#utopian impulse

[athousandgateaux]

Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and the un-possessed. He is sustained by non-being. To forbid him to imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him humanity as such

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, pg. 14

[brokenhandsmedia]

Escaping the Prison of Contingency: Another Attempt to Pin Down the Utopian Impulse

What I am calling the Utopian Impulse is a hypothetical third drive, something to break the Freudian dichotomy of sex and death. What Marcu

My third attempt to define the Utopian Impulse, and suggestions for beginning to work with it. If everything is contingent, we are free to break away from what's been done in the past. Nothing is stopping us.

[athousandgateaux]

Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition of the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ‘Western’ position – the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life – or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death. This is why ethics would be better named – since it speaks Greek – a ‘eu-oudenose, a smug nihilism. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive. Every age – and in the end, none is worth more than any other – has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (‘ethics’, for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe.

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, pg. 38

[sfmoma]

Buckminster Fuller, "Non-Symetrical Tension-Integrity Structures, United States Patent Office no. 3,866,366," from the portfolio "Inventions: Twelve Around One," 1981 (detail)

(via Artinfo)