The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, SIC 8 ([sic] Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822355752 ISBN 13: 9780822355755

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2013

Synopsis

The concept of hope is central to the work of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), especially in his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1959). The "speculative materialism" that he first developed in the 1930s asserts a commitment to humanity's potential that continued through his later work. In The Privatization of Hope, leading thinkers in utopian studies explore the insights that Bloch's ideas provide in understanding the present. Mired in the excesses and disaffections of contemporary capitalist society, hope in the Blochian sense has become atomized, desocialized, and privatized. From myriad perspectives, the contributors clearly delineate the renewed value of Bloch's theories in this age of hopelessness. Bringing Bloch's "ontology of Not Yet Being" into conversation with twenty-first-century concerns, this collection is intended to help revive and revitalize philosophy's commitment to the generative force of hope.

Contributors. Roland Boer, Frances Daly, Henk de Berg, Vincent Geoghegan, Wayne Hudson, Ruth Levitas, David Miller, Catherine Moir, Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Welf Schröter, Johan Siebers, Peter Thompson, Francesca Vidal, Rainer Ernst Zimmermann, Slavoj Žižek

About this title

About the Author

Peter Thompson is Reader in German at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Crisis of the German Left.

Slavoj Žižek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of many books, including Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE PRIVATIZATION OF HOPE

Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia

By Peter Thompson, SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5575-5

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
xi
Note on Editions and Translations..........................................
xiii
Slavoj Zizek, Preface......................................................
xv
Peter Thompson, Introduction: The Privatization of Hope and the Crisis of 
Negation...................................................................
1
1 Wayne Hudson, Bloch and a Philosophy of the Proterior....................
21
2 Vincent Geoghegan, An Anti-humanist Utopia?..............................
37
3 Johan Siebers, Ernst Bloch's Dialectical Anthropology....................
61
4 Peter Thompson, Religion, Utopia, and the Metaphysics of Contingency.....
82
5 Roland Boer, The Privatization of Eschatology and Myth: Ernst Bloch vs. 
Rudolph Bultmann...........................................................
106
6 Catherine Moir, The Education of Hope: On the Dialectical Potential of 
Speculative Materialism....................................................
121
7 Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Engendering the Future: Bloch's Utopian Philosophy 
in Dialogue with Gender Theory.............................................
144
8 Frances Daly, The Zero-Point: Encountering the Dark Emptiness of 
Nothingness................................................................
164
9 David Miller, A Marxist Poetics: Allegory and Reading in The Principle 
of Hope....................................................................
203
10 Ruth Levitas, Singing Summons the Existence of the Fountain: Bloch, 
Music, and Utopia..........................................................
219
11 Rainer E. Zimmermann, Transforming Utopian into Metopian Systems: 
Bloch's Principle of Hope Revisited........................................
246
12 Henk de Berg, Unlearning How to Hope: Eleven Theses in Defense of 
Liberal Democracy and Consumer Culture.....................................
269
13 Francesca Vidal and Welf Schröter, Can We Hope to Walk Tall in a 
Computerized World of Work?................................................
288
Contributors...............................................................
301
Index......................................................................
305

CHAPTER 1

Bloch anda Philosophy ofthe Proterior

Wayne Hudson

The odds against a boom in utopia are high.

—Jürgen Habermas

Utopia has aged. No one believes anymore in a perfect society or in aperfect humanity. On the other hand, the need to imagine a better futureremains. Ernst Bloch was the most original thinker to defend the continuingsignificance of utopia in the twentieth century, yet he remainsrelatively little understood in the English-speaking world. When I beganto study in Oxford almost forty years ago, I was only allowed to workon Bloch because Leszek kolakowski agreed to supervise. In the early1970s Gillian rose and I were among the very few at Oxford trying torethink Marxism in the light of classical German philosophy. When Iwrote The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (1982), I had to establishhis intellectual credentials and to demonstrate his importance for theMarxist tradition at a time when Althusser and Gramsci were morefashionable figures. In the 1980s German classical philosophy wasmainly available in caricature in English, and I did not know enoughabout Schelling to appreciate Bloch's subtlety at some points. Moreover,although I talked at length with Bloch himself, I was too young to entirelyappreciate the dialectical complexity of his thinking, as he notedwith a mixture of astonishment and bemusement in our interchanges.Today, as a result of new translations and exceptionally fine studies, classicalGerman philosophy is being received in English as the major philosophicalachievement of the West after the Greeks. Now, as then, however,Bloch's extraordinary legacy has still not been adequately receivedin the Anglo-Saxon world, despite the labors of many.

