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Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXVIII  |  Number 3  |  2017  |  5–16
“No matter where, no matter where, 
so long as it is out of the world.”1
Charles Baudelaire
The essays gathered together in this volume were prompted by the articulation 
of two notions: the imaginary and utopia, whose paradoxical convergences and 
divergences are currently altering our experience and conception of the radical 
changes brought about by various creative practices and, indeed, the very idea 
of what it means to think. 
This introduction will try to touch upon this complex issue through a consid-
eration of Foucault’s conception of space and spatialisation, focusing on the 
notion of heterotopia, which we will attempt to reformulate differently while 
following its logic more closely. The present period, Foucault famously claims 
in his essay Of Other Spaces, is the epoch of space, thus announcing a transition 
between temporal and spatial paradigms: in contrast to the 19th century, which 
was obsessed with temporality, more specifically, with history, at present,“[w]e 
are in the epoch of simultaneity, we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch 
of the near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed.”2 The space in which we 
live is not an empty space, but a heterogeneous space that takes on the form of 
relations among sites that are irreducible to one another. It is from this perspec-
tive that Foucault introduces a distinction between utopias and heterotopias: 
“Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation 
of a direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present so-
ciety itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any 
1 Charles Baudelaire, “XCIII: Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World” in: Little Poems, trans. 
A. Crowley, The Teitan Press, Chicago 1995, pp. 117–119.
2 M. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1986, p. 22.
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Introduction: 
The Imaginary and its Utopian Potential
* Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
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case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” In contrast to the utopian 
unreal spaces, there are also 
real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of socie-
ty – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in 
which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are 
simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are out-
side of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in real-
ity. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect 
and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.3
One of the distinctive features of heterotopias, as Foucault defines them, is their 
capacity to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces that are in themselves 
incompatible. As they are in relation to all remaining spaces, heterotopias, ac-
cording to Foucault, have a double function, i.e. either to “create a space of illu-
sion that exposes every real space […] as still more illusory,” or, on the contrary, 
to “create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, 
as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”4 While it may 
appear that in this second function heterotopias appear to be indistinguishable 
from utopias, this is not the case. Taking certain colonies as an example, Fou-
cault goes on to show that such heterotopias, unlike utopias which could be 
seen as heterotopias of illusion, have a compensatory role: they are spaces in 
which “human perfection [has been] effectively achieved.”5 
It should be noted, however, that the examples mentioned by Foucault (the 
museum, the cemetery, the holiday village, etc.), i.e. social sites intended for a 
particular activity, which are well demarcated, both spatially and temporally, 
prevent one from fully developing the potential of the heterotopic idea intro-
duced by Foucault, for envisioning the possibility of gaining distance from the 
here and now. In order to widen its scope and areas for its redeployment, thus 
bringing into play new spatio-temporal dimensions, so as to include a spatial-
isation of the subject within the framework of networks of relations between 
different points beyond the subject’s control, it is important to note that a het-
3 Ibid., p. 26.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
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introduction: imaginary and its utopian potential
erotopia concerns the users of a site, not only its spatial organisation, as has 
been elaborated in essays concerned with the utopian potential in urbanism, 
architecture, and design. For in the heterotopic site it is not only spaces that 
may be multiplied, but the simultaneous presence of the subject – insofar as it 
is distinct from the individual – may be multiplied in these different spaces as 
well. Moreover, being-in-space today means being-in-heterotopic-space, which 
is why heterotopia is not just a matter of well-demarcated sites as the whole 
world is gradually becoming heterotopic to the extent that heterotopic spaces 
are spaces that are not mastered by the speaking bodies that inhabit them. 
At the heart of the investigations presented in the various essays assembled in 
this volume are the notions of the imaginary and utopia, whose redefinitions 
and redeployment serve widely divergent ends: from the reinforcement of the 
typically modernist political fantasy regarding the possibility of radically break-
ing with the here and now, to assisting in the reimagining of ethical and politi-
cally responsible urbanism, architecture, and design. Directed against the pres-
sures of the neoliberal dominant discourse, this collection of essays attempts 
to rediscover the emancipatory potential of these two troubled notions by clar-
ifying their vicinity to and/or distance from notions such as ideology, fiction, 
fantasy, and illusion.
