MESSY UTOPIANISM AND THE QUESTION OF WAR: WHAT DOES “STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE” MEAN IN RELATION TO WAR?

• Authors: Jӧrg Kilian
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Donna Haraway’s formula “staying with the trouble” frequently appears in discourses concerned with ecological catastrophe. Despite their ostentatious rejection of utopian thinking, Haraway and like-minded thinkers tend to consider messiness, tension or even conflict as antithetical to their ideal state of society. A cultivation of a specific life-promoting and enabling messiness and ambiguity, however, is essential for nourishing new forms of a minoritarian, “messy” utopianism. This article reflects on contemporary utopianism’s relation to war: do contemporary utopias address war explicitly or implicitly? In this context, bolo’ bolo (1983), written by sci-fi author and anarchist P. M. (a pseudonym of Hans Widmer), can serve as a helpful reference. This speculative utopia sketches out a different relation to conflict and its underlying presumptions of stately order, property, control and subjective self-determination. It proposes to conceive of violence as something not akin to war and thus offers a welcome alternative to simplistic notions of a “natural state”, in which humans are determined either by a bellicose or a peaceful inclination. This approach fills important gaps in the discussion of no-longer-modern utopianisms.

Keywords

EN

DONNA HARAWAY; UTOPIANISM; SPECULATIVE UTOPIA; DUALISM; ANARCHISM; WAR

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 18 – 28

Contributors

author

Jӧrg Kilian

• Independent Artist and Scholar, Austria

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8932-5300

Identifiers

DOI

10.31577/WLS.2024.16.4.2