The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia ed. by Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek (review)

Ernst Bloch, the utopian neo-Hegelian speculatist materialist philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, the neglected “rebel” philosopher whose work, by being neither continental nor analytic, was emphatically “extra muros” (Hudson 23), and who has consequently found only an “isolated position” within English-language theory and cultural studies (Siebers 61), gets his day in this new collection, the eighth in Slavoj Žižek’s influential SIC series for Duke University Press. The Privatization of Hope collects fifteen new essays by established Bloch scholars, most of whom are based in the UK or Australia. The essays urge a return to Bloch within today’s theoretical circles, and should spark renewed interest in Bloch’s work within the humanities and social sciences.

If there is an overall argument across the essays, it is that our current era has learned to construe hope only in individual terms such as hope for oneself or one’s family, and that Bloch can be the solution. A thinker who “belongs even more to our time than to his own” (Žižek xx), and who “offers interesting parallels and discontinuities with current speculative materialist thought” (Moir 125), Bloch teaches us to see the contingent processes by which the future is already immanent in the present, and, from this perspective, to hope collectively. The volume offers an excellent introduction to Bloch’s utopian thought, expositions of his theories of utopia and the “not yet,” syntheses of his vast and wide-ranging body of work, correctives to common misunderstandings, and applications of his thought into new contexts. It brings Bloch with surprising ease into current theoretical contexts, especially those defined by Žižek, Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Frederic Jameson, Graham Harman, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The Privatization of Hope will be an indispensible entryway into Bloch’s oeuvre for many readers and an urgent call for further engagement with his sprawling three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1959).

Three essays deserve particular praise here for the way they have challenged me to think about Bloch’s work very differently. Really the heart of the collection is a long essay by Frances Daly, who sees Bloch not as a thinker of optimism, as he has sometimes been seen, but really of the “sublime emptiness of nothingness” (187). In Daly’s reading, Bloch’s genius was to see how politics confronts a void or “zero-point” through which death can become the backhanded engine of political renovation (171, 187). This is a startling rethinking of Bloch’s promethean politics, and a perfect corollary to David Miller’s essay, “A Marxist Poetics.” Miller presents The Principle of Hope as a literary text, one that gains rhetorical power because of, not despite, its vexing style. The difficulty of Bloch’s writing becomes an allegory of its own reading, argues Miller persuasively as he channels Paul de Man, forcing Bloch’s readers on to the trajectory of hope, however necessarily bewildering, that The Principle is actually theorizing (213). Meanwhile, Caitríona Ní Dhúill brings Bloch into an unanticipated collision with the work of Judith Butler, finding in Bloch’s implicit utopianism, openness to the future, and capacity for strategic essentialism a prefiguration of contemporary gender theory despite Bloch’s relative silence on questions of gender (146).

Equally admirable are the two essays by Peter Thompson, who co-edited the book with Žižek and is Director of the Centre for Ernest Bloch studies at the University of Sheffield. In the Introduction, Thompson offers an overview of Bloch’s theory of hope and situates Bloch within an intellectual context including Brecht, Badiou, Žižek, Lacan, and Hegel. He develops this framework further in his outstanding second essay, “Religion, Utopia, and the Metaphysics of Contingency,” in which Bloch is shown to have thought about religion in a way resonant with Badiou and Žižek’s work on Christianity some fifty...