What Does It Mean to Suck the Breast Milk of Fairy Tales? Marginal Notes on the Interpretative Problems of Utopias

Abstract

The trust which once surrounded alienation as a diagnosis and the notion of alienation as the fixed point of criticism, has noticeably “oozed” from literature. Among the reasons for this, not incidentally perhaps, are the doubts concerning the credibility of the counter-world Marx outlined, above all, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts as well as in a few passing observations. In my paper, I argue that what applies to “prophetic historiography” in general also applies to the historical-philosophical outline of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts: it does not (and cannot) offer a recipe, i.e. its conceptual notions cannot be translated into (not-yet-existent) institutional logics (the sociology of not-yet-existent relations etc.), but as is characteristic of our utopian trains of thought, they can give us some guideline (in the regulatory sense) of how we ourselves should weigh whatever “we can hope for”.