horizon of utopia, seem both significant and likely to be of interest to at least a few

other thinkers.

All three thinkers engage with the ghost of Heidegger. This project will approach

this troublesome Heideggerian connection negatively – that is, by avoidance – insofar

as that will be possible. Initially, Heidegger for these authors seems to represent a

celebration of a kind of immanence – the full immersion of being in existence, and

the entire statement of the relevant philosophical problem in language.47 In

opposition to Heidegger, all of these thinkers advocate some species of

transcendence, with its various problems. We might call this the advocacy of a

broken, partial or humble transcendence, a cautious faith in transcendence, along

with an insistence that a space for such transcendence must be held open, as the

space of a possible redemption (Agamben, Adorno), or creativity (Irigaray). These

thinkers, then, make an effort to deal with the central relationship of transcendence

to immanence that troubles the legacy of western metaphysics, with the purpose of

saving something of the desirable features of transcendence.48

It is worth noting that the connection of all these possible modes of approach to

something like transcendence (utopia, religion, art) rely on the possibility and the

intelligibility of transcendence itself. The idea that people can know and desire

something that truly and irreducibly arises “from elsewhere” or “from outside” or

creatively surfaces repeatedly in religious consciousness, in artistic endeavor, and in 46 Gender is admittedly not the same category as sexual difference, and the conflation of

the two here is a dangerous – but at least partially alert – convenience. See Alsop et al, Theorizing Gender; Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

47 This is to read Heidegger with Adorno, against those readings, like Tina Chanter’s, that understand Heidegger to be arguing in a profound way against a simple equation of immanence with immersion in the present. See Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

48 For one discussion of the relationship of transcendence to immanence in western metaphysics, see Noëlle Vahanian, Language, Desire, and Theology (London: Routledge, 2003).

21

the utopian imagination. Here Plato’s ghost haunts the investigation, in an echo of

that exchange in the Symposium in which eros leads the mind by degrees to the

appreciation of increasingly loftier vistas. The idea that such loftier observations

apprehend something genuine, something real and really determinative, moves in

these thinkers like a breath, a hope, the promise of some kind of meeting, the

conviction or, if not conviction then desire, that something or someone does

constitute a, if not the, legitimate object of love, of eros, of desire, such that this

desired is also desirable, worth desiring, is justly desired, and constitutes the rendez-

vous of love, justice, truth, and beauty. That is a tall order. It may “exceed all real

possibility of satisfaction.” But a refusal to relinquish this idea is part of the project of

each of these thinkers.

While this refusal provides the motive force of utopian discourse, we should see

that the concept of such a rendez-vous has also traditionally been an inspiration of

the religious imagination, and of the artistic or aesthetic enterprise. An insight here

is that utopian discourse is a specific form of a much older discourse, being pursued

under new terms and on new terrain, but with similar principles, premises, and

motives. As a consequence, it becomes subject to some of the same constraints.

One of these is the prohibition of descriptions of the ideal that would restrict its

possible realization in radically transformed concrete forms. This insight informs the

preliminary thesis that is a point of departure for this project.

A Preliminary Thesis

I propose to explore critically the elements of these authors’ work that deal with

the contours of the ideal world to which their philosophical reflections tend. I expect

this exploration to demonstrate that (1) the concept of utopia draws on pre-existing

aesthetic and religious thematics for reasons outlined above;49 (2) possibly for that 49 This religious or quasi-religious dimension is explicitly acknowledged by all three

thinkers; it seems considerably more problematic for Adorno than for either Agamben or Irigaray. I think this is interesting in itself, as it bears witness to a certain “return to religion” on the part of postmodern thinkers that modern thinkers believed to have been

22

reason, it figures as the object of an anti-representational discourse – that is,

devotion to the cause of utopia requires a refusal to describe it or represent it in

detail or in particular ways;50 (3) this anti-representational discourse is animated by

ethical and metaphysical concerns about an ineluctable human tendency to

misspecify the desirable that stems from sources – like history, language, and

embodiment – that these theorists understand to be both basic constituents of the

human condition and significant sources of the unreliability of desire as a

straightforward index of the good;51; and (4) for this reason, these theories privilege

an apophatic methodology with respect to whatever pursuit and achievement of the

good life in a human relational context might be possible.52 That is, these theorists

privilege modes of approaching the good life, both interpersonally and politically, that

leave the precise contours of that life and its institutions unspecified, open – to

invention, discovery, or to specification en route. This openness is required by the

indispensable role of relationship with others and of collaborative effort and learning

in the construction of the good life.53 These theorists do, however, eliminate or

exclude certain concrete alternatives as incompatible with the good life. That is, they

do not opt for a normless utopia, even if utopian norms cannot be substantively

forecast.