The individual contributions range from an examination of the utopian drive 
inherent in language, to reworking concepts, such as Lacan’s notion of anamor-
phosis, Badiou’s notion of the post-evental truth in literary terms, and consider-
ations of specific political issues, such as the simultaneous coexistence of more 
spatial settings in a single space, the emergence of new socio-political forma-
tions in which the boundaries of mastery are disseminated everywhere, thus 
becoming progressively invisible, and the correlative necessity of creating new 
heterotopic spaces, spaces that are out of joint precisely at those points of pas-
sage where different speaking bodies use the same space differently.
While each of the essays brought together in this volume contributes to a col-
lective reflection on the relations of conjunction or disjunction that can be es-
tablished between utopia and the imaginary, the essay “Utopie et langage” by 
Jean-Jacques Lecercle provides the most general framework in which this reflec-
tion can be inscribed. Thus, utopia, or rather the utopian drive, is not primarily 
due to the unbridled imagination, but is inherent to the very structure of hu-
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man language. Taking up the line of argument of Karl Mannheim, according to 
which utopia is consciousness that does not coincide with being, a trait shared 
by ideology, too, as both utopia and ideology push towards transgressing the 
frontier of reality and, in so doing, partly or entirely destroy the ontic regime of 
a given situation. For Lecercle, however, the gist of utopia is not to be found in 
the content of various utopian fictions, it is language itself that encourages and 
produces what he terms the utopian impulse or drive. On this reading, utopia 
parasitises language’s ability to construct and organise time, i.e. to transgress 
the present, to anticipate the future, or to return to the past. But it equally ex-
ploits the modal dimension of language. Because language does not express 
only what is, it also states what is possible, thereby opening onto the possible 
worlds. The modality of the possible is the linguistic equivalent of the mirror 
experience in that it opens onto a multiplicity of worlds. If utopia can thus be 
situated in the vicinity of fiction, this is because, Lecercle maintains, “all fiction 
is virtually utopian.” Fiction is a way of escaping imprisonment in our world in 
order to accede to other worlds. Utopia pushes this possibility of escaping to 
the extreme. But the structural trait that, in a sense, constitutes the basis for all 
others, and which is for that reason at the heart of the relation between utopia 
and language, is negation. Language has the capacity to negate or annihilate 
what is and to bring into existence what is not and it is precisely in negation 
that the militant “no” of a revolt finds its roots. Several conclusions follow from 
this analysis, first of all concerning the relationship between ideology and uto-
pia, since both aim at transcending the existing reality. However, while utopia 
is destructive, ideology is essentially conservative: being a false consciousness, 
it fosters adaptation to reality in the very move of going beyond it. This distinc-
tion allows for a more elaborated account of the emancipatory potential of the 
utopian, which is to be situated in the moment of counter-interpellation that 
opens up the possibility for individuals interpellated into the subjects of ide-
ology to gain some distance vis-à-vis their condition. By finding its support in 
the non-referential functions of language (emotional, poetic, metalinguistic), 
which presuppose that the speaking being has a body, utopia is able to spell out 
the truth of imagination and the imaginary insofar as the latter is not simply a 
reproduction or representation but primarily a creation.
Several essays focus on the relation between fiction and truth, which figures, 
for different reasons, as the eternal irony of writing. The essay by Claire Sibony, 
“Virginia Woolf. La stratégie du grain de raisin ou l’utopie d’un corps trans-
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introduction: imaginary and its utopian potential
lucide”, addresses the issue of utopia in connection with the imaginary from 
a slightly different angle. Setting out from Foucault’s definition of the utopian 
body, “the utopia of an incorporeal body” – since it is only in a place outside of 
places, this being Foucault’s definition of utopia, that it is possible to have “a 
body without a body”6 – Sibony interrogates Virginia Woolf’s “private utopia” 
or, rather, fantasy of “another body that is experienced as one’s proper body, but 
not as I” in order to bring to light its connection to writing. In this regard, the 
scopic fantasy of “lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent 
yellow” that intimates the experience of rapture, i.e. the pleasure of being with-
out being oneself, represents a source of Woolf’s writing, indeed, a utopia of a 
non-place wherefrom, for her, meaning emerges. A grape, for Woolf, as a fan-
tasmatic and utopic place, allows the writer not only to experience the sense of 
being, but also to protect herself from the chaos of nonbeing. “Lying in a grape” 
thus turns the subject into a monadic shelter that shields her from moments of 
de-realisation, moments of the eclipse of being and the aphanisis of the subject. 
Discussing the connection between truth and affect as revealed and treated in 
Proust’s writing, Rok Benčin in his essay “‘Sans cause’: Affect and Truth in Mar-
cel Proust” probes the intricate articulation of the imaginary, utopia, fantasy, 
and fiction. The truth that is at stake in the work of Marcel Proust is, in the words 
of Deleuze, “one that depends on an encounter with something that forces us to 
think and seek truth.”7 Focusing on the forceful aspect of truth that “presents 
itself to us as necessary and inevitable,” Benčin presents how Proustian truth 
shares some crucial traits with a Badiousian post-evental truth, to the extent 
that it is endowed with the potential to “reframe what we perceive as reality,” 
a problematic that is also addressed in the essays of Riha and Finkelde. The 
emphasis on the real dimension of truth comes to the fore in the very nexus of 
affect and truth: from this vantage point which, Benčin argues, situates truths 
“beyond the realm of the possible,” i.e. beyond the realm of the imaginary, a 
truth can only be “revealed by the intermediary of an affect because it is a truth 
that does not yet exist, that still needs to be developed.” Through an analysis 
of the relationship between the affect and truth, Benčin pins down what is spe-
cific to Proust’s idea of subjectivation, noting that it involves the effect of deper-
sonalisation since affects “give rise to another being from within the individual 
6 M. Foucault, Le Corps utopique, les hétérotopies, Nouvelles Editions Lignes, Paris 2009, p. 10.
7 G. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2000, p. 16.
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that can be the bearer and the developer of a truth.” Or in terms closer to the 
Badiousian vocabulary: it is from within a finite entity, the individual, that there 
emerges an instance of infinity, i.e. the subject whose function is precisely to 
fully develop the truth. It is also at this level that Benčin situates and discusses 
the Proustian conception of fiction, for the correlation between affect and truth 
is reduplicated by another correlation, that of event and world. Conceived as a 
frame of totality, the world dissolves under the impact of the event; on the other 
hand, the event, if the truth it carries is not developed, disappears without a 
trace. The eventual truth that Proust’s conception of the artist’s vocation im-
plies is singular, Benčin insists, but precisely for that reason it must be “for all,” 
which can only be achieved and demonstrated through the fictional “construc-
tion of a world to be shared.” 
The last essay to tackle the utopian potential in language and art is one that, 
paradoxically, places the object of its analysis, music, at the uncomfortable 
point of a “neither nor,” thus opening another, quite unexpected, heterotop-
ic perspective. In his essay, “‘White-heating the Real’ – On Music’s Force to-
wards Impossible Nudeness”, Christoph Sökler positions music “at the rim of 
language, at the border between language and non-language.” Neither purely 
symbolic, “another language with its own rules,” nor the imaginary, a kind of 
fantasmatic ancestor of language, music is rather what Sökler, borrowing from 
Alain Dider Weill, calls “experimenting with lack,” an experience involving both 
a particular topology – “music is always on the other side” of the Möbius strip – 
and temporality – involving a logical time that can be reconstructed in the very 
experience of listening to music. Discussing this experience, Sökler examines 
the subjectifying effects of music, a “music-making subject,” as Dider Weill puts 
it, that can be reconstructed through “torsions between the subject and the Oth-
er.” For what characterises the experience of listening to music, Sökler claims, 
is the experience of lack. It is as a lacking, desiring subject that one listens to 
music and it is only by listening to music that one discovers oneself as lacking. 
Here, Sökler, insists, we are facing a double nescience or a double lack, which, 
however, is never to be fused in order to dissolve in a mystical experience of 
ecstasy. On the contrary, the experience of the two lacks is one that presents the 
subject with the possibility of experimenting with his or her own lack and the 
lack in the Other, “without the mediation of a fantasmatic object,” yet which 
precisely as such “opens up the possibility of directly enjoying the barred Other, 
the Other that is fundamentally inconsistent and lacking.” It is only at this point 
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introduction: imaginary and its utopian potential
that – through the experience of listening to music – the subject experiences 
the “ceasing of time,” an experience of fantasy beyond fantasy, as it were, as it 
presents the subject in statu nascendi, so to speak, i.e. at the “degree zero” of his 
or her subjectivation when, as a speaking being, he/she emerges as the subject 
of desire, which is to say, as divided.
It is from the perspective of fantasy that Helmut Draxler’s essay “Traumatic or 
Utopian Other? Conditions of Emancipation: Phantasy, Reality, and Depression” 
broaches the complex relations between utopia, trauma, and emancipation. De-
fined as “a fundamental fantasy inseparable from the ideal of emancipation,” 
utopia signifies the possibility of a full realisation of this ideal. On the other hand, 
trauma, too, necessarily contains an aspect of fantasy insofar as it relates to real-
ity as “pure negativity,” as a complete loss of the ideal. Consequently, a politics 
that strives for emancipation oscillates between utopia and trauma because of 
its inability, in the words of Draxler, to “synchronise content and form.” In fact, 
this lack of synchronisation constitutes “the symbolic space of politics” in which 
“single acts are symbolically determined as political only in and through the re-
lations that structure them.” And, paradoxically, it is only insofar as politics can 
be defined as a symbolic space characterised by the absence of unity, stability, 
and control that its articulation to utopia can be elucidated. At the same time, 
politics can be seen as having “the symbolic function allowing one to imagine a 
world beyond the existing normative order, and the possible realisation of uto-
pian ideals.” And it is precisely this inconsistency of the symbolic that cease-
lessly calls for alternatives, thus keeping us “trapped within the narcissistic and 
competitive aspects of the imaginary.” This can be evidenced in a paradoxical 
relation between the impossibility of a radical break or the transgression of the 
existing symbolic and the ceaseless productions of alternatives. The symbolic, in 
this view, can only operate by tacitly calling for new alternatives. It is precisely as 
a symbolic operation that politics is driven by the desire to think otherwise and 
to search for another world. Put otherwise, the very fact that a politics of eman-
cipation gestures towards another world signals that it is caught up in the sym-
bolic matrix. Hence, the desire to find a way out of the symbolic is only possible 
within the framework of the symbolic. Because politics can only be symbolically 
radical, Draxler proposes reconsidering it from a post-Kleinian perspective. This 
would be a politics that, renouncing its utopian ambitions, takes into account 
utopia and trauma, on the one hand, and phantasy and reality on the other, 
while keeping them distinct from each other. This is the only viable solution to 
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avoid both traps of modern politics: the imaginary confusion of these categories, 
as well as an orientation to the impossible real that would require the (unachiev-
able) transgression of the framework of the symbolic. 
Rado Riha’s essay refocuses the main theme of this collection by asking “What is 
the object of thinking differently?” Following Lebrun, Riha argues that it is Kant 
and more specifically his Critique of the Power of Judgment that can teach us to 
think differently. A short analysis of the artwork Public Toilet by the contempo-
rary Slovenian sculptor and architect Jože Barši provides us with a reflection on 
the object proper to such thinking differently. Taking up and further developing 
Barši’s thesis according to which contemporary artwork is destined for anybody 
and is thus “for all,” while presenting at the same time an irreducible unique-
ness, Riha considers this paradoxical connection of the artworks singularity and 
its universal destination as one that opens up a possibility for the elaboration 
of the notion of singular universality, this being, for him, a new notion of the 
universal introduced in Kant’s third Critique. Strictly speaking, the true referent 
of thinking differently as implied in Kant’s reflecting power of judgment is what 
is declared to be a case of the generic Idea of Reason, i.e. something that has no 
body of its own within reality and can therefore only exist by parasitising some 
existing, ordinary objects. By transforming an ordinary object, a public toilet, 
into an object of art, Public Toilet, Barši de-sublimates the sublime object Public 
Toilet and, at the same time, de-realises the ordinary utilitarian object, a public 
toilet. But precisely as such, in presenting “a materialisation of the double ab-
sence of this ‘neither the one nor the other’” contemporary art presents what it 
means to think differently: it implies the kind of thinking that “opens our eyes 
so that we can see that our objective reality is objective only under the condition 
that we are capable of understanding and using it as a place where also some-
thing non-existent is present.” And in so doing, it signals that the de-constitu-
tion or de-realisation of the given reality through “the affirmation of the exist-
ence of the non-existent in this reality” is to be considered as “the de-realisation 
of reality in the name of this same reality,” which as a consequence of this very 
operation turns into “something other than what it is.” 