In this chapter I draw attention to aspects of Bloch's still largely unrealizedlegacy and propose that it may be possible to inherit this legacyin the context of a philosophy of the proterior.

I

At his death on 4 August 1977 Bloch was known as a utopian Marxistand as the philosopher of hope, characteristics of declining appeal inthe decades that followed. In the English-speaking world, no clear viewof Bloch's importance has emerged. Both Anglo-Saxon good sense andthe arcane nature of his German texts make it hard for us to know whatto make of him. Nonetheless, Bloch's legacy is astonishingly rich, andthe volumes of his collected works contain model ideas of outstandingcontemporary importance. Today, however, there is a need to releaseBloch's legacy from the political as well as the philosophical contexts inwhich it arose.

In political terms, the hope that Marxism can be salvaged along thelines that Bloch and Lukács proposed has passed away. It is now widelyagreed that a reconstruction of Marxism must be more severe than Blochrealized and may have to conform to intellectual canons to which Blochhimself was not sympathetic. Bloch then easily appears as a utopian whofailed to grasp why utopias have to be given up and as a Marxist wholacked the detailed history and economics to provide a powerful frameworkfor Marxist theory. There are those who argue, plausibly withinlimits, that Bloch belongs to a phase of German Jewish cultural historythat is now irretrievably behind us, that Bloch was at best a MarxistSchelling (Habermas), at worst the philosopher of German Expressionismwho failed to develop. Equally, there are those who seek tolocate Bloch within a typology of western Marxism as a religious leftistwho never freed himself from metapolitical satisfactions and who remainedpolitically deluded for most of his career. This is a reading whichvulgarizes the complexity of Bloch's political analyses, including his endorsementsof Lenin and Stalin, the hard political judgments which hemade about the socialist East, and the degree to which he was preparedto tailor his intellectual activities to the attempt to "build socialism." Itis also a reading which fails to account for the shrewdness of Bloch'sanalysis of the nazis, his evaluations of the political potential of a greenpolitics, or Naturpolitik, and his commitment to an alliance of socialistand progressive Christian forces, as well as to the cause of women's liberationand to work for peace.

Because Bloch's work does not conform to the expectations of philosophersof an epistemological bent, he is sometimes presented as aforerunner of postmodernism without the necessary qualifications.However, once it is established that Bloch was not a postmodernist butan advocate of a new edition of the Enlightenment, the relevance of hiswork on multi-temporalism, non-contemporaneity, and the need towork outside and below tertiary cultures can be discussed.

What is needed is an interpretation of Bloch that refuses safe houses.Bloch was extra muros. He stood outside the university culture of histime and its neokantian obsessions with epistemological and intrasystematicconcerns. He did so as a rebel against the subjection ofrational thought to methodologically controlled discourses. The scandalouscharacter of Bloch's work is essential to it, and it is a fundamentalmistake to join those who seek to domesticate Bloch posthumously, asthough, cleaned up, he could take his rightful place in the German philosophicalpantheon alongside Walter Benjamin and Adorno. Like JakobBoehme or Johann Georg Hamann, Bloch was an irregular, and the importanceof his contributions becomes more evident as the limitationsof the modern disciplinary organizations of knowledge are recognized.

Against such domestication, it is necessary to insist on the unavailabilityof Bloch's work, and the fact that there is a continuing delay in thecourse of its reception as only some aspects of Bloch's work are reallytaken up. An abnormal time structure is fundamental to Bloch: a timestructure linking anticipatory insights to later developments and thistime structure applies to his own work. It explains why even today hisstudy of the problem of materialism awaits an adequate reception.