definitively foreclosed.50 This anti-representational discourse participates in and extends an iconoclastic or anti-

iconic critique of idolatry, a primary site for which has historically been the aniconic monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and for similar reasons.

51 This unreliability is relative to a presumed natural or pristine desire given once and for all along with the perduring or essential human condition. It necessitates a complex theoretical treatment of desire as both potentially helpful and harmful.

52 That is, the way to approach an understanding of what utopia is or might be is through the negative procedure of gaining clarity on what it is not. For Irigaray this relational context is explicitly that between male and female human subjects; for Adorno and Agamben the relational context seems more traditionally political, though one in which embodied physical humanity figures prominently. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London: Continuum, 2002); Lisa Yun Lee, Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno (New York: Routledge, 2005).

53 These would constitute, then, dynamic utopian reflections; for a discussion of problems associated with more typically static, “end-state” utopias, see Erin McKenna, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

23

Utopia itself cannot be described substantively in a conventional way in these

thinkers’ works, for good reasons. It appears nevertheless, as the chronically implicit

and sometimes glimpsed horizon of these works, towards which their efforts of

conceptualization and ethical reflection tend. A further hypothesis is that, since

utopia occupies the position of the ultimate desirable, it becomes subject to the same

prohibitions on sketching fixed images as does the ultimate desirable of God in the

monotheistic religions, and for the same reason, namely, that there is an awareness

of the need to insulate this concept from immutable specification. The underlying

hope is that, as people cultivate characters that might (it might be hoped will) be

more capable of deeper, more accurate understanding, different and more

illuminating specifications of the desirable will continue to emerge.

This negative approach privileges some forms of art over others, tending to make

the utopian aesthetic one of abstraction and of an evocation of experience by its

absence rather than its direct representation. The intuition that the negative, the

“something missing” of desire, which is also something other than immediate reality,

is precisely the consciousness necessary for political resistance invests art, literature,

and other forms of symbolic cultural expression generally with political importance.

Less clear is how in a late 20th century-early 21st century context people can arrive at

positive symbols of the world that corresponds to utopian longing. Such artistic

expressions of longing for the world people want to live in become vital for

identifying the directions in which people’s political efforts might proceed.54

Utopian thinking and discourse carries with it inescapable ethical implications.

The negative utopian approach undercuts the logic of a prescriptive, deontological

ethics, perhaps best illustrated by Adorno’s critique of Kant’s authoritarian defense of

freedom in Negative Dialectics.55 The approach seems more compatible with what

54 “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988) 1-17. This problem occupies Irigaray to a significant degree, as expressed in her remarks about the necessity of female images of divinity.

55 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 281-299.

24

might be seen as a revival of the world’s wisdom traditions, a more contextualized

bringing to bear of competing principles, and a learning to discern when to give

which of these principles more, which less weight in arriving upon a course of action

or a direction. The ethical task is complex, not one that can be simply and always

modeled on a court of law or a decision behind a desk, but is rather more like

undertaking a difficult and uncertain journey through shifting terrain, in changing

weather, with a changing complement of traveling companions. The tactics

appropriate to crossing a river differ from those attuned to making one’s way through

a dense wood, a corn field, or an urban center. Utopian thinking – the thinking that

has in mind a journey without a map to a distant and indistinct destination – might

value that kind of ethical thinking.

Method

The method of this project will involve a close reading of texts, and the use of

hermeneutic principles to try to understand what is going on in these texts. That is,

it will involve the method of subjecting the texts to questioning, and trying to answer

these questions on the basis of the evidence of the texts. The project will draw on

historical documents, secondary sources and commentaries, where available and

relevant, to provide deeper understanding of the context in which these texts

originated. The goal of this reading will be less to reconstruct what the authors

“intend” than with what the texts seem to say when read from the standpoint of a

concern with utopia, as a symbol of the humanly desirable and desired world. I will

assume as much as possible that these texts talk about “the same world” as the one

in which I live, though with some sensitivity to the fact that there is some distance

between that world and the world of this reader, a fact most notable in the case of

Adorno.

