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In Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper and Return of the Grasshopper, game-play is claimed to be the 'ideal of existence' and the only activity that could sustain us through the 'endless and endlessly boring summer' of utopia. Christopher Yorke has challenged these claims by way of a constructive dilemma. If these games are sufficiently akin to the games we play, then they are not adequate to the task of rendering immortality tolerable. If these games are importantly different than the games we play, then, in being 'unknown and unknowable', they would characterize a form of life that is importantly different from our own and, so, would be inappropriate objects of social and political aspiration. Against Yorke's skepticism, I argue that the games that constitute the ideal of existence are intelligible to us because we already play what the Grasshopper calls 'open games'. Steffen Borge concedes that utopian games are intelligible, but argues that such games would fail to 'grab our minds and imagination'. In the second half of the paper, I contend, against Borge, that such open games are adequate to the task of sustaining the interest of an immortal community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By adopting Habermas' communicative theory, this paper categorizes players' actions into four elements. The strategic action involves players manipulating each other within the framework of a game1; normative action is manifested in following the rules and the underlying ethos; dramaturgical action emerges through the players' deliberate presentation of themselves to both participants and spectators; and communicative action reveals the purpose of a game as a way of being. The conceptualization of game actions leads to a qualitative redefinition of the perfect game, which enables a greater understanding of the game, its participants, and human excellence. As such, this paper's significance lies in the proposal that the Habermasian perfect game is a potential solution to Suits' puzzle about what type of games can be played in his Utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Conservative critic John Borstlap cited Ligeti as a partisan in his fight against the modernist myth of progress in the arts, based on the famous citation “I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Ligeti's ambivalence reflected his distaste for art linked to utopian socialist ideals, and for all that was reactionary. Yet he admitted that his own youthful utopian strivings evolved into a desire for complex music that often defied audibility. This essay traces Ligeti's reception history from the late 1950s onward as a reaction to the thwarted utopian strains in his music. For some, Ligeti's music of the 1960s seemed to define “the contemporary problem itself.” But the composer's increased visibility in the 1990s led to demands that he deal with his Jewish heritage and wartime trauma, and cease writing music with a broad appeal. I argue that Ligeti's works reinscribe the past, the personal, and the extramusical as a conscious expression of his prison. They express the nonlinear notion of progress that defines modernism: a vast “tear in the historical process” able to lift music above the scrum of political-aesthetic skirmishes, to a “region which lies elsewhere.”

