"Utopia poses a question. Not simply in the sense of a problem to be resolved and at the same time eliminated . . . but in the sense that, within the economy of the human condition, utopia, the aim of social alterity--of all social otherness--is ceaselessly being reborn, coming back to life despite all the blows rained down upon it, as if human resistance had taken up residence within it."

For the French philosopher Miguel Abensour, the fictional genre of utopia has provided thinkers and artists a fertile ground to explore for the past 500 years, both as a way to imagine new...