The fissure in the Absolute. A debate over utopia in critical theory

The article presents two independently written narratives, problematizing the question of the status of utopia and the nature of utopian thinking in German critical theory and, more broadly, the dialectical philosophical tradition from different perspectives. In his part of the paper, Anton Syutkin discusses the transformation of utopian thinking in the context of the development of Marxist and post-Marxist materialist dialectics. The author demonstrates that in the first half of the 20th century the dominant idea proposed the possibility of carrying out a planned revolutionary leap into the utopian kingdom of freedom. This view is shared by the opposing projects of materialist dialectics of Friedrich Engels and György Lukács. However, in the second half of the century a fundamental change in mood occurs after the revolutionary transformation of reality breaks down into terror. Theodor Adorno’s critical theory insists on the impossibility of presenting utopia as a positive program. This allows him to save Marxist thought from collapsing into a repressive totality but leads to the paralysis of the utopian imagination. As an alternative to these ways of thinking utopia, which compromised themselves in the 20th century, the author proposes an appeal to the legacy of Ernst Bloch and its re-actualization with the help of modern materialist dialectics of Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou.

Artyom Serebryakov in turn focuses on the debate over utopia between Bloch and Adorno. The author gives a preliminary analysis of the concept of utopia, showing that its employment inevitably leads to the problem of representation of the utopian and the correlation with the good and its images. It is this question that turns out to be a stumbling block for Bloch and Adorno. While the former is an apologist for the work of the utopian imagination, for the pursuit of daydreams about the bettermost, Adorno, on the contrary, considers the representation of the utopian to be unacceptable in order to save it from reification. Despite such a restriction, the Adornian position cannot be reduced to melancholic aestheticism, since for Adorno the work of utopian thinking is expressed in the form of specific demands that are political in nature and appeal to the necessity for a radical restructuring of society and its institutions. The question of how utopian thinking, which makes judgments about the principles of the possible transformation of reality, and the utopian imagination, which produces images of a better life, should be related is fundamental to determining what challenges philosophy should set itself and how it should respond to its own failures.