American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army PDF
Preview American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army
AN AMERICAN UTOPIA AN AMERICAN UTOPIA Dual Power and the Universal Army FREDRIC JAMESON, JODI DEAN, SAROJ GIRI, AGON HAMZA, KOJIN KARATANI, KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, FRANK RUDA, ALBERTO TOSCANO, KATHI WEEKS EDITED BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK First published by Verso 2016 The collection © Verso 2016 The contributions © the contributors 2016 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-453-9 (PBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-452-2 (HBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-454-6 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-451-5 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Press Contents Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams Slavoj Žižek 1. An American Utopia Fredric Jameson 2. Mutt and Jeff Push the Button Kim Stanley Robinson 3. Dual Power Redux Jodi Dean 4. The Happy Accident of a Utopia Saroj Giri 5. From the Other Scene to the Other State: Jameson’s Dialectic of Dual Power Agon Hamza 6. A Japanese Utopia Kojin Karatani 7. Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism Frank Ruda 8. After October, Before February: Figures of Dual Power Alberto Toscano 9. Utopian Therapy: Work, Nonwork, and the Political Imagination Kathi Weeks 10.The Seeds of Imagination Slavoj Žižek An America Utopia: Epilogue Fredric Jameson Notes Index Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams Slavoj Žižek Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia radically questions standard leftist notions of an emancipated society, advocating—among other things—universal conscription as the model for the communist reorganization of society, fully acknowledging envy and resentment as the central problem of a communist society, and rejecting dreams of overcoming the division between work and pleasure. Endorsing the axiom that to change society one should begin by changing one’s dreams about an emancipated society, Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on possible and imaginable alternatives to global capitalism. This volume brings together Jameson’s pathbreaking text, especially revised for this edition, with an original short story by Kim Stanley Robinson that plays upon some of Jameson’s motifs, philosophers’ and political and cultural analysts’ reactions to Jameson, and Jameson’s short epilogue. Although the reactions are often critical toward Jameson, they all agree on the need to radically rethink the leftist project. Many leftists (and especially “leftists”) will definitely be appalled at what they encounter in this volume—there will be blood, to quote the title of a well- known film. But what if one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the left another chance? 1 An American Utopia Fredric Jameson 1. We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike). Can these developments be dated or periodized in some way? I have always been tempted to mark the end of utopian production with Ernest Callenbach’s great Ecotopia of 1975, a work whose most serious flaw, from today’s standpoint, is the absence of electronic or informational technology. Maybe the utopian form, then, cannot integrate such technology, or maybe on the other hand the Internet itself has soaked up many of the available utopian fantasy impulses. Or was it the triumph of Reagan- Thatcher financial deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that spelled the end of utopian thinking, at the same time that it seemed to seal the victory of late capitalism over all imaginable, let alone practicable, alternatives? In fact, the possibilities for utopian thinking were always bound up with the fortunes of a more general concern, not to say obsession, with power. The meditation on power was itself an ambiguous project. In the 1960s this project was a utopian one: it was a question of thinking and reimagining societies without power, particularly in the form of societies before power: here Lévi-
Description:The list of books you might like
