Does the Left Need New Imaginaries?

Abstract In recent years, writers, scholars, and commentators on the left have called for the development of new collective “imaginaries” to kindle hope and desire, which are expected to catalyze radical social change. This project of hope building constitutes a neo-utopian endeavor, despite many of its advocates’ distancing themselves from the utopian tradition. It rests on largely implicit theoretical assumptions about the political subject and the collective imagination—assumptions this article aims to make explicit. Chief among these are a conception of the political subject as driven by desire and will, and a pedagogical view of the imagination, often framed as the “education of desire.” Coined by Miguel Abensour and later adopted by E. P. Thompson, this phrase continues to circulate in contemporary neo-utopian discourse. The author argues that this pedagogical investment in desire, while rhetorically compelling, proves ultimately politically anemic: it inflates desire as the animating force of emancipatory politics, obscures its constitutive ambivalences, and rests on a reductive conception of education. By interrogating the presuppositions of this neo-utopian framework, the article exposes the limits of a desire-centered politics and insists on a dialectical understanding of utopia and emancipation.