These readings will be guided by and will try to construct answers to the following

specific questions:

25

Where is utopia mentioned?Does some other term signify something similar (i.e., a or the “place of ideal perfection”)? If so, what term(s)?

What, if any, definition of utopia does the author give?Is there a working definition of utopia? What is it?Does this definition apply throughout the author’s treatment of utopia, or are different senses of utopia evident?How does Levinas’ definition of utopia as “an expression and exploration of desire” relate to the author’s own definition, if any?

What, if any, predicates are assigned to utopia? How is utopia described?Specifically:Is utopia singular, or plural? Individual or collective? Public or private?What, if anything, does utopia specifically include, or exclude?What, if any, utopian descriptions are specifically religious?What, if any, utopian descriptions are specifically artistic/aesthetic?What, if any, utopian descriptions are specifically linguistic? (That is, characterize language or the role of language in utopia or the utopian condition?)How does this specific utopia relate to Tillich’s utopian categories (as a utopia of overcoming death, of overcoming estrangement, of connecting with the Ground of being)?Is utopia attainable or unattainable, practically speaking and in principle? [That is, does it make sense for people to try to “get to utopia,” or is utopia strictly an orienting ideal?]

How do these predicates relate to what people desire? How do they shape what people desire?

How do these predicates relate to what is desirable (and by what criterion or criteria)?

Against what non-utopian background situation is utopia discursively positioned? What in this situation is not desired, and what is undesirable (and by what criterion or criteria)?

What, if any, dangers or obstacles does this author identify in speaking about or describing utopia? What, if any, dangers or obstacles does this author identify in not doing so? Where does s/he strike the balance in her/his work, and for what discernible reasons?

What is the practical import, if any, of the author’s discussion of utopia?

What, if any, map or itinerary would take people (of any description) towards utopia? How adequate would a map generated by human desire be? How adequate would a map generated by a representation of the desirable be? Where would such a map come from?

What, if anything, does this map or itinerary concretely include? That is: What would change in extant reality, or what would have to change, to make extant reality utopian? What, if any, activity would produce this change?

26

Would it be a change in extra-personal reality? Would it be a change in people themselves? Would it be both? Would one have to come before the other?

What is the relationship between this map or itinerary and the maps or itineraries developed by any of the world religions with which the author would be familiar? The artistic movements or political movements with which the author would be familiar? Any aspects of these programs that are specifically included or advocated? Any specifically rejected?

To whom, if to anyone, would this treatment of utopia offer hope? How? On what conditions?

What are the criteria for making use of human desire in approaching “the desirable”? How do we distinguish between that which we desire, but wrongly or to our hurt, and that which we desire, rightly or to our benefit? Which desire would we be wise to pursue, which to deny?

Each of these questions constitutes a preliminary point for comparison. I will ask

whether the similarities and differences these readings uncover might be taken as

evidence of any further meaning. I will pay particular attention to how religious and

aesthetic thematics are mobilized in these author’s treatments of utopia. The key

question is what secures the possibility of confidence, and what degree of

confidence, in the reality of the image(s) of the desired, that is, confidence in the

desirability of, and the real desirability of, the desired world. [That world is actually

desirable and is worth trying to achieve.] That is, in another way of thinking about it,

what provides or constitutes the authority to which these authors ultimately appeal.

Preliminary Plan

A preliminary plan for the project is as follows:

Chapter 1 – Introduction and Background: Desire and the Desirable

Introduces key ideas and themes of the project, along with a preliminary

discussion providing intellectual context and a sense of the issues at stake

in the investigation. Main divisions:

Reasons for the focus on utopia; contextualization of utopian

reflection in the tradition of the humanities;

Relationship of key ideas and themes: utopia, appearance, religion,

art, desire and desirability;

27

Reasons for consulting Adorno, Agamben, and Irigaray;

The central problem of articulating desire and desirability; the

possibility of being misled by desire, and the concomitant problem of

being misled by erroneous specifications of the desirable.