Discussions within queer time studies often hinge upon a simplistic binary division between Lee Edelman's anti-futurism and José Esteban Muñoz's queer utopianism. This article aims to reframe this discourse, acknowledging its limitations and proposing alternative approaches to conceptualizing the future through a queer lens. Beginning with a brief overview of both the queer anti-social thesis and future-oriented utopias, this article explores alternative, critical frameworks for future-making praxis such as Jussi Parikka's 'counter-futuring' and Bahar Noorizadeh's 'weird-futuring'. Leveraging these frameworks and Muñoz's suggestion to investigate novel queer epistemologies within queer art, the article then examines Zach Blas' 'xeno-telos' and micha cárdenas' 'queer prototyping', as paradigmatic examples of queer future-making beyond the referred dichotomy. In conclusion, this article argues for a diversification of queer time/future politics, advocating for partial, precarious and open-ended approaches to future-oriented thinking; approaches that embrace the unknown, trial and error and unexpected possibilities, thus fostering, new, diversified and radically engaged queer temporal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying how people relate to the future and how it shapes individual or collective affects is a way to grasp what motivates social practices. What would be the effect of the climate crisis and democratic disillusionments on social mobilisations? What impact does the disappearance of the horizon of progress have on individuals' lives? Based on long-term fieldwork among a dozen neo-farming anarchist libertarian collectives in the Massif Central (France), I analyse how the future horizon of despair, anxiety, or abandonment is necessarily intertwined with utopian projection. This interaction between antinomic futures creates a paradoxical and Camusian 'absurd' present that resonates with a shared temporality emphasising the 'here and now' and prefigurative politics. Through this study of the 'back-to-the-land' movement, I will propose a broader epistemological discussion related to how anthropology has historically approached incoherence and contradictions. I advocate for deepening our understanding of the meaning of social practices by interrogating the intrinsic multiple representations of time that impel them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to establish a conceptual connection between social innovation (SI) and utopia. Both refer to change in the future, imply an intent to bring about or envision a better state of affairs and therefore offer some critique of the present. Current concepts of SI lack focus on thecritiques, hopes and imaginaries that underlie SI initiatives. The paper turns towards the concept of utopia to fully understand SI as a tool for social change and engages with how utopia can become part of a social theory of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boys’ Love (BL), known as Danmei (耽美) in China, is a popular female-oriented male-male intimacy genre celebrated by today’s Chinese younger generation. From 2000 to 2020, BL fiction rapidly developed, becoming a major expression of male homosexuality and homoeroticism in China. This research detects the dynamics between BL fiction’s utopianized space and gay readers—a community simultaneously being the major subject of BL representation and the minority of BL fans. Conducting semi-structured interviews with three Chinese BL gay readers from high school, college, and workplace, this research delineates a representative picture of Chinese gay readers’ intentions, experiences, and opinions of involving a utopianized BL world. Using Ruth Levitas’ utopian thinking framework, this research investigates how the utopianized representations of idealized homosexual romance, arousing homoerotic behaviors, and the normalized gay everydayness in Chinese BL fiction from 2000 to 2020 can impact gay readers’ engagement with practical lives. The study argues that Chinese BL gay readers’ active involvement and strategic interactions enable them to contingently engage with their lived reality, demonstrating their subjective role as active audiences with agency. This result adds to contemporary BL studies and provides an enriched utopian thinking framework, calling for subsequent minority research to value individuals and individuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper shows how and why it is ‘im-possible’—i.e. simultaneously possible and impossible—for humans to travel and stay underwater by narrating the story of how Jules’ Undersea Lodge was designed and how its guests can remain there for relatively long periods of time. Drawing from interviews with its designer, Ian Koblick, reflexive ethnographic material collected at Key Largo’s (Florida) Jules’ Undersea Lodge in the early spring of 2024, and an interview with Joseph Dituri—who in 2023 set a world record for the longest time spent in an underwater habitat – we conceptualize im-possibility as a dialectical tension between possibility and impossibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charges of eccentricity have long clung to the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich. Flouting many of the conventions governing classical performance, Argerich has openly resisted professional and identitarian confinement, admitting that she "[doesn't] want to be a pianist" and has never "felt like a woman." Indeed, reviews of her performances are littered with impressions of disorientation attributed to the subtleties of her gendered transgressions coupled with her corporeal stillness in performance. This fixation on stillness invokes a history traceable to eighteenth-century music criticism, wherein descriptions of stillness policed the borders of palatable gender expression. This phenomenon of stillness would come to condition the figure of the "virtuosa" and, persisting into the twentieth century, complicates prevailing narratives centering the great men of piano performance history. This article takes Argerich's performances as invitations to look back toward the tradition of feminine virtuosity to which she belongs, while exploring the ways in which she challenges its gendered limitations. I argue that the tensions underpinning her self-professed gender ambivalence and professional dissatisfaction are enacted through the virtuosic choreography she fashions in performance—a choreography that both reinscribes and traverses the borders of feminine virtuosity. I thus read her performances as queer enactments of her gender disidentification. I then turn toward Argerich's world of artists misaligned with the demands of classical performance. Her commune has provided refuge not only for this community of outcasts but also for those who have never shared a space with Argerich, yet nonetheless stumble upon the traces of her aberrant desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractElaborating on Barthes’ famous distinction, this article examines the relationship between the writerly and the readerly in Abe Kazushige’s novel Individual Projection (Indivijuaru purojekushon). The ‘writerly’ (scriptible) designates an open-ended, playful narrative, giving free rein to the interpretation of the reader who thus becomes a co-writer of the text. The readerly (lisible), by contrast, implies authority and redundancy: it imposes a meaning or message, thus turning the reader into a consumer rather than producer of the text. I argue that Abe’s novel is built upon an internal tension between the openness of the writerly and the more assertive and ethical message of the readerly. The first two parts of this essay focus on the writerly side of the text. Individual Projection could be first described as a parody (1. Political Utopia and Genre fiction as Parody in Individual Projection): through its unreliable narrator, the novel toys with stereotypes associated with political utopia and genre fiction. Such distancing with clichés destabilises the text and opens a free space of interpretation for the reader (2. Metafiction as Writerly Text: When the Reader Writes). Yet, the novel ends with a final metatextual reversal which reshapes our understanding of the story and redefines the reader’s own relationship to the text (3. Metafiction: Revenge of the Author?). This end illustrates the paradoxical nature of metafiction in its relationship to the reader: its apparent semantic openness can also be a means to assert the author’s authority over the text to convey a theoretical or philosophical message. Here, my own understanding of Individual Projection challenges Azuma Hiroki’s interpretation of Abe’s novel. Azuma saw in the openness of Individual Projection another illustration of his own theory both describing and advocating a free consumption of fiction, relying much more on the logic of recycling and recombination than on the linear path of the plot. If Azuma’s interpretation sheds interesting light on the agency devoted to the reader in Individual Projection, it yet fails to apprehend the potentially critical message of the text: Abe’s novel also suggests a pessimistic view of contemporary’s hyperreality which seems quite antithetical to Azuma’s own eulogy of postmodernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pope Francis’ pastoral response to trans people represents a compromise between his negative-affective political stance towards transness, and his positive-affective theology of pastoral welcome. By reducing away transness to sickness or sin, he can welcome trans people as individuals in a depoliticized personal sphere apart from the political – at the cost of a reductive ‘domestication’ of trans people, and the reproduction of right-wing populist politics evoked by his own negative-affective political transphobia. This paper argues for a better compromise, which enables positive-affective attitudes specifically in and amidst negative-affect, enabling trans people to be welcomed without reduction. It does this by reading Francis as championing a utopianism similar to that of José Esteban Muñoz. It argues that his recovery of a Franciscan ethic of self-subjection gestures towards an unimagined relationality in which trans people can be welcomed amidst the tensions of the present, and against theopolitical transphobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critique of planning in the 1960s and 70s legitimized the subsequent emaciation of governmental planning, which marked a shift from comprehensive, rational planning and government-created masterplans to looser forms of urban governance through regulations, codes and ‘flexible’ frameworks, produced by urban designers, planners, developers and local authorities. This paper interrogates the idea of contingency, a key ingredient in discrediting ‘the plan’. It argues that the proposition to ‘embrace contingency’, which permeated work of scholars ranging from Popper to Laclau, has had a detrimental impact on planning theory and practice. It has condoned the uncertainty and havoc caused by the free-market within the built environment. It continues to de-legitimize attempts to reintroduce ‘tight’ planning, which describes what ought to be done, and hence steers our cities towards evermore