In this talk, Bill Cashmore will outline the specific problem that utopia poses for political thought. That is, if utopia is defined as a non-place, what is its relation to the actual utterance that declares it to be nowhere? How can utopia be said to be removed from actuality when it must always be articulated in terms of that actuality? Significantly, Cashmore’s claim will be that the problem of utopia is indicative of a structural problem regarding the relation of politics to the social. That is: what is the place of the concept of rupture in our political thought? This talk will articulate one of the key arguments of Cashmore’s new book We Hear Only Ourselves, which is that the idea of utopia is speculatively aporetic, and as such there can be no merely speculative answer to the question of what utopia is. Rather, they argue that we ought to re-understand the idea of utopia through the concept of utopian narrative, which may offer a response, if not a solution, to the aporias constitutive of utopian thought in general. Towards the end of the talk, Cashmore hopes to articulate how such a mode of thinking might be applied to two discourses in contemporary critical theory: the question of pessimism in Black studies, and the narration of trans identity.

Register here: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYlce6vqz8pGN12x8thmK-UqA5OLVBT6ldd

Bill Cashmore is a writer and philosopher based in East London. They work predominantly on Marxism, critical theory, and the Black radical tradition. Their next project is on the dialectics of value in Marx’s critique of political economy. Cashmore’s new book We Hear Only Ourselves (Zer0 Books) is available here: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/we-hear-only-ourselves-utopia-narrative-resistance

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