CfP: "To Speak with Blind Alleys": Utopia, Catastrophe, and Critical Theory

Guest Editors: Bruna Della Torre & Nicholas Brown

_{To speak with blind alleys}

_{of what confronts,}

_{of its}

_expatriate

_{meaning —:}

 

_{to chew}

_{this bread, with}

_{writing teeth.}

_{Paul Celan}

 

_{Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to cross the so-near darkness of the just-lived moment, in which all becoming is adrift and hidden from itself. In other words: we need the most powerful telescope, that of keen utopian consciousness, in order to cross precisely the most immediate proximity.}

_{Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope}

 

Since its birth, the relationship between critical theory and utopia has been fraught. Marxism was born out of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s demand to think the radical transformation of society on the basis of its real historical and material determinations. This demand emerged from direct confrontation with utopian socialism (Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, among others), which was detached from the actual contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and from the concrete dynamics of clsss struggles. Against the abstract and voluntaristic proposals that characterized this tradition — characteristics that do not invalidate the importance of these authors for Marxist thought — Marx and Engels came to anchor their call for socialism in the critical analysis of social forms, the centrality of class struggle, and the immanence of historical processes. Rather than devoting himself to elaborating models of a future society, Marx concentrated his efforts on a rigorous analysis of capitalist social forms and their phantasmagoria.

Marx and Engels placed their bets on the contradictions of this system, which, they insist in the Communist Manifesto, would intensify to such an extent that — mediated by the organization of class struggle and with consideration for its concrete conditions — the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production would become not only possible, but probable. With this horizon in view, crisis was not seen as mere collapse, but equally as a condition for the possibility of negating the existing order. It is no coincidence that in both Marx and Lukács, especially in History and Class Consciousness, we find that crisis, understood as a fissure, could lead to a historical opening in relation to the fetishistic domination of capital.

But history would not be slow in revealing the regressive face of the capitalist crisis. The economic and social collapse of the twentieth century not only failed to pave the way for emancipation, but gave rise to renewed and even intensified forms of domination. It is in this context that the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School emerges. Against the backdrop of the resurgence of the Russian Revolution, the crushing of workers’ uprisings in Germany, and, above all, the rise of fascism, there was little room left to think utopia. The Frankfurt School began to investigate the social, economic, cultural, and psychological mechanisms that allowed the most regressive and barbaric forms to rise in the heart of advanced capitalism. In short, Critical Theory became the branch of Marxism that devoted the most time to studying fascism theoretically and politically — as a formation inseparable from the immanent tendencies of capitalism itself.

However, as Fredric Jameson would later argue, thinking dystopia is a way of thinking utopia. In this sense, paradoxically, few traditions of Marxism have been as utopian as critical theory. Walter Benjamin wanted to recover revolutionary memory from the rubble of the nineteenth century. Ernst Bloch, with his ontology of the not-yet, reinscribed utopia as a principle immanent in history, as that which pulsates in the unfinished, the latent, the possible. Herbert Marcuse insisted on the urgency of preserving the utopian imagination against the administered and one-dimensional closure of the real. Theodor W. Adorno, with his thinking ad pessimum, criticized socialism for having abdicated its utopian impulse, arguing that the blockage of consciousness — now spread across the political spectrum — derives not from distance from the possibility of radical transformation, but, paradoxically, from its proximity. In the century of catastrophes experienced by these authors, culture became one of the principal refuges of utopia.

The twenty-first century radicalizes a lesson that the twentieth had already imposed. Crisis, far from guaranteeing an historical opening, is fertile ground for the rise of the right, for the deepening of barbarism, for new forms of authoritarianism, ecological destruction, violence, and war. Today’s catastrophe is not an event, but a mode of reproduction of the capitalist order. Against this backdrop, the question of utopia is raised again through the questioning of its very possibility. With the resurgence of neo-fascisms around the world, the deepening crisis of social reproduction, the return of colonialist logic in the peripheries of capitalism, the consolidated hegemony of the culture industry, and the intensified desertification of art, is it still possible to speak of utopia?

The dossier “To Speak with Blind Alleys: Utopia, Catastrophe, and Critical Theory” invites contributions that reflect on these questions from theoretical, historical, philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives. We welcome articles that address, among other topics:

• The critical theory of Marx and Engels and utopian socialism
• Fracture and totality in Georg Lukács
• Ernst Bloch, utopia, and hope
• Theodor W. Adorno beyond negativity
• Walter Benjamin and the Soviet dream
• Expanding horizons: feminisms, anti-racism, and queer theory
• Bertolt Brecht and utopian realism
• Revolution and liberation in Herbert Marcuse
• Utopia from below: critical theory on the periphery of capitalism
• Utopia and dystopia in Fredric Jameson
• Neofascisms, persistent barbarism
• Critical theory of the apocalypse
• Catastrophe and utopia in the arts
• Catastrophism as ideology (and its differences from critical theory)
• Utopias and dystopias of technology under platform capitalism

 

Articles may be submitted in Spanish, Portuguese, or English.

Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2026.