libertarian and neoliberal (non-) governance. This theory paper’s argument concisely studies the idea of contingency in general terms, proceeding to analyse key literature in urban design and planning that delegitimized ‘the plan’ in the 1960s and 70s through accusations of utopianism, and finally looks at more recent contributions that, as this paper demonstrates, continue to follow the contingency-dependent, anti-plan path identified decades ago, often explicitly criticizing neoliberalism while implicitly supporting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dialectical relationship between myth and utopia, fantasy and reason. The text presents 'interpretive keys' that enable historical consciousness to interpret the past and critically decipher glimpses of utopia in the traces of the present. The presented theoretical models are primarily those of the Frankfurt School philosophers Benjamin and Adomo, who base their positions on Hegel’s philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When European writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote about utopia or their vision of the best possible way to live, they usually included reflections on religion. Religion as it was known in their day was not perfect and had been criticized for causing numerous abuses. If a perfect or near-perfect society were to be imagined, it would have to include a perfect or near-perfect understanding of religion. This could range from atheism to a minimal religion which avoided all the institutional factors, to one in which detailed regulations governed all facets of religion and life. This article reviews and interprets the treatment of religion in a wide range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century utopias. It concludes that some utopian writers set high goals for change, some settled for lesser reforms, and some left religion as it was while changing other parts of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to an apolitical, pessimistic, and non-feminist perception of Witi Ihimaera's work, this article contends that his early novel The Matriarch (1986) and its sequel The Dream Swimmer (1997) frame Māori communities as an ancient, patriarchal space in need of revision to accommodate women. Reconsidering the role of tribalism and Māori utopian and cyclical land narratives, this study argues that the confessional male narrator of both novels, Tamatea Mahana, learns to embrace a matrilineal genealogy not only of powerful Māori women leaders of chiefly status, but also of charismatic women in the shadow, like his mother Tiana. Beyond Pākehā imperial democracy and Māori "male utopias of domination", Tamatea and the exceptional gallery of warrior-matriarchs implement a peculiar and controversial retrotopia — a return to the prematurely buried grand ideas of the past — which, even when dangerously resonating with nostalgia, aims at an open-ended model of democracy through spiral temporality. 1 A predominantly decolonizing theory and methodology is used, drawing on Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Levitas's (2013) 'utopia as method' as a way to approach the histories of digital education and its utopian possibilities. The themes of emergence, openness and desire are woven through the three modes of Levitas's method. First, an archaeological analysis considers the relationship between digital education, lifelong learning and utopia in the political programmes of UNESCO, OECD and the UK government. Second, Levitas's 'utopia as ontology' considers how critical digital education might help move us from the paradigm of the locked-down 'data subject' within a human capital model of education toward emergent and more-than-human ways of understanding. Third, the method's architectural phase is used to explore how a future for digital education might be imagined through the themes of ecopedagogy, diversity of knowledge and the end of institutions. The paper argues that the new twenty-first century utopian imagination might help us to imagine and build better futures for digital education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Wizard of Oz (1939) is one of the most often referenced, if not the most often referenced, text within US popular culture. The MGM classic starring Judy Garland has largely eclipsed L. Frank Baum's vast universe of Oz and original book, as the songs ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow"), phrases ("We're not in Kansas anymore"), and visual iconography (ruby slippers) of the film are regularly alluded to – and have taken on a life of their own. This not only raises The Wizard of Oz to mythic status, but it also allows for these references to serve as signifiers immediately understandable to a US-American audience, in what can be called "palimpsestic transmediality," building on the theories of Gérard Genette, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Henry Jenkins. To illustrate this phenomenon, the article provides a close reading of the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso (2020–23), where The Wizard of Oz is used to illustrate the titular protagonist's journey of personal growth, and thus connects it to a televisual fantastic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article represents a study of one of the most distinctive, yet neglected, utopian visions of the late 1960s and early 1970s in America. It examines the Black Nationalist struggle of that decade as an expression of utopia with special reference to one of its leaders, Amiri Baraka. The article shows how Baraka's Black Nationalist works express a prophecy of creating a new reality for Blacks in America. Baraka's ideal society, his utopia, it is shown, is reached by "breaking the continuity of history," that is, by a total separation from what he views as the "rotten and hellish" white American society. Black Americans should create, instead, an alternative Black society through what Ashcroft calls "the myth of return," reimaging the Black man's glorious pre-slavery African past, that is, going back to his origins--the home of his ancestors (Africa). The article argues the reconstruction of a number of Eastern/African elements (ancient Africa, its traditions, culture, heritage, and language) that Baraka describes as "keys to a new black world." The article concludes with a discussion of the reasons behind the collapse of Baraka's Black Nationalist utopian project in 1974. As Baraka started to move toward the left due to the influence of Mao, Nkrumah, and Cabral in the mid-1970s, he realized the clash between his utopian ideals (equality, freedom, justice, selfdetermination... etc.) and the unidealistic foundation of his utopia. This new Barakan Socialist utopian vision remains untouched and is thus recommended for a profound examination in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Islamic Economics & Finance Studies is the property of Politik Ekonomik ve Sosyal Serdivan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The school or method of phenomenology, with the fundamental change it created in the interpretation and understanding of philosophy, culture, literature, politics, science and art, caused thinkers to leave the habitual view and repeated analyzes and by suspending the reading of texts through institutionalized traditions. And from the perspective of others, it provided the ground for new perceptions of concepts and intellectual and practical currents. The Qalandariyya school, with its various phenomena and special neomas, has many complexities and ambiguous points. This mystical school is often discussed, interpreted and analyzed through the eyes of others and historical knowledge, and its intuitive and sensory aspects have been ignored. Phenomenology, by suspending previous knowledge and placing the natural view based on historical knowledge in parentheses, provides a kind of sensory and intuition-based view to look at this mystical school and sect, through which we can also understand some of He understood the neglected aspects of this intellectual and practical flow with a sensory and direct view, and he understood the same type of Qalandran's view of existence and mystical issues that provide the reasons for distinguishing this sect from other mystical sects. The current research has explained this cult based on the phenomenological method with the library method and qualitative content analysis and has come to the conclusion that Qalandari's poetry is descriptive in nature. Qalandarsara poets have their own definitions of mysticism. The purpose of this school is to fight against the Riyazdeh society and the false and holy claimants. The Qalandariyya school has a contradiction between claims and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passages composed by Nietzsche around the time he spent at Sorrento reflect an engagement with the anarcho-utopian socialist milieu into which he had been introduced by Malwida von Meysenbug. The "Sorrentino politics" that appear in Human, All Too Human I and II and later works need to be understood in the context of an affirmative form of political thought that could remedy the pessimism and nihilism that he finds in the politics of all sides. Nietzsche argues that the monarchical state, modern industrialism, and the restricted ownership of capital and property all undermine the goal of creating a life-affirming culture for Europe. He also provides a criticism of a utopian teleology of equality in the future – whether religious or socialist – that imposes an objective notion of purpose. Nietzsche rejects the Schopenhauerian pessimism of resignation while affirmatively engaging with the thought of Alexander Herzen and Guiseppe Mazzini. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much has been said about the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers, this essay aims to address the decade from ‘67 to ‘77, which saw the departure of the Ungers family for the United States of America, more precisely for the city of Ithaca in the state of New York. It was precisely the American period that allowed O.M. Ungers to reflect and revise much of the work that had seen him directly involved in some controversies, which culminated in protests in December ‘67. The purpose of this text is to briefly review some of the events that took place during that period, in order to shed light on two almost unknown texts that saw their birth mainly thanks to the American period and the social ferment of the time: Kommunen in der Neuen Welt. 1740 - 1972, published in ‘72 by both authors and Die Rückkehr des Roten Mannes: Indianer in den USA, published in ‘74 by Liselotte Ungers. It is essetial to point out these publications, not only to bring to light a part of Ungers’ work unknown to most, but also to clarify some of the urban strategies proposed by O.M. Ungers that become, now more than ever, fundamental references for the possible resolution of contemporary crises. In a period that sees the rediscovery of utopia as a model for solving the many crises we are facing, as was already the case in the 1960s and 1970s, it is appropriate to recall and deepen Ungers’ reflections on the Utopian device trying not to fall back on the proposal of sci-fi or retro-futuristic models.

