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Abstract: With few exceptions, Franz Kafka's work has been read as deeply dystopian. This essay undertakes an examination of Kafka's references to the utopian imaginary, from his Diaries to the Zürau Notebooks, and from the story "Fellowship" to Amerika and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk", demonstrating that Kafka was both conscious of and interested in the rhetoric associated with utopian (or "intentional") communities and in the parameters of utopia as a genre of writing. Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop, within his writing, a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community—particularly acute for him as a multiply estranged European Jew—and the aesthetic problems of impossibility and failure.

ABSTRACT
This essay responds to Darko Suvin by focusing on his observations on selfhood and personality. Antiutopias are defined as narrative texts framed by fear and anxiety regarding the self-preservation of individuality and by subscription to the principle of relentless struggle for survival amid resource scarcity. The ambiguities that insinuate themselves within this framework include: first, the conflation of "self-preservation" with domination over others; second, the oscillation of self-preservation between a "biopolitical" pole and a "cultural" one. Turning to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, the article explicates why, in their view, "self-preservation" destroys "the very thing that is to be preserved." The conclusion involves examining a few literary texts both as instances of the "pleasures of misery" imposed by the antiutopian obsession with "self-preservation," and—contrastively—as ways of exploring the high cost and risk involved in a utopian transformation of selfhood beyond the dictates of "self-preservation."

This article begins by dwelling on the forms and causes of Western "historical nihilism" toward the Chinese socialist project. I then analyze issues attendant to Deng's appeal to "liberating thought," particularly as regards the importance of the development of the forces of production and the dilemmas this presents for socialists. This segues into a discussion of contradiction analysis, which is theoretically central in Boer's book. Through the discussion of the difference of such analysis from forms of "either/or" logic dominant in the West, I arrive at the significance of the category of the "concrete universal" (Hegel) for the understanding of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." After unpacking some of the central issues posed by the "reform and opening-up," I dwell on the question of socialism in China. I emphasize some of the complications inherent in the combination of socialist planning and the market economy, including the issue of the conception of a future or prospective "communist" stage. The discussion concludes by dwelling on issues of law and political structure, with particular emphasis on the innovative importance of "rule of law" in the socialist context, as well as on the importance of contradiction analysis for understanding the dialectic of sovereignty and globalization.

ABSTRACT
This article addresses the question of the actuality of Sir Thomas More's Utopia by arguing for the centrality within More's text of the question of forcibly displaced and economically "surplused" populations. Drawing upon Gramsci, this article posits the fundamental role of a dialectic between population and traumatic disaster in More's text and the genre at large. After engaging with the most direct sign of this dialectic in Utopia, this article posits three interpretative advantages to reading it as a "fiction of population": Such a reading, first, allows for an understanding of the logical consistency of the relationship between Hythlodaeus's critique of the Tudor penal system in the first book and the highly disciplinary character of the Utopian society envisioned in the second; second, helps us grasp the existence of a similar logical continuity between the denunciation of European geopolitical rapacity (book 1) and the advocacy of Utopian colonialism as rational and just (book 2); and finally, problematizes the interpretive binary that posits Utopia as either a progressive/emancipatory or a fundamentally conservative/repression-laden work. It concludes by returning to the paradoxical nature of Utopia's actuality, dwelling on its proximity to and distance from our own historical moment's confrontation with the question of surplused lives.

ABSTRACT
In the first section, this article offers a sketch of tendencies in the engagement with utopia and utopianism in contemporary Greece: after dwelling on Greek-language scholarly research and translation in the area of utopian studies, it makes reference to film, drama and performance art, architecture and urbanism, and cross-platform cultural initiatives. It concludes with two observations regarding the dominant character of the Greek reception of the utopian problematic in recent years: first, that it is highly political in nature and therefore oriented to concrete social and cultural interventions around the major issues the country has faced and, second, that the increasing resonance of utopia is for these reasons largely unofficial in character, since European research funding is relatively lacking. This gives a strongly "grassroots" character to much of the activity using utopia as method and orientation. The second half of the survey draws on responses to the journal questionnaire to document the activity of one research initiative undertaken in Greece, "Utopia Project 2006–2010," coordinated by Vassilis Vlastaras and Maria Glyka under the auspices of the Athens School of Fine Arts and involving the collaborative work of international artists and academics over a period of five years.

