Utopia as Politics of Emancipation: Miguel Abensour, Jacques Rancière and the Legacies of Utopian Socialism

Abstract

Starting from Miguel Abensour’s contribution, the article addresses an interpretation of the concept of utopia aiming to stress its political nature and to place it within the movement of emancipation emerged throughout the nineteenth century. The first part of the article points out four fundamental dimensions of the Abensourian concept of utopia, whilst the second part aims to locate it within the broader context of the French Marxism debates and, in this way, to link it with Jacques Rancière’s thought of utopia. The conclusion provides a critical interpretation of the considered idea of utopia and maps out the political-intellectual environment emerged around that idea in France at the end of the 1990s.