Feeling Bloched

From a situation in which nothing is possible, suddenly anything is possible again
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative

Today marks the publication of my new book, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch, out with Zer0 Books. The book — more of a pamphlet really — is not an attempt to try and provide the definitive explanation of Bloch’s philosophy but to try and make the argument that Bloch’s work is an under-appreciated and invaluable resource for a renewing and continuation of the project of utopian philosophy. Indeed, the whole Zer0 Utopia series seeks to serve this aim. Despite the fact that Bloch, throughout his work, particularly The Principle of Hope (published in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1959) built a philosophical corpus devoted to the utopian idea, his own reception in Anglophone political discourse has been somewhat marginal. In contrast to figures like Lukacs, Benjamin and Adorno all of whom were writing in response to Bloch and have found large readerships in Anglophone leftist circles, Bloch’s reception has been far more narrow. There’s a famous quote from Jameson that unintentionally describes Bloch’s reception quite well:

One finds everywhere today… something like an unacknowledged “party of Utopia”: an underground party whose numbers are difficult to determine, whose program remains unannounced and perhaps even unformulated, whose existence is unknown to the citizenry at large and to the authorities, but whose members seem to recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals

In the lead-up to writing this book, I’ve met people who have told me they know nothing about Bloch, or have never heard of him, but there have always been some — not many, but some — who have responded with delight, members of that underground party committed to the unannounced program of which Bloch’s philosophy is one of the heralds. Jameson, in one of if not the earliest English introductions to Bloch’s work in Marxism and Form, compares his philosophy to a great satellite — something which has crashed into Earth from some other time, and some other place. Bloch is a philosopher of the future tense, creating concepts for a world which does not yet exist.

It is this element of his philosophy that I think is most useful and perhaps goes some way to explaining the relative lack of popular interest in his work over the past few years. In the wake of Mark Fisher’s work, which has shaped an entire generation of writers, there is perhaps a tendency to valorise the necessary negativity of critique. In this kind of environment it’s easy to see the great passages of Bloch-Musik (as Adorno would put it) as being dangerously close to a kind of religious enthusiasm, looking past the present problems for an easy Utopian dream. Yet, I think this misses the utopianism of thinkers like Fisher and those like him. The thing that was so transformative about reading Capitalist Realism is the insistence that this world for all of its nightmarish qualities was something constructed and both should and could be changed. Philosophical negativity is a stand against the present and thus, even if it’s never stated explicitly, a call for a radically different future. The end of Capitalist Realism is a call for an understanding of the present that recognises the audacity of our demand and the extent of our capacities. A Primer on Utopian Philosophy is an attempt to show the ways in which Bloch’s historical situation and his intellectual work still has much to teach us and is entirely compatible with a philosophical commitment to the ruthless criticism of all that exists (something Bloch’s contemporary Theodor Adorno knew all too well). Tom Moylan, in Becoming Utopian, talks of the dialectical and dialogic movement of “denunciation and annunciation” that makes up Utopian philosophy. For all Bloch’s reputation might be dismissed as simple annunciations of a world which is not-yet, his work is the very model of exactly this double movement, philosophy that is done in and against the world of capitalism. This is one of the best reasons to try and read Bloch if you never have, as a philosopher whose work directly speaks into the blockages and contradictions of the present.

A second or minor reason would be the sheer joy of it — Bloch’s writing is like nothing else. The translators of The Principle of Hope (Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight) point out in their introduction that it is a proudly literary work, which explains why Marxists didn’t really like it. Bloch is both poet and philosopher and his work is never abstract or overly scholastic. Rather, he believes that the Utopian impulse has been found within philosophy but cannot be isolated to just that field, as this quote from the opening of The Principle of Hope shows quite beautifully.

The good New is never that completely new. It acts far beyond the daydreams by which life is pervaded and of which the figurative arts are full. All freedom movements are guided by utopian aspirations, and all Christians know them after their own fashion too, with sleeping conscience or with consternation, from the exodus and messianic parts of the Bible. In addition, the merging of have and have-not constituted by longing and hope, and by the drive to reach home again, has in any case been burrowing in great philosophy. Not only in Plato’s Eros, but also in the far-reaching Aristotelian concept of matter as that of possibility towards essence, and in Leibniz’s concept of tendency. Hope acts unmediatedly in the Kantian postulates of moral consciousness, it acts in a world-based, mediated way in Hegel’s historical dialectic. However, despite all these Enlightenment patrols and even expeditions into terram utopicam, there is something broken off about them all, broken off by contemplation.

All of our explorations into the terrain of utopia are broken off by contemplation — it’s why I wouldn’t want to have written a properly “philosophical” book — this is not that, it is a primer, something for you to take and do with as you need.

If the book does what I hope it will, then for people who would like to spend more time with Bloch then start with his archive here. It includes his introduction to the first volume of The Principle of Hope, his commentary on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and his short, superbly accessible book on Karl Marx.

You can order my book from Zer0 Books here: