The Utopia of Thomas More involves circumlocutory ways of distancing the author's self from the delineation of the exemplary city of Hythlodaeus. More wanted not only to obscure his agency as an author, but also to confer a unique credibility on the conceptual hypothesis he sought to fabricate. By endowing his “philosophical city” with a semblance of reality, he made his readers see the mechanism at work through a fake description, which is also the essential characteristic of the utopian genre (Frye 31). A symptom of Renaissance anxiety over the constant intertwining of ideas of dissidence, privacy, guilt, and anti-state practices, More's Utopia attributes no private space to its inhabitants. As a result, “[T]here . . . no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting places. . . [T]heyone is keeping an eye on you, so you are basically forced to get on with your work and make adequate use of your free time” (Other 65). Ironically, More is also painfully aware of such eyes on himself and, as a result, the pretense of a second-hand account can actually be interpreted as a protective technique that More makes use of (Turner xiv). The paradox of this situation can best be identified by identifying how More himself paid with his life for the degree of surveillance that haunted Renaissance England, where even his silence on the issue of Henry's assumption of the supreme head of the Church VIII was a betrayal. enough to be sentenced to death. More's utopia, and utopian thinking in general, has had a far-reaching cultural impact in the context of the emergence of modern socio-political conditions of subject formation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Catholics and Communists both indulged in what Paul Turner calls "a critical love tug" (xi), in an attempt to valorize their own ideologies by borrowing More's authority. Such an approach betrays only a partial understanding of the utopian tradition to which the work belongs, precisely because it interprets the author's intention as that of producing, so to speak, “a project of the society we aim for” (Popper 157). As Lyman Sergent pertinently observes: “few utopias have been written with the intent of realizing them in detail, and the history of political thought offers no models for building new societies” (570). Undoubtedly, utopian literature, when viewed as social or political theory, creates a conflict between an artist's intent and the extent to which he chooses (or perhaps is forced) to expose himself to the reader's scrutiny. The way More, as an author, tries not to authorize his text, can't just fool some "fat" who said he didn't see why More should be so much admired for his Utopia, since everything he did it was writing what someone else told him" (Turner xiv), but he should also keep the intelligent reader on his guard about the “reality” he is playing with. More's success in shaping an almost proto-postmodern ethic rests in part on his pioneering ability to introduce this element of "play" into his text, the element of ambiguity that locates and dislocates reality through the simultaneous interaction of presence and absence. The reader can easily identify the socio-political evils that Hythlodaeus speaks of, but not being able to contextualize them except as veiled references further veiled by the interventions of the dramatic personality of the author himself from within the text, he perceives reality as confused and dislocated. Today's relevanceof utopia cannot be appreciated if we try to put it in the straitjackets of communism or Catholicism, but regarded as a spontaneous overflow of intellectual good humor, a feast of debate, paradox, comedy and above all of invention that starts many hares but kills no one (Rengasamy xxxii), the text remains a space fraught with complexities of consciousness that resonate with modern concerns of privacy, family, utility, religion, and identity. The appearance and disappearance of borders and the multiplication of various ideological borders have not stopped in our time, and «it is precisely at this moment, while new, or very ancient and frightening, borders appear or reappear, those of nationalistic, racial or religious – precisely at this moment it is worth remembering the fiction of an island that appeared at the dawn of a period of which our present time would constitute the twilight” (Marin 11). Furthermore, it can be argued that the utilitarianism of the utopians that arises from their notion of mercy and kindness has much in common with what Charles Taylor calls “modern utilitarianism” as a secularized variant of Christian spirituality (13). The very beginning of Hythlodaeus' arguments emphasizes the cruelty and impudence behind the capital punishment of thieves prevalent in the then England. Remarkably, his arguments combine compassion and prudence as he seeks to demonstrate how widespread poverty should be addressed first instead of punishing the thief who steals primarily out of poverty and scarcity of basic services resulting from the underutilization of human labor and natural resources. More's veiled reformist spiritual zeal comes to us filtered through Hythlodaeus' account of the utilitarianism of non-Christian utopians which can be paralleled with the "thrust of the utilitarian Enlightenment, protesting against the needless and senseless suffering inflicted on human beings in name of...". . . orders” (Taylor 13). Identifying and recognizing the individual subject as a product of social conditions is one of the main strengths of Hythlodaeus' argument. As Habermas noted, More's ideal city shares an important feature of Machiavelli's proposals in The Prince (1513): we must first establish the social conditions in which individual subjects can realize their human potential and moral ideals. He says: “virtue and happiness as such are here [in Utopia] conceived in a traditional way; but what is modern is the thesis according to which the technically adequate organization to satisfy the needs of life, the correct institutional reproduction of society, are prior to the good life, without these in themselves representing the content and purpose of action morality” (Habermas 54 ). The process of employing “correct institutions” in Utopia – which includes the abolition of private property, a source of power and privilege through the accumulation of wealth – however signals an opposite hypothesis of the Prince, namely a movement towards removal (rather than the strengthening) of the social domination of the few over the many (Dupr? 151). By emphasizing the dependence of the individual's actions on the social system that he constitutes, Hythlodaeus almost anticipates a poststructuralist concern that seeks to argue that subjects are not the autonomous creators of themselves or their social worlds; rather, subjects are embedded in a complex network of social relationships (Namaste 221). The specific social and cultural logic – the key to subject formation – leads mysteriously to ways in which subjectivities are simultaneously framed and hidden. We can move on to localize these features at the textual level. The loans More made to Plato's Republic as he shaped his utopia were along commented critically. In addition to the similarities that the two share, the manner of More's conscious departure