Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics

In response to humanity's existential challenges, this book explores the fate of utopia and argues that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth and the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis. It reconstructs utopia's link to survival through the mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 19 October 2021
Publisher: Stanford University Press

A groundbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book showcases how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique can be harnessed in response to humanity's looming existential challenges.

Utopia in the Age of Survival argues that critical social theory must reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time, the left must reclaim utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. S. D. Chrostowska looks to the vibrant, visionary mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake, reconstructing utopia's link to survival through to the earliest, most radical phase of the French environmental movement. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for a variety of democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions across the globe.

Vigilant and timely, balancing fine-tuned analysis with broad historical overview to map the utopian impulse across contemporary cultural and political life, Chrostowska issues an urgent report on the vitality of utopia.

Weight: 310g
Dimension: 137 x 215 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781503629998