Publication detail

Looking Forward in Hope and Despair: Critical Perspectives on Utopia and Dystopia in Philosophy and the Arts

Year: 2021

Type of publication: ostatní - konference, koncert

Publisher name: Centrum pro etiku, Fakulta filozofická, Univerzita Pardubice

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	Looking Forward in Hope and Despair: Critical Perspectives on Utopia and Dystopia in Philosophy and the Arts	In a time of growing inequalities, re-emerging fascist regimes, climate collapse, and now the recent pandemic of COVID-19, an increasing number of people nonetheless turn to dystopian fiction to get their escapism fix. Albert Camus’ La Peste sold out in bookstores all over the world only a couple of weeks after the pandemic started. Meanwhile, Slavoj Žižek has already written a book on the current pandemic as a possible catalyst for the resurrection of a new communism. It seems as if the drastic events and changes which our global community has undergone in the recent years have stimulated both the arts and philosophical writings which grapple with visions of the future, and this in turn calls for critical attention to the ways in which these visions are forged and engaged with. What do we mean by the concepts Utopia and Dystopia? What does it say about our imagination, political and otherwise, that we are drawn to depictions of something even worse in states of crisis? Why is the history of philosophy rich in imaginings of ideal states, whereas this seems to have gone out of fashion today? How do the narratives and tropes of dystopia and utopia shape, challenge, or undermine our understanding of what critical, normative, creative, and/or deconstructive thinking should be like? How do moods like hope, despair, cynicism, or peppiness (ambivalence) affect our philosophical approaches? What does it entail to read a dystopian or utopian work of fiction in relation to the state of the world, and what does it mean to read the world as utopian or dystopian? Do concepts such as ‘pandemia’ change through events like the recent global spread of the coronavirus, that is, when what has been mere dystopia becomes reality? And, last but not least: Can – or should – philosophy itself even attempt to contribute to the forging of visions of a better world or should it leave this task to the arts while confining itself to conceptual analysis and/or criticism?	Hope; Despair; Utopia; Dystopia

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