Michal Kaczmarczyk

This article examines dystopian literature as a critical counterpart to sociology, emphasizing its role in social self-description. The author introduces the concept of the sublimation of the negative, inspired by Niklas Luhmann, to explain how dystopias transform the negative side of self-descriptive social codes into tools for critical thought. The re-introduction of the distinction of good/evil allows dystopia to unmask the latent ‘social evil’ hidden within the utopias of efficiency promoted by other systems such as politics, science, or the economy, which are often blind to their own human costs. Unlike sociology, which often avoids speculative and future-oriented inquiries, dystopias embrace imaginative alternatives, addressing epistemic gaps such as de-futurization and the marginalization of subjective experience. Through analyses of works such as Gabriel de Tarde's The Underground Man, Edward Morgan Forster's The Machine Stops and Janusz A. Zajdel's Limes inferior, the article demonstrates dystopia's ability to transcend sociological explanatory schemes.