In the essay that follows, “Anamorphose und Subjektivität – Zu den beugungs-
gesetzen von Bewusstsein und Wirklichkeit”, Dominik Finkelde shifts the focus 
of attention from what could be called a heterotopic object, an object that finds 
no place in “objective” reality, to the subject of desire, that is, likewise, place-
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introduction: imaginary and its utopian potential
less and can only situate itself in some “other space.” To delineate the contours 
of such a heterotopic subject and the mode of its operation in reality, Finkelde 
takes the Kantian difference between phainomenon and noumenon as a point 
of departure, only to displace it by introducing Lacan’s notion of anamorpho-
sis. Grounding his argument on Lacan’s analysis of Holbein’s painting The Am-
bassadors, which shows how the spectator, as the subject of desire, is “literally 
called into the picture, and represented here as caught,”8 Finkelde maintains 
that what is constitutive of objective reality is nothing other than the subject’s 
gaze that is present in the perceived reality as a blind spot, or better, as that 
in the object that is more than the object itself. Discussing the moment of the 
paradoxical self-inclusion of the subject in “the picture” of objective reality that 
renders visible the parallax hole that separates reality from itself allows Finkel-
de to bring together Lacan and Hegel: If, on the one hand, anamorphosis can 
be seen as that operation that allows the subject to be inscribed in the realm of 
being only to provoke the de-hegemonisation of the objective reality, there is, 
on the other hand, no domain of veridical facts without the constitution of an 
anamorphic place since for both Lacan and Hegel, Finkelde’s argument goes, 
this curious heterotopia that is here called anamorphic place is nothing other 
than the subject.
When the concept of heterotopia is applied not only to space but also to its users 
it becomes possible to account for those creative practices that take place on 
the frontier between places, thus enabling the emergence of new spatial-tempo-
ral configurations in which the process of subjectivation can only deploy itself. 
While the concept of heterotopia does not automatically imply emancipation, 
for it relates to a complex of irreconcilable spaces in which one remains en-
tangled in obscure networks of power beyond anyone’s control, it nevertheless 
gestures towards those liminal sites where the stitches by which the dominant 
discourse strives to hold together a heterogeneous reality become visible, thus 
providing an opportunity for an unforeseeable transformation of the present 
conditions. Or, in the words of Christopher Dell, “it is always possible for urban 
actors to find a gap in any power regime in order to try out and experiment on 
new ways of socialising spatiality.” 
8 J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin 
Books, London 1977, p. 92.
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Of particular importance and all the more ambiguous is the discussion of our 
spontaneous urge to imagine how our everyday life could be better than it is now 
in architecture and design, the two disciplines that shape our daily existence, 
since the capacity to transform in architecture and design is itself moulded by 
the demands of the neoliberal market. Among contemporary architects, Yona 
Friedman, with his “mobile architecture” and “utopies réalisables” (feasible or 
realisable utopias), is known as the theorist and practitioner of utopia. Indeed, 
in a world moving toward increasing pauperisation, utopia, as a collective re-
sponse to this problem, for Friedman, appears to be not only possible, but nec-
essary. Friedman’s utopian architecture takes the form of architecture without 
architecture, a new kind of mobility of architectural structures that are neither 
determined nor determining, relegating responsibility for the conception and 
creation of their dwelling to future users – a process he calls “autoplanifica-
tion”. Fundamentally convinced that the ideal mode of architecture is the ab-
sence of planning, Friedman advances the idea of an improvised architecture, 
modelled on the future user who is ultimately situated as the creator of his/her 
dwelling. Thus emancipating the user, changing his/her environment, interven-
ing in the very materiality of the real by encouraging new modes of behaviour, 
architecture, as Friedman conceives it, allows for a new way of envisioning and 
using the world, one marked by the coexistence of heterogeneous spatialities. 
The architectural principles of mobility, flexibility, improvisation, and renunci-
ation of construction, dear to Friedman, speak thematically to the final three es-
says in this volume, which reveal the utopian perspective materialised in theo-
ries and practices in architecture and design in order to explore the potential for 
a radically transformative thinking in these two fields. Architecture and design 
converge toward the same aspiration: engaged in a process of subjectification, 
which is itself a consequence of a displacement of their conceptual practices – 
due to grappling with the heterogeneity of the real – architecture and design 
aim at opening the space for a rethinking of the social and political space.
