Abstract
“What occurs,” Louis Marin asks, “if the foundation is not firm ground, but, as Bloch wrote, abyssal depth?”1 Through and with Nietzsche, I read the impossibility of any form of hypostatization. This is, I have suggested, intensely liberating; and indeed, for Nietzsche, this is the moment of possibility for “a new plot and potential for the Dionysian drama….”2 Nietzsche’s recognition was that we are always-already fictionalizing creatures (though often—most often—we have mistaken “our” fictions, or the restraining fictions of others, for truths). This understanding of fictions is, I suggest, beyond the epistemological, is temporal, and carries with it political and ethical implications. In a Stirnerian language, Nietzsche’s “spooks” do not dominate, but instead enable participation and creativity in the project of making worlds meaningful; a Kantian, hierarchical understanding is made lateral and plural, while the real is not reduced to simply the given or the possible. The present, in Nietzsche, was fissured, open.
Thinking means venturing beyond.
Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope
I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and must go on dreaming lest I perish!
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Production without product, structuration without structure …
Barthes S/Z
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Notes
Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play trans. Robert A. Vollrath (London: Macmillan, 1984), p.xxii.
For debates on utopia as social dreaming and impossibility or more decisively didactic, see, e.g., Levitas, The Concept of Utopia; Moylan Demand the Impossible Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), “Bloch Against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function,” in,
Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, ed. Jamie Owen Daniel & Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997f);
Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); and
Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” in, Utopian Studies 5/1 (1994), pp.1–37.
Richard Gunn, “Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” in, New Edinburgh Review 76 (1987), pp.90–98, 92.
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p.3; Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, p.xii.
Ruth Levitas, “For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,” in, The Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p.27.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p.220.
Cited in Mike Kenny, “Socialism and the Romantic ‘Self: The Case of Edward Thompson,”in, Journal of Political Ideologies 5/1 (2000), pp.105–127, 107.
Simon Critchley, “The Other’s Decision in Me (What are the politics of friendship?),” in, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Levinas, Derrida and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), p.280.
See, e.g., J.L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952) for the “tragic paradox of utopianism” (p.95), and more recently,
Yannis Stavarakakis has argued that “the naivety—and also the danger—of utopian structures is revealed when the realization of this fantasy is attempted. It is then we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatization is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions”: Lacan and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p.100, emphasis mine. I have, of course, been arguing that this is a misconstrual of utopia in the first place.
Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia: Or, Can We Imagine the Future?,” in, Science Fiction Studies 9/2 (July 1982), pp.147–158, 153.
Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopia Discourse,” in, Diacritics 7 (Summer 1977), pp.2–21, 21.
Eugene D. Hill, “The Place of the Future: Louis Marin and his Utopiques,” in, Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982), pp.167–179, 169.
Ricoeur’s characterization is instructive and interesting: the utopian image is “productive, an imagining of something else, the elsewhere […] It is always the glance from nowhere […] Utopia has the fictional power of redescribing life,” in, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.266. Nevertheless, I have previously pointed to the limitations of a redescription that is not also politically transformative.
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp.32, 25.
Thomas H. West, Ultimate Hope Without God: The Atheistic Eschatology of Ernst Bloch (New York: P. Lang, 1991), p.25.
Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982), p.53, p.26.
Liliane Weissburg, “Philosophy and the Fairy Tale: Ernst Bloch as Narrator,” in, New German Critique 55 (Winter 1992), pp.21–44, 29.
Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, trans. Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.4, emphasis mine.
Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” in, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1998), p.223.
Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.164.
John Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in, Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed. John Holloway and Eloine Peláez (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p.173.
Marcos, Zapatista Stories, trans. Dinah Livingston (London: Katabis, 2001), p.118.
Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Cornell University Press, 1977), p.208.
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© 2005 Susan McManus
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McManus, S. (2005). Bloch’s Utopian Imagination: Fictive Theories. In: Fictive Theories. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976802_7
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