Event overview
InC Seminar Series: 'The future: philosophy between utopia and end-time prophecy'
Mark Kelly (Middlesex): 'Foucault against prophecy and utopia'
Michel Foucault refuses two forms of thinking about the future: prophecy and utopia. Expanding on Foucault’s rejection, I argue that claims to know what the future either can or will hold for society are epistemically unjustifiable and politically dangerous, because we cannot know the real consequences such thinking will have. Such thinking hence ought to be abandoned, though it may be politically useful if understood as merely speculative fiction that serves to open up the space of thinking.
I then argue for the extension of these insights to ethics, suggesting that the same considerations also apply against either prophetic or utopian thinking in the horizon of our personal lives. I will argue that Foucault’s refusal to think the future in a definite or utopian way can be extended to desire itself, with certain forms of desire in personal life being utopian, and carrying with themselves similar dangers to political utopianism, though rejecting Foucault’s valorisation of pleasure in favour of a focus on immediate desires. I consider this point in relation to the Lacanian problematic of fantasy and desire, with a view to countering the objcetion that utopianism is inevitable as a form of fantasy about the future. Though fantasy and desire are indeed ineluctable aspects of human subjectivity, I conclude, following Lacan himself and Yannis Stavrakakis, that we nevertheless ought to do without either prophetic or utopian content for these, since, from a Lacanian perspective, such aspirations hold out an impossible hope of a final healing of the dehissance at the heart of subjectivity, and an attempt to finally tame the real.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Feb 2012 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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