Dystopia,Utopia, Atopia

In the face of contemporary critiques of dystopia as engendering political hopelessness and apathy, this article explores the instability of the category of itself. Bringing together work by the German jurist and political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, and the American ex-patriot poet, H.D., I show that each engages in thought experiments that might be taken as dystopic, but just as easily as utopic – and hence, as refusing the sharp contrast on which these generic distinctions are made. Schmitt and H.D. also bring into play issues central to the work of the contemporary U.S. poet, Susan Howe, with which I close. Howe’s poetry and essays, particularly in The Nonconformist Memorial, lead me to posit the usefulness of the idea of atopia, a thinking of the past, present, and future in which the alpha privative points to a more radical kind of “no place” than that first posited by Thomas More’s utopia. At the center of my argument is the idea that literature – and other works of the imagination – may be the necessary non-place, or place without the limitations of place, for thinking pasts and futures that are literally uninhabitable (as much as I may try, I can’t actually live in a book) – and yet whose psychic, imaginative, intellectual, and affective existence is vital for human life.