The research is devoted to the status and role of utopian consciousness in society and culture. The author believes that the utopian component is inherent in any human goal-setting and design. A project is the result of dissatisfaction with the current reality; it carries within itself a desire for change, radical restructuring, but at first a person is dominated by desire and an as yet unformed image - both the goal and the path to its implementation. Therefore, the first phase of design is always utopian. In sociocultural design, this is the “image of paradise”, which only later develops into realistic plans and selection of funds, taking into account circumstances. However, the utopian component as an ideal remains an inspiring moment with a clear distinction between ideal and reality. Utopian consciousness acquires the features of an illusion when the ideal is transferred to specific actual space and time. Then people try to either “move” to Eden, or transport it to themselves, or quickly realize it, in a hurry and getting tired. In the first case, one’s own “project for the best” is abandoned; in the second, one tries to implement one’s own project without taking into account real possibilities. In both cases, disappointment follows due to the lack of realism. The study also analyzes utopian consciousness as a social construct created by influential social groups to realize their interests. This construct is spread through the media. The author believes that ideologies, including those produced by existing power, are always at the same time utopias for the masses. Two powerful modern utopias are briefly examined - globalist-technocratic and conservative-archaic, noting their unrealistic nature, leading to subsequent disappointments.

From the perspective of the Holy Quran, motivation is considered one of the pillars of civilization-building in the establishment of an Islamic utopia. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to present a conceptual model of a motivational utopia in the civilization-building of the Holy Quran. The theoretical part of this goal is pursued by examining concepts extracted from the commentaries of exegetes, while the practical part investigates how motivation-based civilization-building, as rooted in the Quran, is achieved. The main research question is: What is the conceptual model of a motivational utopia in the civilization-building of the Holy Quran? This study is classified as fundamental-developmental research, utilizing qualitative content analysis as its methodology. The entire Quran (as the population) was analyzed, identifying the themes related to the "conceptual model of a motivational utopia" (more than 2,700 verses). Then, through examining commentaries, open, axial, and selective coding was conducted. To present a comprehensive model, three core themes—causal, structural, and consequential—were identified after coding. The validity and reliability of this model were initially assessed by 17 experts, with the CVR and CVI values confirming the content validity of this conceptual model. The findings indicate that from the Quran’s perspective, society and civilization-building represent a utopia where the motivational system is established across various individual, familial, and social domains.

