This book was born out of the concern for the negative political and environmental trends at the turn of the decade as well as for the impact of pessimism on the possibilities of humanity to tackle its challenges. Along with the other then active members of the Center for Practical Phenomenology – Olli Aho, Joonas Martikainen, Janne Vanhanen and Jaakko Vuori – the editors organised the event Analysing Darkness and Light: Dystopias and Beyond in the spring of 2019. It says, perhaps, a lot about our time that while our biggest worries at that point had to do with global warming and post-truth politics, since then we have come across other extremely worrying developments, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and, on the European level, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Alongside actual threats concerning the environment and society, dystopias have a more imaginative dimension, fiction and artistic representations, that are equally included in this book. Art provides a tool for critical analysis of dystopic themes in visual arts, music, film and literature alike, areas that provided interesting starting points for analysing and speculating on the scope of dystopias.
In the conference of 2019, we discussed the issue of darkness and light more broadly than in this book, going well beyond the theme of dystopias. Yet we are indebted to those speakers who did not contribute to the book at hand but did contribute to our discussions: the keynote speakers Sara Cohen Shabot and Almira Ousmanova, the panellists Mirja Hartimo, Shojiro Kotegawa and Susanna Lindberg, the session speakers Olli Aho, Petri Berndtson, Tuukka Brunila, Andrei Gornykh, Dmitry Korotkov, Pedro T. Magalhães, Heta Mattila, Karolina Pełka and Joni Puranen, and the commentators Jussi Backman, Niklas Toivakainen and Jaakko Vuori. The discipline of Practical Philosophy provided the venue for the conference at the University of Helsinki along with some financial support, for which we are grateful.
Our sincere thanks go to the authors of the articles, with whom our co-operation was always swift and pleasant. It has likewise been a pleasure to collaborate with our language reviser Kate Sotejeff-Wilson. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the generous support of Kone Foundation, which funded our projects Despair and Time, Indirect Philosophy as a Form of Resistance and The Work beyond Aesthetics, and, through them, made our work for this volume possible.
Helsinki, August 2023
The editors
