The privatization of hope: Ernst Bloch and the future of Utopia (original) (raw)

2015, Contemporary Political Theory

History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. (Heaney, 1990, pp. 77-78). If Bloch is indeed 'our contemporary', as Žižek affirms in his typically lively Preface, this is because he is, from within his nevertheless expansive utopianism, witness to the manifest failure of hope, time and again and despite its persistence and ubiquity, to attain that which it promises: the revolutionary satisfaction of hunger, redemption, justice and joy-Heimat. Indeed, the ostensible starting point of this book picks up from where Bloch left off. In 1964, in conversation with uneasy ally Adorno, Bloch identifies a 'terrible banalization' of utopia. Adorno concurs, adding that 'utopian consciousness' has suffered a 'strange shrinking' to the extent that 'people are sworn to this world as it is, and have this blocked consciousness vis-à-vis possibility (Bloch and Adorno, 1988, pp. 3-4). The problem is not that humanity has lost its capacity to hunger and hopethere is, as Kafka laments, 'plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us' (Benjamin, 1999, p. 166; and referred to by Daly in this volume, p. 195). The crisis of hope is that, contra Seamus Heaney's insurgent rhyming, hope and history have unravelled, that hope has lost its utopian dynamic shaping social, collective and historical agency, becoming, instead, individualized, apoliticalprecisely privatized. This remains, nevertheless, an oddly titled book. Conceived during capitalism's period of triumphal hegemony, but birthed in the context of the 'Second Great Crash' (p. 1), the question of hope's 'privatization' is asserted but not directly confronted; indeed, it is belied by this rich collection of engaged essays. The collection opens by considering Bloch's ontology of 'not-yet-being', rehearsed with Žižekian speed in his Preface. For Bloch, reality itself remains ontologically incomplete (a claim that Žižek finds echoed in Heisenberg and Bohr's