Sylwia Chrostowska’s Utopia in the Age of Survival is a passionate defense of utopian thinking, exploring the question of utopia’s relevance in an era defined by the threat of climate crises, pandemics, and planetary extinction. Rejecting the notion that utopian thought is a lapse into idle speculation, detached from praxis, Chrostowska shows that utopia is the lifeblood of transformative struggles, animating alternatives to late capitalist social and political relations. The book acknowledges utopia’s long struggle with a bad reputation for escapism, as well as its more recent commodification as neoliberal lifestyle branding that creates a veritable “cauldron for utopias” (p. 6). Yet her work deftly rescues utopian thinking from both of these pitfalls, arguing for its radical alterity to reformist thinking as a necessary dimension of disclosing alternative possibilities, on the one hand, and remaining vigilant about the neoliberal assimilation of utopia to commodity fetishism, on the other. In the process, she mobilizes the full resources of utopian thought—drawing on her vast knowledge of the genealogy of utopia, as well as a precisely articulated topography of utopian methodology. The goal of the book, far from a joyless scholarly analysis of utopia’s conceptual history, is to allow us, reader and author together, to exercise our muscles for utopian theory and praxis, and the ignition of the embodied desire that leads us toward a collective life worth living.
For Chrostowska, our present age of survival is the backdrop for a renewed urgency toward utopian thought. Facing the real possibility that living on earth may soon be impossible paradoxically thrusts us toward the necessity of utopian thought in the present moment, precisely because only a radical break with the existent could possibly begin to respond to the confluence of catastrophes we currently witness. Utopia is defined as, firstly, “any embodied desire, here and now, for a good society; a desire capable of giving form to individual and collective action and thus becoming prefigurative of such a society, which nonetheless remains latent and dynamic, rather than being elaborated as a social plan” (p. 22). Secondly, “utopia is a futureward myth that activates hope and orients, without purporting to normatively determine, action” (p. 22). Armed with this approach, both punctual and nondogmatic, Chrostowska engages in a series of attunements of utopian methodology: Like yoga postures, fluid interventions into constellations of thought and commitment, Chrostowska’s chapters stretch the parameters of contemporary debates about utopia as method.
The first chapter of the book delves into the question of how the impulses of critique and utopia can be linked. Indeed, one of the book’s major contributions is to resuscitate the profoundly utopian strain of critical social theory, tempering its emphasis on immanent critique and the journey of reason with the reach of utopian alterity and the affective propulsion necessary for alchemizing theory into praxis. When it fails to extend into utopian futurity, critique’s immanence renders it unable to awake us from inertia and inaction. As Chrostowska writes, “To prove its credentials as praxis, critique must do more than reach inside; it must also reach out, and far. That is not its job, but its true vocation” (p. 26).
Linking critique and utopia requires not only this projective quality but also a particular affective attunement toward memory and the past. Chrostowska distinguishes a properly utopian affect from a tendency toward left-wing melancholia that she observes in contemporary left critique, which immobilizes utopia even as it unconsciously seeks to resurrect its political energies. Identifying this affective theoretical strain in theorists including T. J. Clark, Enzo Traverso, and Daniel Bensaïd, she counters left-wing melancholia with an entreaty for nostalgia. This utopian nostalgia is not the sentimental and conservative nostalgia that holds memory hostage to past illusions, but rather a nostalgia that liberates memory for the expression of utopian hopes, allowing for the forms of attachment that “can provide criticism with material, values, and aspirations relativizing our own and idealized ones” (p. 35). Connected with this liberatory nostalgia, chapter 1 contends that the connection of critique and utopia requires an orientation toward myth, not the familiar myth of the social contract, which gives an account of social order, so much as a speculative myth, which in the words of Northrop Frye (1965), is “designed to contain or provide a vision for one’s social ideas, not to be a theory connecting social facts together” (quoted at p. 323).
Chapter 2 is devoted to the question of desire and its place in utopian thinking, and more specifically how to educate desire to propel us toward emancipation. In the words of Miguel Abensour (1999), “to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire otherwise”(quoted at pp. 145–46). This is a far cry from tempering, disciplining, moralizing, or restricting desire to reach a particular vision of the common good as we see in the classical utopia of Thomas More, which would have us inhibit our passions. Indeed, Chrostowska rewrites the genealogy of utopia in this respect, displacing the threadbare version of utopia’s history that would begin with More’s Utopia with the “desire-driven body utopia” of Cockaigne, a medieval European myth that tells the story of a leisurely, abundant, sensuous society (p. 56). Surrealism and Situationism were key movements in the education of desire toward its expression and plenitude, rather than its discipline or taming. The psychogeographical experiments of the Situationist International sought to reorganize urban space and time through the mobilization of play, love, sexuality, and relationality, the refinement of pleasure into noncommodified forms. Chrostowska seeks to shift the emphasis of utopian thinking toward the bodily utopias of thinkers such as Charles Fourier and Raoul Vaneigem, and away from its more disembodied forms, which make their most dangerous appearance in the “applied utopias” of existing socialism, sacrificing the creative power of bodily desire to a machinic productivist vision of society (p. 68). Crucial to this emphasis on somatic desire is a rethinking of the hierarchy of desire and need, and indeed a questioning of their analytical distinctness. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s dialectic of need and desire, Chrostowska argues that “[o]pposing need to desire perpetuates the assumption that, to fulfill a need, anything is better than nothing, lowering the standard by sanctioning mediocrity, and justifying an indiscriminate, rather than personalized, approach to need satisfaction as sufficient, good enough for most, who cannot afford better. The same opposition also maintains survival as ‘bare life,’ incapable of imagination or cultivated desires” (p. 69). Utopian desire expands our understanding of what our needs are beyond the parameters of the given.
This expansion of somatic desire ultimately leads Chrostowska to the finale of the book, a powerful exploration of the politics of survival in an age of planetary crisis and its relationship to nonstatist, utopian thought and practice. Here she explores radical experiments with the politics of survival from neo-Zapatism, communalist Rojava, eco-Zadism, and the direct democratic dimensions of the Yellow Vest movement. Perhaps most provocatively, she discusses movements that engage in necroresistance, citing the work of Banu Bargu, including forms of practice such as self-starvation and immolation that target “survival as the sovereign means of biopolitical domination” (p. 91). Far from endorsing necroresistance in a naive way, Chrostowska offers these examples as a courageous engagement with the possibilities for resisting the capture of political imagination by the biopolitics of survival. In so doing, she shows that facing the existential threats to the planet that we see all around us demands a utopian reimagining of how human survival can point beyond the very conditions of survival from which it originates. Chrostowska’s work is a powerful and masterful exploration of the necessity of utopia for critical theory in the present. Beautifully written and passionately argued, the book is an essential read for those of us struggling, both emotionally and intellectually, to find sustenance in the political desert of the present.
