La vendita del fumo. Izolacjonizm, szczęście i doskonałość w światach eutopijnych

Krzysztof M. Maj in the chapter “La vendita del fumo”. On Isolationism, Happiness, and Perfection in Eutopian Storyworlds delivers a historial analysis of literary eutopias from classical texts by Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, or Francis Bacon up to more contemporary iterations in the analysed genre. Most predominantly, the paper re-introduces such theoretical concepts as “sieged mentality”, teleo-eudaimonism, the sphere of idolum, topothesia, carentia defectus, as well as multiple philosophical approaches to isolationism and happiness—aiming at composing a definition of eutopia as not necessarily a narrative, but a living fictional world. Furthermore, the author proposes to view eutopia from allotopian (i.e. acknowledging the worldliness of the world and discouraging interpretations that frame eutopian worlds as fantastic and, ipso facto, unreal or unrelevant as secondary, subcreated worlds) perspective in order to deconstruct a postcolonial, diastatic relationship between the continent of empeiria and the island of (e)utopia. By doing so, he also tries to evade another crude juxtaposition that is the unequivocal difference between eutopia and dystopia—which, in the proposed approach, intertwine with each another as envisioning equaly logocentric, ethnocentric, and egocentric societies. It is only “a progression toward an attainable perfection” that allows utopias to become eutopian, performatively perfecting their status quo in order to reach Duns Scotus’ (unreachable) ideal of perfection understood teleologically as the finis ad quem res principaliter ordinatur. Last but not least, the chapter interpretes a number of Polish eutopian texts rarelier discussed in utopian studies, such as Antoni Lange’s Miranda, Stanisław Lem’s Eden, Wizja lokalna [Observation on the Spot], Golem XIV, or Janusz Zajdel’s Utopia—referring to both Polish, and international prominent contepts in generally understood utopianism.