Of Utopia

Édouard Glissant

Utopia, at least in its systematic projections, appears as a function of

the mind that resurfaces whenever thought, in any fraction of Humanity,

hesitates before a new expanse, which it must, if not conquer, regulate in

order to assure itself.

Plato’s Republic emerged as the city-states of Greece wavered

between the uncertainty of direct democracy and the injustices of

traditional autocracy. Saint Augustine’s City of God, from the idea of

political power being bound to divine consecration. Thomas More’s

Utopia, as the seemingly enviable supremacy of universal rationalism, in

whose name the people of Europe set-out to conquer the world, spread

across the West.

The construction of Utopia is, by tradition, the piecing of a model for

its perfect form. Thus, Utopia parts from that which exists, emerging in

response to the very imperfections it seeks to repair. In this sense, its

builders must value, not necessarily the ruins, but their preceding

structures as they become inefficient and obsolete.

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 The definite emergence of a new inspiration within any Utopia—for

example, the excellence of the philosopher, the omnipotence of divine

providence, or the universality of rationalist ethics—does not prevent us

from knowing that Utopia stems from reform, and that its intent is

therefore normative.

If we were to summarize the work of Utopia—a near impossible

endeavor—we might say it arises from an object, be it Man or his

organization in society, in order to aim at perfection. By doing so, it

necessarily involves norms and a governing activity, whose objective is to

ensure the perpetuity of an intended result. Every Utopia is a quest for

eternity.

Such consideration leads us to conclude that the work of Utopia has

always sought for the harmony of Measure. To my knowledge, no Utopia

has been founded on excess, because excess is unpredictable, and its

fulfillment bears the looming mark of disappearance. It is difficult for the

human mind to conceive of an end of the world within order and measure.

Just as it cannot conceive of an eternity of Excess—what we would

commonly call chaos—without being tempted to suppose that, at some

imperceptible moment, a principle of order and measure, however

infinitesimally small, might emerge to regenerate chaos and transform it

over time.

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 Utopia requires order and Measure; this is why utopian ideologies—

which I refer to and regard as mere systems of thought—build terrifying

orders with no tolerance of divergence or deviation to affirm themselves.

This is how, all over the world, massacres are inflicted magnanimously—

for the sake of a future humanity.

Certainly, we distinguish between false utopian ideas and the great

works of Utopia, mentioned at the beginning of this intimation. But even

these great works do not hesitate to reject the useless, accessory, or

contingent in their pursuits of Measure, fearing the excesses of emotion,

thought, or imagination. Thus, Plato banished poets from The Republic,

and Saint Augustine, a poet of sensitive intuition, was constantly alarmed

by his own disposition. Utopia is severe by vocation and selective by

practice.

Yet, none of these considerations—the open field, the model, the

perfect form, the normative imperative, the search for Measure, etc.—are

relevant in the reactivation of utopian thought. Today, more than ever

before, humanity is in urgent need of true utopian thinking. I will try to

explain why, for it is now that we may affirm such need as our absolute

urgency.

Utopia is not a dream. It is what is missing from the world. This is

what it is — that, which is missing in the world. Many of us were delighted

when the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggested in one of his works

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 that the function of literature, like that of art, is first and foremost to

invent a missing people. I read along Deleuze as I was finished Ormerod,

the second of my novels following Sartorius, where the Batoutos first

appear—a people who chose to remain invisible so as to instill humility

and tolerance in others. In doing so, I had undertaken the literal

realization, in every sense, of Deleuze’s brilliant idea to invent a missing

people.

I say that Utopia is a place for such people. For they could have been

the people of the United States for Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, or

the Russian people for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or the Italian people in the

narrow passages of Dante’s Divine Comedy, or the Zulu people for Thomas

Mofolo, who recounted the epic song of Emperor Chaka. Thus today, from

place to place and above all, it is them who are most threatened, the people

of the Tout-Monde, who have long been missing, diffracted into a

countless people and all peoples at once, and poetics, art, and philosophy

are the ways—among others unknown—that once freed from systems of

thought and systematized thinking, allow us to name and invent such

peoples without fixity: as our realities are mobile in the Tout-Monde,

meaning they cannot endure as favoured, single fractions of reality across

the world. This is not to fall in the enclosures and limits of a comfortable

nationalism or populism; the people to avoid is our very becoming-a-

people, as philosophy would propose—not missing from you and me, but

from all of us at once, from the Tout-Monde.

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 We understand then, why our utopian thoughts—far from utopianism

—do not wish to reform a single given object, as many as there are,

proposed at once by all peoples. Rather than selecting an object to perfect

while ignoring all others, we must stand them in relation.

Our utopian thoughts conceive of no norm toward the perfect form.

Where would we find the norm of such perfection? Could it be in the water

patterns of a Chinese plain, in the fixed trembling of the African mask, or

in the magnificent grid of an unfinished church façade in a square in

Bologna, which marks, better than any sun, the mysterious boundary

between day and night? It is everywhere at once—not to confuse One with

everything else, but to strive toward an aesthetic that offers one to another.

Our utopian thoughts won’t elevate one sensibility above others;

instead, they bear their accumulation, unifying our visions. Their art will

recite totality, only to avoid totalitarianism—which requires the

presupposition of a Model—to which these thoughts refuse to adhere.

Our utopian thoughts will strive to reconcile Measure and Excess,

because we have learned the beauty of the world’s unpredictability, and

because we now lean over the joys and sufferings of all peoples.

What have I tried to propose, if not the urgent task of rigorously

transforming our imaginaries? There will be no lasting or truly beneficial

solution to the world’s problems—that is, the problems of the world’s

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 peoples, their struggles for survival, their struggles in relation—without the

immense insurrection of our imagination, which will finally lead humanity

to recognize itself for what it truly is beyond moral injunctions:

unstoppable change amid permanence, perennial, the never rigid.

I have summarized this colossal proposition, both heard and known

across the world:

I can change, in exchange with the Other, without losing myself or

distorting my own nature.

Édouard Glissant, Martinique

Tr. Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Francofonia, No. 50, Écrire dans tous les français du monde (Primavera 2006).

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