Utopias and temporo-spatial invention: reading More with Marin

Scholar, Richard

Abstract

How do early modern utopias imagine space? In his 1973 study, Utopiques: jeux d’espaces, Louis Marin defines Utopia as the organization of space in a discourse that finds its expression in specific texts from More’s onwards. Utopia, as a no-place, is variously characterized as neutral, plural, and other. Marin says that it contains non-congruent spaces – internal gaps and fissures in the geography of Utopia unwittingly betrayed by the description of More’s traveller – and that these point to places of argument awaiting an as-yet unformulated theory of society in an era of capitalism. Utopianism may thus be said above all to occupy, for Marin, a space of prefiguration. What I wish to observe is that, even as it thus presents Utopia as organized space, Marin’s analysis is here driven by time, primarily the historical time that produces Marx, whose social theory Marin projects backwards on to More’s Utopia and which he describes as latent in that work’s critique of an emergent capitalism. Marin’s retro-projective approach, for all the remarkable insights it generates, leaves underexamined the question of how early modern utopianism may be said to have imagined space on its own terms and, in so doing, emerged as a tradition of invention.

Citation

Scholar, R. (2023). Utopias and temporo-spatial invention: reading More with Marin. Early Modern French Studies, 45(1), 22-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200410

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 27, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jun 5, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Mar 28, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 13, 2023
• Journal: Early Modern French Studies
• Print ISSN: 2056-3035
• Electronic ISSN: 2056-3043
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 22-29
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2023.2200410