L’Utopie de l’Espace, l’espace-temps de l’Utopie : archéologie dialectique de la science-fiction dans l’œuvre d’Alexander Kluge

Science-Fiction, as a genre and especially as a thought of the space-time, is central in Alexander Kluge’s work since the Sixties. This article proposes an analysis of Kluge’s appropriation and critical reinterpretation of Science-Fiction around 1970, and its subsequent generalization. If Outer Space and the Future are generally “external” zones which allow the utopian projection, Kluge rather uses them as the locus of its dystopian reversal, which he will develop and accomplish in his book Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (1973). Facing the permanent failure of the utopia, the “science-fictional”-principle allows Kluge, far beyond his SF-production, to make the utopian yearning reappear at the heart of his catastrophic tales, carrying on his reflection about the “dialectic of Enlightenment”. In this way, the conflagration between present and “the rest of time” (A. Kluge) and the crossing of knowledge (science) and imagination (fiction) become a general method of work based on “metaphorical” thinking.