The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, SIC 8 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822355752 ISBN 13: 9780822355755

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

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 Zizek

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

Slavoj Zizek 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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822355752
• ISBN 13: 9780822355755
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Herausgeber: Thompson PhD Peter
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar