Hope/Less - Exploring Psychoanalytic Uses of Utopia

The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

Ernst Bloch

Utopia promises us an ideal paradox consisting of a limit and an opening: a limit to our suffering and frustrations and an open road to the unimpeded pursuit of our desires. It embodies an unconscious dialectic—a paradoxical symbol standing both as a boundary and as an opening. Utopia functions as a projection of an ideal state where suffering and frustration are contained within a symbolic limit, yet simultaneously, it beckons the subject toward an unbounded horizon of desire's fulfilment.

The Greek etymology — οὐ τόπος, “no-place”, coined by Sir Thomas More — offers a Lacanian meditation on the allure and treachery of the unattainable. It hints at an impossible desire for a perfect state beyond language and reality, a dead end that may serve as a phantasmatic anchor rather than a genuine horizon. And yet, 500 years after the word was created, the hope for limitlessness and resolution is still ever present, we persistently cling to an elusive longing for an unconditioned plenitude — an eternal resolution that perpetually slips just beyond the grasp of symbolization.

This collection of dialogues — propelled by thinkers engaged in psychoanalytic, philosophical, and critical inquiry — invites us to question the function of hope and utopia within the psychic economy. What revelations can these domains offer about the role of hope in the analytic process? How does utopia manifest in the clinical setting? Are we inclined to relinquish hope, or does it serve as a vital structuring force? If hope persists, how can it be harnessed therapeutically? Moreover, does hope belong solely to the realm of optimal illusions and dangerous fantasies, akin to Pandora’s box, or can it be transformed into a sustained, constructive act within the matrix of the analytic encounter?

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Programme

10.00-10.30: Registration and Coffee

10.30-10.40: Welcome

10.40-11.30: Keynote Speaker

Richard Gilman-Opalsky – Imaginary Power, Real Horizons: The Political and Psychological Necessity of Utopianism

11.30-13.00: Panel 1:

One or Many Utopias: Marx, Bloch, Materialism and Desire

Jon Greenaway - Thoughts Out of Season: On Inappropriate Utopia and the Heritage of Our Time.

Billie Cashmore - Utopia Must Not Be A Theological Category

Alexander Stoffel - Desire and Capitalist Contradiction: Towards a Non-Functionalist Account of Desire

13.00-14.15: Lunch

14.15-15.45: Panel 2:

The Laboratory for Feminist Listening: Feminist Listening as Worlds in the Making

15.45-16.15: Break

16.15-17.45: Panel 3:

Utopia and the Clinic

Jim O’Neill - Utopia: “Heroic Failure”

Foluke Taylor - TherapeutiX: Sketches from a Black Feminist Playground

Anouchka Grose - Come Back Marcuse, All is Forgiven

17.45-18.00: Closing Thoughts

18.00: Reception

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