The New Utopian Spirit in the Anthropocene

The article draws on Miguel Abensour’s notion of the new utopian spirit to engage with contemporary debates on the need to rethink and reactivate utopian rationality in the face of the climate crisis. The article articulates two challenges of the Anthropocene for the new utopian spirit. The first concerns the problem of imagining alterity, which is a perennial problem of utopian thought and which gets new urgency in face of the Anthropocene. The second challenge has to do with conceiving utopianism in light of the permanence of climatic changes, which is interpreted as the necessity of utopianism without full reconciliation. Ultimately, I argue that the Anthropocene does not spell the end of utopianism, but that utopian imagination, understood in the parameters of the new utopian spirit, is necessary for political struggles towards a more sustainable world.