Anarchic utopia in Aris Alexandrou's The mission box

This paper shows that there are two notions of utopia operating in Aris Alexandrou's novel The Mission Box (Το κιβώτιο). The first is the autarchic utopia espoused by the Communist Party and represented in the novel by the rational, chronologically organised narrative. The second is the anarchic utopia that disrupts the certainty of the rational narrative as well as the belief in a teleology that will lead to the Party's victory. I argue that the anarchic interruption avoids a politics of oppression by extrapolating a notion of freedom whose definition does not rely on a negation of imprisonment.