The text questions the possibility of a unique path of philosophy, religion, art and science within the framework of living culture. Language and writing are media that direct spiritual efforts. On one side is the techno-scientific world that seeks operability, while on the other side is the search for a language that can penetrate to true human existence. In this process, experience turns out to be the key result of the cooperation of hand and brain. The technoscientific world of information and attempts to maintain existing relationships in societies is opposed by the utopian idea of human community. Such a just, humane community can only be realized by a being who is given the power to dream, think, and strive to manifest it. Intelligence and intuition, and good will as free will, are tools with which it is possible to achieve the ideal, i.e. what is possible, just. Being open is a process of feedback, elliptical exchange of energies, constant swirling. Living in an ideal community is a free exchange of energy and vibrations with a tendency towards balance. Utopia is an idea waiting to be realized, and the philosophical concept of the idea of Unity is worth practicing, living together.

When European writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote about utopia or their vision of the best possible way to live, they usually included reflections on religion. Religion as it was known in their day was not perfect and had been criticized for causing numerous abuses. If a perfect or near-perfect society were to be imagined, it would have to include a perfect or near-perfect understanding of religion. This could range from atheism to a minimal religion which avoided all the institutional factors, to one in which detailed regulations governed all facets of religion and life. This article reviews and interprets the treatment of religion in a wide range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century utopias. It concludes that some utopian writers set high goals for change, some settled for lesser reforms, and some left religion as it was while changing other parts of life.

Few of the parables found in the gospels have received more attention than the parable of the man with two sons, commonly known as the parable of the Prodigal Son. In this paper, I argue that discourses of queer futurity can help make new sense of the parable, highlighting its use of family structures and its assumptions about time, and attending to the story’s reflections on the conditions of flourishing. Understood this way, the parable of the man with two sons reads as a debate over bodies, kinship, and possession of the future, and it provokes reflection on the limits that heteronorming structures place on thriving. Read alongside theorists of queer futurity, the parable of the man with two sons affords at least two possible interpretations. It can be understood as a gesture toward a new horizon, embracing a queer future free of the constraints of heteronormative reproductivity. But the parable can also be understood as a conservative cautionary tale that insists on temporal reproductive norms and pathologises deviance from full alignment toward a heteroreproductive future.

