Beyond the Education of Desire The Utopia of Councils in Abensour

• Published in: Theoria (Pietermaritzburg) Vol. 70; no. 3; pp. 96 - 120
• Main Author: Mazzocchi, Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Berghahn Books, Inc 01-09-2023
• Subjects: Analysis; Councils; Democracy; Desire; Dialectics; Education; Emancipation; France; Heuristic; Infrastructure; Innovations; Mediation; New York; Oppression; Reading; Totalitarianism; United Kingdom; Utopias; France; New York; United Kingdom
• ISSN: 0040-5817; 1558-5816
• DOI: 10.3167/th.2023.7017604

While critical utopias sought to rescue the political import of utopia, recently scholars have questioned their overemphasis on literary forms and a disempowering pluralism. Challenging the applicability of these claims to one of the instigators of critical utopias, I provide a political reading of Miguel Abensour's understanding of utopia and connect this to councils as a concrete institutional infrastructure. This begins with a re-reading of his influential conception of the 'education of desire' in relation to the simulacrum as a utopian 'model' that, in rejecting identity-thinking, refuses to reduce utopias to a blueprint. I then turn to conceptualising the utopia of councils through the simulacrum on two fronts: first, as a form subject to innovation in the context of the dialectic of emancipation; second, as a content that aims to both 'democratise utopia' by embracing plurality and 'utopianize democracy' by expanding the realm of democratic space.