Escaping The Repetition Of Catastrophe: On Abensour's Utopianism

The late French political philosopher Miguel Abensour—who passed away on April 22, 2017—occupies a curious place in the interdisciplinary project of utopian studies, especially for its participants in the Anglo-American world. On one hand, Abensour first articulates what has become one of the foundational concepts shaping current research in the field—the notion of utopia as an "education of desire." On the other, Abensour's writings remain largely unknown to English-language readers, as very little of his work has been translated, the exception being the 2011 publication of Abensour's Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, a rethinking of the utopian horizon of democracy undertaken through a careful rereading of Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Raymond N. MacKenzie's lively translation of Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin thus helps correct this situation and begins to make Abensour's work more available to the wider audience it so richly deserves. Moreover, although originally published in France in 2000—and more recently reissued as the third volume of Utopiques, a four-volume edition of Abensour's collected writings on utopia—the concerns of this book speak in an immediate way to our own ongoing state of emergency (even more so now in the fall of 2020 than in the spring of 2018, when I first penned these words), wherein it remains a challenge to find any utopian horizon in the conditions of the present.

Abensour formulates the notion of utopia as an "education of desire" in his 1973 doctoral thesis, "Les Formes de l'utopie socialiste-communiste," focused on the political writings of William Morris. The concept's wider circulation would begin three years later, by way of E. P. Thompson's 1976 New Left Review essay and subsequent Postscript to the revised edition of his landmark 1955 book William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Thompson characterizes Abensour's education of desire as "not the same as 'a moral education' towards a given end; it is, rather, to open a way to aspiration, to 'teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way' (330). Morris's Utopianism, when it succeeds, liberates desire to an uninterrupted interrogation of our values and also to its own self-interrogation" (791). Thompson further notes that he welcomes "Abensour's insight the more since it is the insight which, at a submerged level, structured this book when it was first written, but which I finally failed to articulate" (791). Two years later, Raymond Williams, in his essay "Utopia and Science Fiction," also underscores the importance of Abensour's notion, noting that through it, "Abensour establishes a crucial periodization in the utopian mode, according to which there is, after 1850, a change from the systematic building of alternative organizational models to a more open and heuristic discourse of alternative values" (202). It is no coincidence that Williams concludes his essay with a discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's then recently published masterpiece, The Dispossessed (1974), as this open and heuristic turn comes into its own in this moment with the emergence of the tradition that Tom Moylan and Peter Fitting name the "critical utopia."¹

Abensour's notion of the education of desire undergoes a further significant development in Ruth Levitas's groundbreaking study The Concept of Utopia (1990).² For Levitas—who confesses that her "account of Abensour's work … is taken from Thompson's discussion," as Abensour's thesis "is not available in English" (210)—the education of desire becomes a crucial function of all utopias:

Utopia entails not just the fictional depiction of a better society, but the assertion of a radically different set of values; these values are communicated indirectly through their implications for a whole way of life in order for utopia to operate at the level of experience, not merely cognition, encouraging the sense that it does not have to be like this, it could be otherwise. … However, there is plainly...