Paper short abstract:

The loss of transcendence in postmodernity left the subject without possibility to detach from the surrounding and to achieve bodily coherence. Subject is instead dissolved in his surrounding and compelled to incessant organic trade with it.

Paper long abstract:

Utopia is usually perceived as a transcendental category different from reality (cf. Mannheim 1978) which serves as a model for a social change. As such, utopia is deeply affected by the crisis of transcendence in postmodernity. Unlike the Cartesian ego, which maintained firm boundaries between himself and the world and searched for a contact with it through neutral abstract categories, the embodied subject of postmodernity needs to achieve that contact immediately, through his body, affects and sensations. In such a context, in which things do not exist if they can't be felt, utopia has to be achieved as a specific constellation of affects and sensations - as a certain bodily state.

Hyperaesthesia, explicated as the sensual logic of the late capitalism by david Howes 2005, is a means for achieving a specific utopian project. Namely, the project of free market, characterized as utopian by Karl Polany (1999), requires a subject without strict boundaries in order to secure constant and immediate flow of stimuli and goods. The hyperaesthetic state ensures dissolution of bodily coherence and release of perceptual possibilities (Livingston 1998) which allow for an undisturbed exchange of messages, sensations and affects. The embodied subject, therefore, is not faced with utopia as a regulative idea, but is, instead of that, directly immersed in a specific utopian state.