El presente estudio tiene como objetivo la identificación de los imaginarios colectivos e imaginarios utópicos de la población universitaria peruana en el contexto de la postpandemia. Al abordar los imaginarios sociales, esta investigación busca comprender las formas en las cuales las mentalidades colectivas de las personas jóvenes universitarias fueron impactadas por el contexto de la pandemia y, en ese sentido, cómo el contexto del tiempo presente, así como del futuro muestran sus realidades, sus esperanzas y sus temores. Se trata de un estudio básico-descriptivo con un enfoque cualitativo que analiza 20 cartas redactadas por un grupo de jóvenes de una universidad peruana como parte de una actividad académica en un curso de nivel de pregrado. La intención es reconocer los pensamientos, emociones y vivencias de estos individuos. La dinámica de la escritura creativa facilitó una aproximación más íntima a las historias personales del estudiantado, evidenciando la relevancia del círculo familiar y amistoso en sus vidas. Además, se identificaron las principales afectaciones que resaltaron durante la pandemia, como los problemas de salud mental y la fragilidad de sus relaciones sociales. Las conclusiones principales invitan a cuestionar la falta de una perspectiva política tradicional entre estas personas jóvenes, quienes experimentan y reflexionan sobre su entorno social únicamente desde la órbita de lo más cercano (ellas mismas, su familia y sus amistades).

I use a discussion about our human hopes for a this-worldly utopia as a counter-choice to allowing the world to drift or neglect its way into its own forms of dystopia. The signs are clear, including those of climate change and increasing authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of the research lies in the fact that the medieval utopian humanistic pedagogical thought in Volga Bulgaria, reflected in the poem «Kyyssai Yusuf» by the enlightener Kul Gali, has not yet been fully revealed. In this regard, the research problem is to reveal the personal characteristics of the ruler of a humane society, which interested people of all times, but found a solution only in the utopia of medieval enlighteners. The goal of the research is to reveal the humane personal qualities necessary for a ruler to organize a utopian humanistic society, which medieval educators dreamed of and described in their didactic works, including the Bulgar poet Kul Gali. The methodological basis of the study is represented by the use of methods of comparison, induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, generalization and abstraction.The research results: the study reveals the features of utopian humanistic pedagogical thought, at the center of which is the construction of a just society, which requires a person with a number of positive qualities, which were described in detail by the poet-educator Kul Gali in his poem «Kyyssai Yusuf».Key conclusions: the utopian humanistic pedagogical thought in Volga Bulgaria, described by the medieval poet-enlightener Kul Gali in the poem «Kyyssai Yusuf», is inextricably linked with the positive personal characteristics of the ruler, thanks to which justice, legality, equality, respect, love, mercy, sufficient food supply, etc., reign in society.

The paper deals with Nadija Rebronja’s book 88, which is conceived as 88 piano keys or fragments. The paper recognizes some important links that this book establishes with the mannerist literary tradition, as understood and explained by Gustav René Hocke in his widely acknowledged books Mannerism in Literature and The World as a Labyrinth. Instead of opening up to the totality of all things, 88 resembles a mannerist work that closes itself into its own artistic reality and questions the place that literature and art occupy in today’s world. The paper also deals with the implications that arise from the connection Nadija Rebronja establishes with the tradition of magic(al)realism, particularly regarding the construction of motivational systems and their relation to the phenomenon of magic in this book. By utilising the concepts of simultaneity and catalogue, 88 relates to the tradition of the Russian avant-garde, as understood by Aleksandar Flaker. It is also shown that a reassessment, a significant avant-garde procedure, holds an important place in the 88, since the author re-evaluates the figure of travel and a topos of the town square in relation to classical literature. This reassessment is linked to the tradition of hikaye, instructive stories that have come from the Islamic tradition, as well as a farce - a literary form based on reversal. The final part of this paper deals with the fragmentation in Nadia Rebronja’s88 which can be linked to the atomization within the mannerist literature and the avant-garde understanding of the world. It also explores the ways in which the world created in this book relates to,on the one hand,the “optimal projection” as one of the characteristics of the avant-garde, and the concept of utopia as an alternative to freethinking on the other.

Modern graphical interfaces define the user's experience according to various metaphorical spectra – bringing it closer to bureaucratic, then to ritualistic, then to magical interactions over reality. The article suggests a view according to which the basis of this metaphor lies in the idea and image of utopia, and the first forms of realization of such utopia by geometric, optical and technical means, taking into account their philosophical, speculative and eidetic orientation belong to the Renaissance. The utopia of such a geometrized and optically verified city is gradually passing into our logic of thinking about speculative cities, possible spaces of life in general, including graphic user interfaces, Leonardo da Vinci's concepts of space, light, physicality, as well as the features of his approach to using the elements to create environments of life are considered in which: 1) technology does not use styles, but is embedded in them; 2) the space of life is organized not by the material embodiment of ideas, but by involvement through geometric and optical effects in the game of ideas, i.e. it is not the visible forms of the city that become important, but the conditions that allow you to see and navigate; 4) the physicality of the utopian optical-geometric project, in its instrumental and behavioral features, becomes the model that subsequent optical media will focus on, up to the invention of the graphical user interface.