Chapter 2 – Challenges to Utopian Thinking in Modern and Postmodern Times

A more detailed discussion of the specifically modern and postmodern

problems facing utopian reflection, to which Adorno, Irigaray and Agamben

are responding; these include, in particular, a deepening awareness of the

various ways history and discourse are involved in the formation of desire,

and the unnerving implications of that involvement. Main divisions:

Obscurantist consequences of nominalism & positivism [re: Adorno];

The role, and problem, of ideology in the visualization of utopia;

The role, and problem, of the subconscious and the history of the

formation of conscious desire in the visualization of utopia;

The role, and problem, of language and discourse in the formation of

desire, and in the representation of utopia-as-visualized;

The problem of the vanishing unitary subject:

The individual one;

The collective one

Consequences for utopian reflection

Chapter 3 – Adorno

A critical assessment of the appearance of the concept of utopia in

Adorno’s work, particularly Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.

Main divisions:

Background to Adorno’s thought –

Frankfurt School Marxism;

Walter Benjamin’s theory of language;

Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics;

28

Judaism [and the ban on images and idolatry]

Adorno’s negative realist & materialist treatment of transcendence in

Negative Dialectics

Modern art as the negative space of the utopian in Aesthetic Theory

Chapter 4 – Agamben

A critical assessment of the appearance of the concept of utopia in

Agamben’s work, particularly Potentialities and The Coming Community.

Main divisions:

Background

Affinities with Adorno – Benjamin and the Talmud

Pauline Messianism (The Time That Remains)

Aristotle, Foucault, and Bio-power (Homo Sacer)

Utopianism in Potentialities

Utopianism in The Coming Community

Singularity and “Whatever Being”

Irreparability and utopian ethics

Actual prospects: non-administrability and “the tanks”

Chapter 5 – Irigaray

A critical assessment of the appearance of the concept of utopia in

Irigaray’s work, particularly Ethics of Sexual Difference and The Way of

Love; modulations in Adorno’s and Agamben’s reflections on utopian

possibilities suggested by Irigaray’s emphasis on sexual difference. Main

divisions:

Background

Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger

Lacan

Christianity and the thematics of incarnation

[Judith Butler’s critique of Irigaray’s heteronormativity]

29

Utopian ethics in Ethics of Sexual Difference

Utopian communication in The Way of Love

Benjamin’s theory of language revisited

Transcendence and the feminine/human divine

Chapter 6 – Conclusions: The Re-Appearance of the 2nd Commandment in

Utopian Reflection

Discussion of Adorno’s, Agamben’s, and Irigaray’s apophatic and anti-

iconic approaches to utopian thinking, and its recontextualization of the

aniconic monotheistic critique of idolatry. I will make an argument that

runs something like this:

For these thinkers, representations of utopia, including most forms of

conceptual and linguistic representation, already constitute its betrayal.

The opposite of utopia is less dystopia than it is idolatry, or rather,

dystopian forms of life are dystopian because of their idolatry. That

idolatry takes the form of clinging to inadequate concepts, regulations,

rules, ideas, and other fixed representations that constrain the

achievement of human life. This idolatry represents on one hand the

desire for certainty, the wish not to go wrong, and on the other hand the

desire for stability, the final achievement of something worthwhile. These

thinkers, while appreciating rational categories and abstract thinking, want

to leave open the space for that which radically challenges those

categories: the space for concrete life, for surprise, for singularity, for the

event of something not already planned or known. They are thus explicitly

open to “the negative” (Adorno), “the outside” (Agamben, Irigaray) – what

is not, what is coming into being but has not yet taken place, which might

be, and what disrupts notions of closed totality.

Timetable

30

A great deal of work remains to be done on all aspects of the project. In light of

this, the timetable that follows is ambitious, but maybe not ludicrously so.

Do This By This Date

Draft Chapter 1 January 30, 2008

Reread Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory,

complete research for critical assessment of

Adorno’s utopianism February 15, 2008

Draft Chapter 3 March 15, 2008

Complete research on Irigaray’s utopian thought April 15, 2008

Draft Chapter 5 April 30, 2008

Complete research on Agamben’s utopian thought May 16, 2008

Draft Chapter 4 May 30, 2008

Draft Chapter 2 June 30, 2008

Draft Chapter 6 July 30, 2008

Complete revisions November 30, 2008

31

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