ABSTRACT
This essay explores the ways in which the notion of "everyday life" helps us stage a theoretically productive encounter between modernism/modernity and utopia within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary history. Taking Virginia Woolf's critique of Edwardian writers as its starting point, it examines the hidden historical dimensions of the very idea of the everyday, its connection to modernity and, at the same time, to boredom as a specific symptom of that modernity. To illustrate the implications of this theoretical framework for literary study, I turn to two of the most emblematic texts of modernist and utopian aesthetics: James Joyce's Ulysses and William Morris's News from Nowhere. Whereas in Joyce, technical and formal experimentation becomes a means of capturing daily life (including utopian daydreaming) in terms of an oscillation between capitalist commodification and the restlessness of bored distraction, Morris grasps everyday life as both steeped in boredom and removed from the suffering and restlessness associated with it. Thus, utopia reverses the modernist logic of innovation, making "novelty" not a formal dimension of the literary text but one that pertains to its projected, anticipated content: life beyond the determinations of capitalist modernity.

The Book of Lord Shang and the origins of the state / Yuri Pines -- Aristotle on sovereignty / Kazutaka Inamura -- Divided sovereignty : Polybius and the compound constitution / Jed W. Atkins and Carl E. Young -- Reading sovereignty in Augustus' Res gestae / Dean Hammer -- Al-Fārābī : the sovereignty of the philosopher king / Massimo Campanini -- Marsilius of Padua on sovereignty / Vasileios Syros -- The king 'should be' sovereign : Christine de Pizan and the problem of sovereignty in fifteenth-century France / Kate Forhan -- Jean Bodin's République / Sara Miglietti -- Hugo Grotius : absolutism, contractualism, resistance / Marco Barducci -- Shakespeare on sovereignty, indivisibility, and popular consent / Stella Achilleos -- Sovereignty and the separation of powers on the eve of the English Civil War : Henry Parker's Observations and Charles' Answer to the XIX Propositions / Michael Mendle -- Thomas Hobbes, sovereign representation, and the English revolution / Glenn Burgess -- John Locke and the language of sovereignty / Geoff Kemp -- Rousseau's sovereignty as the General Will / David Lay Williams -- Sovereignty in the American founding / Michael Zuckert -- Thomas Paine : reinventing popular sovereignty in an age of revolutions / Carine Lounissi -- Sovereignty and political obligation : T.H. Green's critique of John Austin / John Morrow -- Divided Sovereignties : Lenin and dual power / Antonis Balasopoulos -- Carl Schmitt and the sovereignty of decision / Mika Ojakangas -- Arendt on sovereignty / Shmuel Lederman -- Foucault and Agamben on sovereignty : taking life, letting live, or making survive / Carlo Salzani -- Derrida on the 'slow and differentiated' deconstruction of sovereignty / James Martel.

ABSTRACT
Although More's Utopia is a work for which classical Greek language and literature are central, it was not until 1970 that the work was translated into Greek. During the sixteenth century, Greek scholars bypassed the fundamental texts of Renaissance humanism, clinging instead to the classical Greek past. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Greek intellectuals also ignored Utopia, partly because the nature of their Westernizing agenda did not attract them to a work embedded within the tradition of Catholic Latinate cosmopolitanism. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the term utopia entered Greek intellectual life, "scientific socialism" had also made its first appearance in Greek political culture, possibly preempting the desire to translate a work that would now appear to constitute the source of an already obsolete canon of "utopian socialism." Tellingly, the textual life of More's Utopia in Greek began during the military junta. Its first translation arguably deploys it as a text charged by the desire for egalitarian democracy while at the same time privileging its satirical and playful aspects, partially in order to avoid state censorship. Though there are important differences regarding the framing of More's text by the four extant translations in modern Greek, the overall tendency seems to be to receive Utopia as a fundamentally political text, a text capable of inspiring thought, and perhaps action, during dire and challenging times.