Abstract

This chapter explores the seminar's fantasy of the West as an intellectual utopia illustrating the fantasy by turning to ideas of Russian cosmism and high-minded East European science fiction. The chapter's claim is that, in so far as the utopia was perceived as actually existing on the other side of the Iron curtain, it would be more properly described via Foucault's notion of heterotopia: a mirror image which alters into a counter-site by simultaneously reflecting, contesting and inverting the real site. The linguistic aspect of this mirroring is discussed in the chapter as heterotopian homonymy--the proliferation of conceptual doppelgangers which, as in Foucault's definition, simultaneously represent, contest and invert each other. The confusion ensuing from the traffic of such homonyms is illustrated by the communication crisis at a much debated East-meets-West philosophical conference in Dubrovnik in 1990 where American philosopher Fredric Jameson and Russian-Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili were protagonists.

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