Bloch's work demands an effort because it is designed to subvertpremature conceptions of rationality and the discourses dependent onthem. Bloch used a form of abnormal writing as a way of highlightingquestions and perspectives that had been missed. He can be seen as apioneer of a transdisciplinary writing that runs across the disciplinesto uncover issues and themes that they repress, avoid, or render illegitimate.Here, understandably, the French have proved best equipped toappreciate his importance (Gérard raulet, Jean-François Lyotard, LouisMarin, and Emmanuel Levinas). In the Anglophone world, however,those who deny that nietzsche's contribution to a philosophy of thefuture has been adequately assimilated by either Heidegger or Derridawill find Bloch contemporary reading. Bloch's work is recondite and fullof postponements. To ask, "Has the Emperor any clothes?" misses itstemporal distribution and invites a premature reconstruction of Bloch'sideas. There is no futuristic gnosis (Leszek kolakowski). Prophecy andpredictions are wholly lacking. Nor is occultism the key, Pythagoreanor otherwise (George Steiner). Marxist romantic will not do (JürgenHabermas). Nor will Jewish messianist suffice (Jürgen Moltmann).

One of Bloch's major insights was that working temporally with theutopian surplus found throughout human cultural history and nature wasessential to contemporary enlightenment. Bloch grasped the connectionbetween reduced expectations about our ability to find an unassailablefoundation for the good and the need to learn to pursue realizable goalsby rectifying hope in the light of actual historical outcomes. No doubtsuch temporally sophisticated hope requires concrete methodologicalinnovations and rational procedural controls that Bloch failed to provide.nonetheless, Bloch was not wrong to think that corrected hopecan lead to knowledge. Nor was he mistaken to think that hope can playa part in rationality intent upon a world in which millions of people willnot starve. A reevaluation of hope as an element of rationality would beno mean legacy for Bloch. Finally, at a time when utopia is in disreputeand is widely used as a term of abuse, Bloch can help us to realize thatthe case for utopia does not fall with utopian illusions.

Bloch was not a social utopian of any standard sort. He devised noideal society. Instead, he was attracted by many different strands ofcounterfactual culture. As a result, his work slips through the perspicaciousdistinctions between utopia, Arcadia and Cockayne, to whichhistorians of utopian thought resort. Bloch was closest perhaps toutopians of the chiliastic variety, above all Thomas Münzer. His utopianexpectations related to personal experience of the presence of theend is the now of the moment. On the basis of this experience, he wasirrepressibly hopeful. Existing reality restricted his daydreaming lessthan it constrained his contemporaries. He was invincibly convinced,for both philosophical and psychological reasons, that maximal, if currentlycounterfactual, good was possible. And for him there was also ananticipatory element in cognition. Where the rest of us tend to judge oursuccess in thinking by its relation to current modes of discourse, Blochbelieved that he could think beyond such modes in ways that would bearfruit. This Jules verne quality went with an eschatological orientation,in part gnostic, in part biblical, and a radical openness to a possiblefuture transformation of nature.

Nonetheless, Bloch was no naive utopian. He believed that whatmanifested as utopian fantasy in European thought from the renaissanceonward was a socially and economically conditioned expressionof a human capacity to reject existing states of affairs and to daydreamof states of affairs in which what should be would be the case. What isat stake, then, in Bloch's work is utopia as presemblance that can beharnessed and set to work. Bloch held that manifestations of this realitycould be found throughout the human world and that the neglect of itled to a lack of insightful models for political, social, legal, and culturalchange. Nonetheless, the manifestations of this psychotemporal realitywere not merely subjective. Rather they could involve anticipatoryknowledge and be related to developing possibilities.

Taking up Bloch's legacy here requires a willingness to admit botha constructive function for philosophy at the level of method and the irreduciblerole of normative postulates in philosophical rationalism. Bloch sawthat getting it right in terms of existing conditions was often too conservative,that hazarding what the good required often meant taking leaveof epistemological guarantees. He was acutely aware that at least somephilosophers needed to take account of the causality of their own workin the context of the future of people and their societies. Here MichelFoucault was among his heirs.

Any attempt to engage with Bloch's legacy and set it to work encountersthe problem of what he meant by "utopian philosophy." Given thatBloch wrote so much, it is amazing that he devoted so little space toclear answers to central questions. The answers are there, but they areimplicit, and it is often only developments after Bloch's death whichhelp the reader to get past his arcane terminology to a thought that assumesknowledge of kant's work on practical reason and the sublime,Schelling on the blind spot of the moment, and the theory of the unconsciousfound (before Freud) in the works of the now largely forgottenphilosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906). In each case the philosophicalbackground is well known to experts in German philosophy,but not well known to English-speaking intellectuals without such professionalexpertise. Even in Germany many who are expert on kant arenot aficionados of Schelling, let alone of von Hartmann. Hence they tendnot to be able to follow Bloch's movement beyond school philosophyand its logics to a different type of philosophy altogether. Instead they ask,predictably, what in Bloch is really new?

