The Privatization of Hope

"Bloch . . . is one of the rare figures of whom we can say: fundamentally, with regard to what really matters, he was right, he remains our contemporary, and maybe he belongs even more to our time than to his own."Slavoj iek, from the preface "Late capitalism has been celebrated by its apologists as that stage of society in which nothing more, nothing new, will ever happen (except for wars, catastrophes, bankruptcy, and Armageddon): the end of history as the death of the future. In this affluent desolation, at the tail-end of all thought, we confront the immense enigmatic figure of Ernst Bloch and that tangle of the Not-Yet-Conceivedthe heritage of unfinished business, loose ends, and tired aporias in which new problems are somewhere hidden, new futures slumber, and a freshening and a renewal of history is promised. The present collection makes a start on renewing Bloch himself as a living multiplicity of themes and questions, and may even mark a beginning of that new beginning with which he tantalized us."Fredric Jameson, Duke University like Bloch, contributions in this volume instil in the reader a sense that partisans are not obliged to consider contemporary states of affairs as perfected facts, as if facts amounted to the worlds completion. Instead we are guided by a transgressive thought to take up with renewed vigour Blochs insistence on the worlds being just as little finished as we are. . . . [T]his volume foretells of a much needed coming future engagement with Bloch. -- Nathaniel J P Barron * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books * "[T]he merit of this volume is that it approaches Bloch's thinking from very different perspectives, and often in an ingenious way." -- Ivan Boldyrev * Crisis and Critique * [T]his collection is persuasive that a return to Blochs writing, in spite of or as Miller argues, perhaps precisely because of its difficulty, is a worthwhile endeavour for anyone interested in reclaiming the utopian residues that lie beneath the ideological surface of cultural formations, perhaps in order to then understand how they might be put to work in ensuring that some human dreams for a better collective future do not remain mere fantasies. -- Marcus Morgan * British Journal of Sociology *

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

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