Weak Messianism

Michael E. Gardiner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of numerous books, journal articles and book chapters on dialogical social theory, ethics, everyday life and utopianism, concentrating in particular on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

• Contents: Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as Critique – ‘A Very Understandable Horror of Dialectics’: Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty – Utopia and Everyday Life in French Social Thought – A Postmodern Utopia? Heller and Fehér’s Critique of Messianic Marxism – Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and His Critics – The Grandchildren of Marx and Coca-Cola: Lefebvre, Utopia and the ‘Recuperation’ of Everyday Life.

«Michael E. Gardiner’s critically informed and conceptually innovative forays into the work of Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, de Certeau, Debord and the French Surrealists, Heller and Fehér and – above all – Henri Lefebvre, do far more than evince a masterly and encyclopaedic grasp of his topic: they define the boundaries of a new field of inquiry, while linking the project of utopian studies to an ambitious revaluation of the import of some of the vital thinkers of the twentieth century. An indispensable book.» (Antonis Balasopoulos, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Cyprus, editor of ‘Intellectuals and the State: Complicities, Confrontations, Ruptures’)«Gardiner’s ‘Weak Messianism’, written with wit and rigour, is an indispensable resuscitation of the critical and productive possibilities of utopianism within twentieth-century critical thought. I wish there were more scholars like Gardiner – erudite, knowledgeable and with a heart and mind dedicated to rescuing the shards of hope from the rubble of modern life. In Gardiner’s hands social theory has never been more necessary or more exhilarating.» (Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, author of ‘Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday’)«Not only does Michael E. Gardiner challenge many common suppositions about both utopia and everyday life, but he also offers vital signposts for developing a utopian social theory that refuses claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to a suffocating neoliberal order, and that seeks openings here and now for radically different ways of living.» (David Pinder, Reader in Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, author of ‘Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism’)