Bloch contributed a new idea to the history of utopian thought. Thiswas the idea that utopia was not "no place," but existed in the darknessof the lived moment and its transcending dynamic. In contrastto Adorno's negative dialectics or Marcuse's libidinal sophistications,Bloch theorized utopia in terms of Schelling's critique of transparent accountsof consciousness. Utopia was not in the manifest field but in thenontransparent darkness of the lived moment. Our daily experience ofthe world was traversed by a wonderful, unconstruable excess. HenceBloch could assert that there was no dualism possible between utopiaand actuality, since utopia pervaded experienced actuality as a nonavailableincognito. Just as there is no way to talk adequately in tertiaryterms about the erotic experiences that we all have, and the vocabulariesused tend to be scatological or euphemistic, so Bloch held that utopiawas given experientially as a daily reality but repressed in discourse.Consistent with the critical pessimist side of his thought, Bloch did notpretend that utopia could be demystified and translated into school philosophyterms. On the contrary, no one could know what utopia correspondedto. But this did not eliminate the problem of utopia becausethe humanly experienced world was pervaded by a wonderful incognito,which could be normatively glossed, even though it could not be identifiedin ontic terms.

Here Bloch's conception struck at the mundanity and accessibility ofmuch modern philosophy, and it has parallels in French Surrealist discussionsof an atopical void or abyss which destroys the possibility oftraditional ontology, a prominent theme in the work of Maurice Blanchot.nonetheless, what Bloch meant by "utopian philosophy" needsto be extended from its historical location in the early Lukács-Blochcollaboration and the turn to utopia by many central European Jewishintellectuals after 1914. The need for philosophical utopias has long beenrecognized by historians of philosophy. Indeed, historians of philosophyhave concluded that without such surplus, the great "ruins" of the historyof philosophy would arguably never arise in the first place. The roleof utopia in philosophy itself, however, is little investigated, despite theremarkable work of Michèle Le Doeuff.

Bloch sought to pioneer a utopian philosophy with a constructive historicalfunction. He held that at least some philosophers should concernthemselves with human affairs and the state of the world and withhow people understand themselves and their society. Here he influencedAdorno and, through him, some of the subsequent work of the FrankfurtSchool. It remains a vexed question how far such concerns shouldbe regarded as proper to philosophers qua philosophers, as opposed toconcerns which philosophers may take up as citizens or as interdisciplinarywriters. Bloch opted for the first alternative.

By utopian philosophy Bloch meant philosophy that took utopia as itscentral concern, where utopia meant the a-topical mysterium in the darknessof the lived moment. Bloch was not suggesting that philosophyshould become abstract social utopianism or that philosophers shouldwrite accounts of perfect societies. His point was a post-nietzscheanone and based on his own readings of kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Giventhat human beings had no access to any supra-historical absolute truth,the human need to project a vision of highest good could not be met bycertain established claims of knowledge. On the contrary, there was aclear tension between the restricted and moderate strong knowledgesthat could be constructed and the unconstruable wonder [thaumazein]that human beings experienced but for which they could find no adequatecognitive place. In the contemporary period, Bloch suggested, thiswonder and the irrepressible hope to which it gave rise could only beadequately responded to by an assertion of its content which remainedwithout epistemological guarantees. Utopia, in this sense, was all thatwas available to contemporary humanity by way of transcendence.

This realistic, even pessimistic, side of Bloch's thought has beenwidely overlooked. Bloch's notion of utopia was a sociohistoricallysophisticated one that can be located in early twentieth-century Germansocial philosophy, including the work of the German sociologist GeorgSimmel. In Bloch's account, utopian philosophy would operate in a utopianmanner, and it lacks a rigorous methodology in the period in whichit achieved its initial indications. Utopian philosophy in Bloch's sensewould seek to criticize existing discourses, practices, and conditions byreference to utopian postulates and seek to direct attention to concretepossibilities developing in the world, whether social or natural. It wouldseek to keep the culture open to new possibilities and to provide it witha sense of "where to" in a normative rather than a futurological sense.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822355752
• ISBN 13: 9780822355755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Thompson Peter, Zizek Slavoj