The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, "A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself...A social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space." Utopia is usually considered to be an ideal that exists in thought but is unable to change our everyday lives. However, in this presentation Dr. William Paris will argue that utopia does have a role to play in developing our creative capacities and reshaping ordinary life. Utopia is not an ideal created by philosophers. It is the real struggle in our everyday lives to organize the spaces of our lives around freedom, flourishing, and solidarity rather than accumulation, alienation, and domination. Bringing together the space of thought and the space of life is the preeminent task of utopia.
William Paris is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is also an Associate Editor for the journal Critical Philosophy of Race. He is one of the co-hosts of What’s Left of Philosophy? His research focuses on History of African American philosophy, critical theory, 20th century continental philosophy, and political philosophy. He has published on Frantz Fanon and Gender, Sylvia Wynter's phenomenology of imagination, and C.L.R. James and Hannah Arendt. He is also the author of Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press).
Co-sponsored by Humanities Center and Philosophy Department
