The emergence of death is then at that point the signal that it has been possible to take the point of view of the species upon human existence. Utopia necessaraily takes the point of view of the species upon human history, thus emptying it of much that we consider not merely historical but irreplaceably significant in human life. For the urgent specificity of historical events is at one with their uniqueness and their contingency: the irrevocable moment when this special possibility had to be grasped or forever lost. History is the most intense experience of this unique fusion of time and the event, temporality and action; history is choice, freedom, and failure all at once, inevitable failure, but not death. Utopia is set at a height form which those changes are no longer visible: even if the Utopia in question is one of absolute change, change is nonetheless viewed from that well-nigh glacial and inhuman standpoint as absolute repetition, as a sameness of change as far as the eye can reach. A state of society that does not need history or historical struggle lies beyond much that is precious to us in individual as well as collective existence; its thought obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 122-123