Beyond the Education of Desire The Utopia of Councils in Abensour

While critical utopias sought to rescue the political import of utopia, recently scholars have questioned their overemphasis on literary forms and a disempowering pluralism. Challenging the applicability of these claims to one of the instigators of critical utopias, I provide a political reading of Miguel Abensour's understanding of utopia and connect this to councils as a concrete institutional infrastructure. This begins with a re-reading of his influential conception of the 'education of desire' in relation to the simulacrum as a utopian 'model' that, in rejecting identity-thinking, refuses to reduce utopias to a blueprint. I then turn to conceptualising the utopia of councils through the simula-crum on two fronts: first, as a form subject to innovation in the context of the dialectic of emancipation; second, as a content that aims to both 'democratise utopia' by embracing plurality and 'utopianize democ-racy' by expanding the realm of democratic space.