dynamics of power relations and resistance. It draws on the concept of multitemporality, which posits that different 'temporal regimes' — different experiences of time and different temporal constructions of past, present, and future — can coexist. Drawing on the work of K. Mannheim, H. Rosa, and M. Foucault, the article illustrates that power and resistance operate in different temporal regimes, perceive social change at different speeds, and have different attitudes towards the past and the future. The article explores how the optics of multitemporality can serve resistance politics and have an emancipatory effect. Using Foucault's concepts of power and resistance, it describes specific multitemporal characteristics associated with power and resistance, such as power's tendency to slow down the passage of time and resistance's struggle against the determination of the future. The article considers how the temporal aspect helps power to maintain and strengthen its dominance, while enabling resistance to create alternative future scenarios. It emphasizes that resistance acts as a catalyst for social change and, drawing on the ideas of Foucault and Deleuze, underlines the primacy of resistance over power. It concludes that resistance not only seeks to outpace power in time, but represents a qualitatively different approach to time and history.

The paper offers a preliminary study of a phenomenon that could be termed nebulous utopia, an attempt to project an image of the ideal state based on the use of catchwords and slogans. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their extensive use, originally limited mainly to totalitarian states and war propaganda, has become the dominant rhetorical device employed by a wide range of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements aimed at winning popular support by appealing to a set of vaguely defined general values and objectives.

In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the “transhumanist revolution”, a by-product of the ideological myth of progress.

Golden Door (Nuovomondo), a 2006 film by Emanuele Crialese, tells the story of Europeans immigrating to America at the turn of the twentieth century. Representing various characters travelling there driven by diverse motivations, the film showcases different versions of a utopian imaginary vision of America. The article analyses the various ways in which the American ‘promised land’ is conceptualized in the film and how all of them are contrasted with and checked by the realities of the voyage and the Ellis Island reception centre. Referring to the concept of the imaginary, the analysis discusses mechanisms and functions of their production and their subsequent verification and contrast with the rather dystopian realities of the host country.

This paper aims at analyzing utopias and dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. Taking into consideration that this narrative was already defined as a scientific romance and an anatomy with allegorical status, as well as McCarthy's observation that Stapledon’s writing resists simple categorization and that its classification as science fiction or utopian literature is inadequate, this paper suggests several definitions for Stapledon’s work. The author also takes into account the ongoing dispute between utopian studies and science fiction scholars about the strong interaction between utopia and science fiction in the twentieth century. The possibilities of applying the conceptual integration theory to such a complex work of fiction as Last and First Men is explored.

José Lourenço was a religious leader who, in the interior of the State of Ceará, Brazil, organized intentional communities, formed by peasants, who practiced cooperativism based on primitive Christianity along the lines of the Jesuit missions. The Community of Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto, in particular, was home to around 2 thousand people who produced their own food, clothes, tools, among other things, and shared everything according to each person's needs. The community was attacked and destroyed under the accusation of being communists and representing a danger to the Republic recently installed in Brazil.

In this paper I explore the conceptual relatability of Hegel’s description of the Comic Consciousness found in the chapter on “Religion” in his Phenomenology of Spirit to Skinner’s portrayal of a behavioral scientist being tantamount to God, particularly in the fictional behavioral scientist’s ability to create freedom and value in Walden Two. I examine how the Self-Consciousness of the fictional behavioral scientist and the self-consciousness of the Comic Consciousness appear to embody a form of freedom that is able to transcend and create the values of their respective communities. I suggest similarities between these two shapes of selfconsciousness and forms of freedom, as well as the disparities between them, express difficulties for understanding freedom and value in the conceptual context of both the idea of utopia and the “death of God.”

With its inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of female authorship, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) tends to be read as a gendered variation on, or a parodic departure from, the Baconian prototype of the early modern politico-scientific utopia. At the same time, the text’s dialogism, formal heterogeneity and self-reflexivity have spurred theoretical claims surrounding utopia as one of the formal precedents sedimented into the bedrock of novelistic fiction. This study takes up some of these arguments and ponders the possibility of exploring Cavendish’s work as an early instancing of the anarchetypal decentredness of novelistic form.

Review of: Gregory Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet. Life after Consumerism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2022

This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization’s impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek’s Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction’s prescience and part of Czech SF’s path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that “the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia.

The strong belief into the possibility of a comprehensive harmony lies at the core of the European political thought. A Great Harmony, a perfectly planned world in order to achieve equality, uniformity and control was for centuries the goal of many rationalists. With this purpose in mind, they worked for achieving the final stage of human society, no matter the cost. The underlying assumption is that human nature is immutable, permanent in its essence, everywhere and every time one could look at. Despite historical, cyclical defeats of his practical application, the utopia is always ready to start again, with better tools and more eager to plan the ultimate happiness. This is the challenge of our times, facing the immortal utopia in its effort to impose the final harmony, equality and peace. This time, the idealist planners hope that new tools as powerful computers, digital identity, surveillance cameras and digital currency will make the difference.

