LITERATURE AS UTOPIA: BETWEEN JACQUES DERRIDA AND

While Derrida admitted the “critical powers” of utopia, he was generally wary of the term and used it only very rarely. He was particularly concerned that it “can be too easily associated with dreams or demobilization”. By referring to the notion of utopia as proposed by Ingeborg Bachmann, which, from our point of view, overcomes the general concerns expressed by Derrida, this paper reconsiders the relationship between his philosophy and the utopian tradition. On the one hand, we suggest that the utopian perspective can not only be applied to certain political concepts (such as the idea of “democracy to come” or the idea of “unconditional hospitality”), but also to the concept of writing itself, which Derrida analysed in De la Grammatologie (1967) and in his