from Plato's ideal is also interesting in this context. The heteropatriarchal family in the utopia is central to its functional modus operandi, unlike Plato's republic where marriages are controlled by the government and a woman can be married to many men. For utopians marriage appears to be an individual decision insofar as the otherwise peculiar practice in which both man and woman are allowed to see the other completely naked before agreeing to marry is not considered ridiculous. The utopians' attitude towards the power dynamics at work within the family domain also seems to humorously reflect More's family (Rengasammy xxvi). However, crass statements such as "husbands are responsible for punishing their wives" (More 85) or the custom that wives are required to kneel before their husbands every month and ask for forgiveness (without any mention of the same which must be also done by husbands) ) To maintain internal peace, the family is still the coherent unit that elects the syphogrants of the administrative structure. Governors are not elected by popular vote but by these syphogrants elected first by the families. It remains an open question whether every adult member of the family votes or whether the choice is made, for example, only by the head of the family, perhaps after consultation with other family members (Steintrager 363). Utopians attach extreme importance to the prevention of premarital sexual relations by introducing strict laws against it. However, instead of defending these laws on the basis of the preservation of marital sanctity, an almost scandalous (especially for Catholics) argument is presented as the defense. They are said to be particularly strict about these rules “because they think that very few people would want to get married – which means spending their whole lives with the same person, putting up with all the inconveniences that entails – if they weren't. carefully prevented from otherwise having any sexual intercourse” (May 83-4). This statement takes for granted the intrinsic hedonistic predisposition of the soul of the common man, inclined more towards pleasures than principles. The sensual aspect of the human mind is brought to the fore by the assumption that, following natural logic, sexual gratification can become preferable to the “inconveniences” of marital companionship. It is important to note where this logic leads. Their “natural” religion is inextricably linked to “[T]he principles of natural theology… necessary for the support of morality” (Steintrager 370). As Steintrager notes, utopian morality is more hedonistic than the morality of the Republic and for the common utopian, the check on excessive pleasure-seeking is religion (371). The historical moment in which More was negotiating with Plato's past ideal had a great impact on the ideas he explored in Utopia, if not unequivocally supported. In an era when privacy was loosely associated with secrecy and seditious thoughts, the essence of utopian privacy survives only in marital sexuality and the individual's ability to choose a partner and even divorce him/her by mutual consent . True pleasures, being divided “into two categories, mental and physical,” include “sexual intercourse, or any relief from irritation by rubbing or scratching” (Major 76-7). The only limiting factor that defines immorality is simply classified as “pain,” since “pleasure need not cause pain – which they think is bound to happen, if pleasure is immoral” (More 79). What emerges as a pervasive principle in such arguments is immediacycorporeality of pain and pleasure of the individual subject as a direct quotient of private sensory perceptions that would later become important tools in providing knowledge and truth to Montaigne. Although for Descartes and his legacy the thrust shifts exclusively to abstract reason, modern times have seen a vindication of the individual's sensory experience as having the same relevance as abstract reasoning. Such dialectical ways of preserving the privacy of pleasure and banishing it when it veers towards “pain” constitute a key to the formation of the utopian subject. More's fictionalized narrator, Hythlodaeus, is also, first and foremost, a traveler, said to be returning from a journey around the world. the New World as part of Amerigo Vespucci's expedition; and although he claims to be “describing their [the utopians'] life, not defending it” (More 79), in many cases he appears particularly eager to do exactly that. It is intriguing to conceptualize: when “Hythlodaeus means 'dispenser of non-sense', Utopia means 'non-place', Anydrus (the name of a river) means 'not water' and Ademus (the title of a chief magistrate) means 'not people '” (Turner xii) - what is the cultural value of More's ironic interpretation of early modern travel narratives and what are its relationships with the private action of an individual to imagine and reorder reality through stories of travel and spatial displacement. To quote Louis Marin: “every journey is, first of all, a moment and an empty space, a free space that suspends continuous time and ordering places” (14). The Island of Utopia is almost a spatial escape from subjectivity, an exploration that simultaneously falsifies early modern travel narratives and uses them as a cover to filter contemporary reality. The flow at the heart of this early modern enterprise is one that symbolizes the shifting of meaning at multiple levels: “shifted letters, shifted names (shifting their meanings) – a shifted map that shifts all maps and finds none really none - Utopia as a process is the figure of every type of frontier, supplanting, with the practice of its travels, all representations, secretly duplicating every type of real geographical journey and every type of historical and temporal change" (Marin 16). The ultimate fictional nature of the text exposes the fiction of the self created through travel narratives – which have always formed an integral part of the formation of the individual subject – whenever it sought to reclaim its individuality by describing and inventing geographically disparate Others. It is not without reason that the ideas which Hythlodaeus advocates in a half-polemical, half-prophetic voice probably surpass in conviction anything that More has produced elsewhere. More's diplomatic office as the Renaissance humanist ambassador par excellence placed him in a complex cultural melting pot in which his profession was a constant balancing act between stasis and flow, between "private philosophical meditation with public oratory and involvement in the civic world of politics and diplomacy” (Brotton 56), and what he offers in Utopia can be seen more as a rhetorical exploration of an escape from his own subjectivity and even the emerging bourgeois ethic, than anything else. While More himself speaks in different voices introducing real-life characters such as John Morton, Peter Gilles and Thomas More, distorting and displacing their characters, his Utopia also imitates and distorts contemporary developments by practicing a kind of ventriloquism. The constitution of the utopian subject is based on the artifice of appropriating multiple stereotyped representations in a composite spatial Other. Just as travel stories build intertextual metarealities that they nourish.