Abstract
The second chapter traces the changes in the concept of dystopia from its first appearance to the present from a Deleuzian perspective. In so doing, it underlines two significant moments in the history of dystopia: transcendent moment and immanent moment. As the author argues, the transcendent moment corresponds to the twentieth-century dystopia in which the concept of dystopia is not purged of the dangers of transcendence observed in the concept of utopia and leans towards a progress-oriented and telos-oriented position. The immanent moment, on the other hand, stands for contemporary dystopia in which the concept of dystopia gradually moves from the trap of transcendence towards the plane of immanence by rejecting the hold on the idea of progress. The author conceptualises this move from transcendence to immanence by delving into some of the pioneering works in each moment.
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Notes
- 1.
Huxley writes his dystopian novel as a critique of utopia, so he describes the dystopian society in his novel as “Utopia”. In this study I argue that although Huxley’s dystopia emerges as a reaction to utopia, it comes up with its own utopia, which is the primitive alternative in the novel.
- 2.
Lyman Tower Sargent, in his article “Three Faces of Utopianism”, makes a useful discrimination between utopia and eutopia, calling the latter “positive utopia” (p. 9). While utopia is defined as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space”, eutopia is considered to be “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended the contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which the reader lived” (p. 9).
- 3.
One of the motives behind Sargent’s coinage of “critical dystopia” is his idea that the dystopian works of the 1980s critically address the problems of the present society with their subversive modulations on content and form. I, however, argue that the critical dimension cannot be peculiar to a particular form of dystopia but rather is something inherent in the very concept of dystopia and utopia. As Fredrick Jameson also puts it, utopia/dystopia is already “a critical and diagnostic instrument” (2005, p. 148). Thus, although I do not agree with this particular idea of Sargent, I find this definition quite useful in the sense that it testifies to the fact that the recent constellations of dystopia depict distinct features as against the earlier examples and that these features are significant enough to be recognised and to trigger a need for alternative definitions as Sargent does.
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Çokay Nebioğlu, R. (2020). Dystopia from Transcendence to Immanence. In: Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_2
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