Utopia or Utopias in the Gaps: From the Political to the ‘Domestic’

Abstract

There is a question mark hanging over the two great markers of modern civilization in the so-called Judeo-Christian, or more accurately Semitic-western-modern tradition: monotheism is the first of these two great markers. The second is the Project, that is, the idea that real life is elsewhere, messianism. Life must be saved, healed. Based on this structural schizophrenia and this transcendent project can we talk about a humanism? Our western civilization has reached saturation point. This saturation is expressed in a polytheism of values. We should no longer search for a distant utopia, but utopias in the gaps, existential ‘makeshift’ forms, close at hand, that promote something like the emotional, the domestic. It is more a question of re-emerging humanisms, pantheisms, polytheisms, something structurally plural. A re-orientalization as well, an alternative to the monovalency of western culture.