The Post-Critical Utopia

Taking Yanis Varoufakis’s novel Another Now as a case study, this article introduces and makes an argument for a new concept in utopian studies: the post-critical utopia. It begins by making four claims: (1) that Varoufakis has written a utopian socialist novel; (2) that this represents a retrieval of a historical form of literature; (3) that the utopia at its centre takes the form of a utopian blueprint; and (4) that two objections to this utopia, posed by one of its main characters, complicate our understanding of Another Now, with implications for how we ought to classify it. It is then argued that Another Now’s combination of a systematic utopian blueprint with insights drawn from the tradition of the critical utopia qualifies it as a post-critical utopia. The latter concept is then considered in the context of utopian studies scholarship.