Political Theory



H02(c) - Utopias: Past, Present, and Future

Date: Jun 12 | Time: 10:15am to 11:45am | Location: 680 Sherbrooke St. West 1055

Chair/Président/Présidente : Ryan Griffiths (McGill University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Michelle Mawhinney (York University)

Reduction and Utopia in Benjamin’s Critical Political Phenomenology: Paul Mazzocchi (York University)
Abstract: In recent years, critical and political phenomenology sought to recenter the phenomenological project around both unmasking the quasi-transcendental way social structures affect experience and exposing the systems of domination that these structures are rooted in. While critical theory also sought to unmask domination, the members of the Frankfurt School were often dismissive if not outright hostile to phenomenology. Walter Benjamin represents an exception to this tendency within critical theory. Yet, his engagement with phenomenology remains cryptic and largely ignored. This paper explores Benjamin’s subliminal deployment of a phenomenological reduction and what it might contribute to the critical and political turn in phenomenology. Benjamin sought to unmask the temporality of capitalist modernity, including its deployment of an “empty, homogenous time” rooted in conceptions of progress and eternal return. To escape this form of temporality, Benjamin theorized “now-time” as a moment of awakening in which the temporal structure of modernity is suspended, opening new historical possibilities and new relations to the past and future as objects of experience. I argue that now-time can be read as an example of a critical political phenomenological reduction that explodes the historical or temporal continuum in opening utopian possibilities. In doing so, I consider not only Benjamin’s own specific focus on capitalism and the oppressed but how this can dovetail with anti-colonial phenomenologies.


The right to utopia: imagination and experimentation in Nozick’s framework for utopia: Thilo Schaefer (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Ruth Levitas argues that utopianism should be understood as a method, not a goal. Utopias, Levitas argues, represent “provisional hypothesis about how society might be.” The ‘method’ of utopia involves comparing the vast multitude of imaginable social alternatives against each other and against existing social institutions. This evaluative process allows us to better understand what a more sustainable, equitable, and just world could look like. It is this definition of utopia as a method for tomorrow which I employ in my paper reconsidering Robert Nozick’s "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." This is a book best known for its comprehensive defense of Nozick’s entitlement theory of rights and the libertarian minimal state limited to defending those rights. The final chapter, in which Nozick constructs a ‘utopian’ argument for the minimal state, has received remarkably little critical attention. In this chapter Nozick describes his idealized ‘framework for utopia’ using the language of rights: in the framework for utopia “[e]very rational creature… will have the same rights of imagining a possible world for himself to live in.” The existence of a 'right to utopia' is a very provocative suggestion. Even more fascinating is Nozick’s insistence that utopianism is an equal right. My paper explores this eccentric form of egalitarianism that is disguised within an otherwise libertarian argument. I further explain how Nozick views the right to utopia as being made up of two constituent parts: the right to imagine one’s ideal society and the right to actualize it through social experimentation.


Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory and the Role of Forgetting: Sophie Marcotte Chenard (Carleton University)
Abstract: Memory studies have flourished in the past decades, accompanied by memory activism and a prevalent discourse on the duty of remembrance. The democratization of mnemonic techniques, such as photography, has further reinforced the importance of cultural and collective memory as an essential object of study. However, recent memory contestations, in the form of an active destruction of public monuments, have raised central interrogations about the place of forgetting within political communities. Can forgetting be used as a beneficial strategy in dealing with difficult or contested pasts? What is involved in the deliberate operation to reject or eliminate specific traces in collective memory? While forgetting is often presented as a threat or as a pathology, I argue that oblivion may actually perform a central political function. Drawing from Paul Ricoeur’s notion of the “travail de l’oubli” and Axel Honneth’s work on the politics of memory, I elaborate a typology of the uses and abuses of collective forgetting by distinguishing between cases of imposed forgetting, such as amnesties, and cases of ‘forgetting from below’, such as the recent waves of destruction of statues in Canada and the United States. Through the analysis of key examples, this paper examines the politics of memory through the prism of forgetting, and shows how we inherit a living past and how this debt can be processed critically through a balance of remembering and forgetting. It argues that too much memory may prevent the work of imagination necessary for the projection of alternative futures.