La narration utopique déviante — Par Alice Carabédian — Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Friday, November 27, 2015 at 7 PM

DEVIANT UTOPIAN NARRATION
By Alice Carabédian

An introduction to Iain M. Banks’s deviant utopian fiction, in the framework of the Speculative Thinking Series conceived with Émilie Notéris.

“I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary. I am a creature of the mud, not the sky.”Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008, p.3

Far from catastrophist stories about the future of human being or from science-fiction post-apocalyptic visions of our planet, the Culture series by Scottish author Ian M. Banks offers an original and deeply political reflexion about the connection between humanity, artificiality and environment — redrafting with irony the traditions of utopia and space-opera. By presenting the relation to alterity from the angle of the encounter, proximity and emancipation — rather than that of domination, colonisation or utilitarianism — Ian M. Banks’s science fiction invites us to subvert our viewpoint, to decenter ourselves, and to imagine an unprecedented relationship to the world: a deviant utopian relation.

Alice Carabédian is a PhD student at the Laboratory for Social and Political Change at Denis Diderot University. She holds a Master in Modern Literature as well as one in Political Philosophy. Carabédian obtained a doctoral contract at LCSP for continuing her research on science fiction literature, seen as a laboratory of though and a medium to problematise contemporary political issues. Her thesis proposes a re-reading and a re-conceptualisation of the political and critical utopia through Banks’s science fiction oeuvre. She is the co-founder of the “Archipel des Devenirs — Centre de recherche sur l’utopie” (Archipelago of Futures — Centre for Research on Utopia).

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