This architecture’s ability to use the unpredictable in order to re-invent, to make 
new spaces that emerge alongside new urban objects, is at the foreground of 
Christopher Dell’s essay, “Towards the Improvisation of Space”. The thorny 
question of the “right to the city” is raised here from the perspective of con-
tingency considered “as a positive resource of the city” insofar as it “shifts the 
focus away from the city as object towards the city as process.” As a response to 
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introduction: imaginary and its utopian potential
the transformations of ways of life and the mutations of spatial and built mor-
phologies, the city, considered as “a space of possibility” in a constant state of 
flux, is transformed into “a social laboratory.” Taking into account the constant-
ly changing urban practices in unforeseeable, contingent situations requires 
a radical transformation of urbanism: a move away from static solutions to a 
mobile urbanism that can be understood as “the technology of improvisation” 
capable of rapid alterations and re-utilisations in response to the needs and de-
sires of the city’s inhabitants. This new way of thinking, which requires such 
a “fluctuating urbanity,” is one that “reads the city as an unfolding of action 
situations,” states Dell, and thus opens up a space for emancipatory gestures. 
Petra Čeferin raises the question of utopia in architecture, however not in the 
sense of a retreat from or the denial of reality denounced by Manfredo Tafuri. 
Traversing the divide between idealism and materialism, “the utopia of Enlight-
enment architecture,” and “absolute realism”, which denies any sort of utopian 
aspirations, the essay “Architecture: Constructing Concrete Utopias” considers 
architecture as a creative practice that is no longer merely a spatial practice, but 
one that engages an attitude, a concept, thus turning architecture into a vector 
of a much vaster transformation. It is in this sense that architecture, according 
to Čeferin, could be considered as being “always, already, utopia realised.” For 
architecture, to be engaged “in the construction of a better world” requires that 
we insist precisely on “enacting architecture in the world as a utopian, that is, 
creative practice.” Taken in its radical sense, the utopian moment in architecture 
signifies its ability to open up “a space in the given world for something that is 
radically heterogeneous to it.” It is precisely this utopian moment that architec-
ture shares with other creative practices: “it affirms something in the world that 
from the point of view of this world seems impossible, something that isn’t of 
this world.” The possibilisation of the impossible of a given world is at the same 
time the way in which “the materiality of architecture as a thing is present” in 
the world. It is present through peculiar kinds of objects that are both a-topical 
and anachronistic insofar as they are displaced both spatially and temporally 
with respect to the structuring coordinates of the world. This paradoxical exti-
macy of the objectality of architecture requires a special kind of materiality that 
Čeferin defines as a Twoity in One, an issue also addressed in Riha’s essay. In 
its capacity to bring into existence objects that are always something other than 
what they are, architecture, like any other creative practice, calls for a creative 
repetition of architectural solutions that “set our thinking in motion.” 
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Barbara Predan’s essay, “Design for Life: The Struggle for Utopia?” provides an 
epilogue to this collection dedicated to reflection on utopias and alternatives, 
two perspectives that open the space for thinking otherwise, by re-posing a 
question raised by a number of essays included herein: how to rekindle not only 
the courage of resistance, which is necessary for bringing about radical change 
in the world we live in, but even more so the courage of imagination. It is not 
by chance that the emphasis is placed on the courage to imagine. In the world 
of consumer capitalism, which pretends to exhaust the realm of the possible 
by promising full satisfaction to everyone, thus thwarting from the outset any 
attempt to look for a feasible alternative to the here and now in some unfathom-
able “elsewhere”, the explosive force of the transformation is, paradoxically, to 
be found in the usually invisible, anonymous, yet gradually changing everyday 
life. It is precisely here that the utopian moment in design brings the emancipa-
tory function of design to the fore. Taking up Clive Dilnot’s definition of design 
as an act that is “wedded to the possible” since it “comes into being only in 
so far as the possible is present as possibility – i.e. the capacity for change,” 
Predan takes an additional step forward by claiming that design is capable of 
actualising the potential inherent in everyday life by focusing on “the impos-
sible within the possible,” more specifically by identifying “the structural im-
possibility within the potential for designing our everyday life” in order to turn 
the impossible “into a new possibility.” It then follows that the principal role 
of design is “no longer [to] provide the final, unalterable solution to potential 
users,” but, rather to “allow (as well as empower) the community of users to 
address – autonomously, independently, according to a given situation – the 
issues and needs they are faced with.” In encouraging passive consumers to 
invent new ways of use, design contributes at the same time to creating new 
ways of thinking. 
Writing, as Lacan suggests, is “a trace in which an effect of language can be 
read.”9 Beyond what the essays gathered here can say about the specific issues 
they address, it is to be hoped – following and further developing Lacan’s idea – 
that they may also engender certain effects in their readers’ ways of thinking 
and thus encourage further explorations of thinking differently. 
9 J. Lacan, Encore. The Semminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton 
& Co., New York, London 1998, p. 110. 
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