This article rehearses a movement between interpretation and speculation to investigate the dissonances in the knowledge of individual alienations and the imagination of social alternatives. In this essay we analyse three Argentinian fictions: The short story "Deseo" by T. P. Mira-Echeverría, the poetry collection El fin de la era farmacopornográfica by P. Salmoiraghi and the novel Las indignas by A. Bazterrica. This corpus contains an intersection between utopia and dystopia, as well as a gothic horizon that shows the insufficiency of current cognitive materials to explain what is perceptible.

This article represents an exegetical analysis of Bogdan Crețu’s novel, „Mai puțin decât dragostea”, highlights in particular the main markers of the condition of the individual both in totalitarian and post-totalitarian society. In addition, it brings to light psychological or existential issues that shapes the destinies of the characters and how their actions fit into certain behavioral paradigms, allow us to examine some segments of our recent history, artistically represents in a remarkable manner. We could observe both social dilemmas and traumas inherited from the totalitarian period, as well as the main factors that triggered certain utopian tendencies. Therefore, the right to self-determination is a fundamental fact, and this virtue shapes the identity and moral axis of Bogdan Crețu’s characters. Through this applied analysis of the novel „Mai puțin decât dragostea”, we highlighted not only its literary-artistic value, but also the way it can be perceived.

In this paper, we comment and discuss the fifteen replies that interpret, solicit, problematize, and further develop our Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto (Krisis 42(1)), that have been published in Krisis 43(1). In the paper, we address four overarching topics that we see emerging from the replies: Histories and traditions of criticial naturalism; the relation between theory and praxis; the question of what is critical about critical naturalism; and finally the question of utopia. Additionally, we discuss three general types of attitudes that our critics take to the Manifesto.

AbstractThis paper examines the aspirations, imaginaries and utopias of designers of an AI-based mental health app in India. By looking at automated therapy as both technological fix and sociotechnical object, I ask, What can we learn from engaging with psy technologists’ imaginaries and practices of health care futures? What are the assumptions they encode in the app? How does automated therapy reconfigure the geographies and temporalities of care? While automated therapy as instantiated by Wysa provides, I argue, a modest mental health intervention, the scalar aspirations of designers are anything but small. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it turns to designers’ imaginaries of what it means to care for current mental health needs in digitally saturated lifeworlds and how they inscribe them into the app. It identifies nonjudgmental listening, anonymity, acceptance, reframing, and agency as key ideas encoded in Wysa’s sociotechnical algorithms, along with a congruence between entrepreneurial and encoded ethics of care. Second, it situates automated therapy within anthropological scholarship on ‘little’ technical devices in global health to argue that automated therapy devices such as Wysa articulate dreams for minimalist interventions with macro effects. Finally, it explores the new geographies and temporalities of care that automated therapy spurs, tracing the ways the app bridges various spatial and temporal gaps and obstacles of human therapy and upends common global health pathways. This paper contributes to recent scholarship on aspirations, dreams and utopias and on digitization and datafication in global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay deals with the history of Polish federalist ideas, which have evolved from an ideological utopia to a broadly defined tool of Realpolitik politics. After the defeat of the January Uprising in 1863, Polish elites placed geopolitics at the core of the development of federalism in Polish political thought, especially in the context of ascertaining the geopolitical position 'between Germany and Russia'. This model of situating Polish lands on the European map also determined the extensive circulation of federalist ideas among various political camps. After the outbreak of the First World War, the idea of federalism/federation/confederation became an important element of political rhetoric. Subsequently, federalist ideas turned into the ideological slogans of socialist circles and the National Democrat Party. Both political forces considered federalism merely as an instrument of Realpolitik and under the influence of specific political circumstances, without thinking about its implementation as a form of political structure. The tradition of Polish historiography on the two influential political doctrines – 'federative' and 'incorporative' – is questionable. This division needs to be revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue of Law & Literature on "Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures". The aim is to advance two imperative tasks. The first, analytic, task is to pay attention to the diversity of colonial imaginaries across the very different terrains, literatures, and epistemologies of the so-called South. Rather than continue to impose a Eurocentric canon on the domain of law and literature, the argument here is that we need to better immerse ourselves in the diversity of colonial imaginaries from places whose experiences were as different as Indigenous Australia, India under the Raj, African game reserves, or the post-conquest Americas. The second, ethical and aesthetic, task is to accept literature's invitation not simply to document colonial, or for that matter post-colonial, ideologies, but to reimagine them. The realms of literature and art represent a crucial opportunity to talk back to power through the very modalities of fantasy and imagination, myth and story, that have been so indispensable to its maintenance. Each author in this collection wholeheartedly contributes to these two tasks, combining an analytical expansion of the past with a creative ethical engagement with the present and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]