Affirmation and Utopia in the Negative Dialectical and Postmodern Traditions

• In Event: Utopias, Radical Politics, and the Political Imaginary

Abstract

Critical thought, whether in its Hegelian-Marxist or Nietzschean-Postmodern idioms, is famously wary of describing the utopian content of its aspirations. Marx’s and Engel’s own efforts to define a scientific rather than a utopian socialism, one which proceeds through the materiality of things as they are, are amplified in both negative dialectics and postmodernism’s strategies of difference and deferral. Nonetheless, the very coherence of any critical project, whether conceptually, ethically, or politically, at least implies an affirmative referent that orients its activity. In fact, the tension between a wariness of a settled identity and an enactment of an affirmative content that characterizes these variants of critical theory is precisely figured, or spaced, by the ideal of utopia, a no-place that is nonetheless very real in terms of guaranteeing our potentials for autonomous activity. This paper seeks to draw out the affirmative referents that organize the critical, anti-essentialist rhetorics of both the negative dialectical and post-modern streams of the critical theoretical enterprise, paying particular attention to how the utopian or affirmative moments that are articulated within those traditions are crucial for thinking through the motivational structures that contour revolutionary and post-revolutionary desire.

Author

• Michael Lipscomb, Winthrop University