I have concentrated my exploration of utopia in this text on a concept presented by Roland Barthes. Adding to the two poles of the binary - utopia and the 'real world' - he introduces a third, the atopia. The atopia "is superior to the utopia ... Utopias are static, within the binary; atopia is the movement that disturbs the binary. However the two are not separable in a distinct way, for it is only insofar as utopias are nonexistent and yet exist as such (that is, utopias can be thought but are by definition what is not there), that there ensues the movement that is atopia."[1](my italics). Looking at the binary system, one deals with "a two-term dialectic: popular opinion and its contrary, doxa and its paradox... This binary dialectic is the dialectic of meaning itself (marked/not marked)."[2] As utopia is the ideal place, the place of non-describable happiness, I would like to equate it with the Barthesian term of jouissance (bliss, for the want of a better word). Equally, I would like to equate 'the real world' (the 'ordinary' existence and what is possible in it) with the term plaisir for the clarification of relations. "What is jouissance, if not the 'unspeakable', which is not any-thing at all? Furthermore, it turns out that 'pleasure' [plaisir] here (and without being able to anticipate) sometimes extends to bliss [jouissance], sometimes is opposed to it. Jouissance is both a text and a nothing, plaisir is both itself and its other, jouissance. The effort to attain jouissance, which is finally the effort to escape the text of culture altogether, only succeeds in destabilizing both terms of the initial plaisir/jouissance binary." [3] So what is utopia, if not the unspeakable, which is not anything at all? 'The real world' (without being able to anticipate) sometimes extends to utopia, sometimes is opposed to it. The effort to attain utopia, which is finally the effort to escape the text of culture altogether, only succeeds in destabilizing both terms of the initial 'real world'/utopia binary. Utopia is "posed as that which would enable a definite escape from the cultural [from the fixity of the binary], while such an aim is undercut by a recognition of its own impossibility." [4] Utopia is being thought, i.e. desired, and therefore conceptually constructed and as such it exists and does not exist an the same time. Utopia's doxa, the 'real world', must then assume the same degree of instability through the necessity of the binary character of the two terms utopia/'real world'. According to Barthes this is the point where the utopia transforms into the atopia. "It [the atopia] exceeds the utopia that simply opposes the doxa, for what is important is the space it can open up within the doxa to the extent that it itself, a utopia (a nowhere), has no place - atopia (of drifting habitation)." [5] The quest for utopia "is staged in its passage, but just as there is no one object on which it comes to rest, so there is no one subject behind it." [6]