Poetry in Utopian Prose

Abstract

In ‘Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy’, Chantal Mouffe has argued that passions, rather than merely reason and interests, motivate people to act in politics and the only way to confront the mobilization of passions towards non-democratic ends by the Right is to mobilize passions towards democratic visions. Although poetry does not hold central stage in contemporary cultural production, it continues to mobilize various passions. Therefore it comes as no surprise that in the world of real politics, poems (or strategically selected poetic fragments) serve to mobilize negative as well as positive passions, towards democratic as well as non-democratic ends. But what passions does poetry animate in imaginary utopian societies? And why is it featured there at all? These and other questions are probed in the pages below; and I conclude that poetry in utopian prose may open up spaces of negativity that contradict positive utopian designs.