This study examines the concept of "the darkness of the lived moment," as Ernst Bloch, the great philosopher of hope, names it. As Gerhard Richter reveals, what appears in the immediacy of our experience of this particular darkness is, upon closer scrutiny, far removed from our actual understanding. Yet, engaging with this darkness also can help us to learn how to relate to the future. Across a series of incisive chapters, Richter stages encounters with a wide network of seminal thinkers and writers, as well as a broad, yet interconnected, constellation of concerns. The book engages texts from Heraclitus to Schelling, from Nietzsche to Freud, and from Heidegger to Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and beyond. Ultimately, Richter wagers that the darkness of the lived moment is not merely a predicament to be overcome—a temporary aberration from the otherwise illuminating course of enlightenment—but rather possesses its own dignity and its own modes of generating sustained insight. Even if we may not finally know what is to be done, we can be certain that in working through—rather than exclusively against—the darkness of the lived moment, we have, borrowing one of Marx's most moving phrases, a world to gain.
