Download file 122 KB Texto completo en español More of: Martín Hopenhayn

Times of crisis can exercise contradictory effects on the habit of imagining utopias. On the one hand, it can induce inertia and resignation as to the future, thus causing utopian invention to cease or fall apart. On the other hand, crisis can lead its victims to search for a horizon of meaning that re-signifies the present in order to break up its entropy. There, utopia is crucial and it dismantles the reality to recompose it through the mediation of new and unusual combinations.
In this exercise, the aspiration persists to exercise a regulatory force on strategies and political practices--a regulatory force that does not allude to the effectiveness of the means but rather to the virtue of the ends and the ethical consistency between the means and the ends. But in reality, utopian construction confronts a difficult and necessary challenge: How to face a regulatory crisis with open utopias that are not, for that reason, indeterminate? How to articulate utopian construction with political practice in order for this latter to be registered in the universe of collective dreams without thereby limiting its horizon of possibilities? In summary: How can utopias be built that constitute an alteration with respect to the crisis of our time but which is not an unalterable alteration but rather the means to an incessant inventiveness?