In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch claims that the Russian Orthodox Christian Church was theologically more open towards the ideas of October than its Western counterpart. The remark is intriguing, but Bloch does not offer any detailed explanation except to say that Orthodoxy considers the revelation “unconcluded.” This article is an attempt to provide a slightly more detailed background to Bloch’s remark and present some elements of Orthodox Christianity and its utopianism by way of comparative critical hermeneutics, a method (...) that looks at the interpretative differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity with respect to some basic shared dogmas and their de-alienating and alienating effects. (shrink)

Ernst Bloch’s recourse to speculative philosophy has guaranteed him the position of a perpetual outsider in the history of Western Marxism. When Jürgen Habermas described Bloch’s philosophy in 1960 as a ‘speculative materialism’, it was to denounce him for crossing the boundaries of critical thought set down as much by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as by Marx’s critique of political economy. This article argues that Bloch’s speculative materialism deserves to be re-assessed. Contrary to Habermas’s assertion that speculation is divorced (...) from critique, I argue with Bloch that the speculative hypotheses we unavoidably use to interpret the world around us inform our political beliefs and actions, and to stifle speculative thinking as that creative and inquisitive enterprise which questions and transgresses the given is not only a ‘crime against reason’, as Hilary Putnam once claimed, but also a crime against freedom. (shrink)

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

My thesis reads Ernst Bloch’s materialist ontology with the aim of producing a utopian perspective on language’s materiality. As my Introduction outlines, set against the backdrop of a contemporary renewal in speculative philosophy, the present context is marked by a twofold limitation: (1) the perdurant marginalisation of Bloch’s form of utopian speculation, serving to couch contemporary materialism in thoroughly un-prospective tendencies; and (2), a relative failure of contemporary speculative philosophy to reflect on language, a failure attributable to the long drawn-out (...) dominance of post-structuralism’s linguistic form of relativism. To overcome these limitations I dedicate Chapter I of my thesis to expounding the core categories of Bloch’s materialism, casting a light on what I call its fundamental compositional structure: Incompleteness → Process → (possibility of an) Outfall, i.e. completion or arrival. In light of this, I argue that, placed within the horizon of Bloch’s materialism, incompleteness, process, and futural-directedness ought to be taken as cornerstones of language’s materiality. So as to better position what this means, in Chapter II a reading of the metaphysical Sens of Bloch’s materialism is given. There I consider Bloch’s materialism as a novel form of analogic metaphysics. Insofar as at the core of Bloch’s materialism there lies a metaphysical conception whereby being as such (e.g. Aristotle’s ontōs on) names an ultimate desire and not—pace the classical metaphysical tradition—an already existent beingness—a metaphysical conception Bloch proleptically terms the “ontology of not-yet being“—so then the essential dynamic of this materialism hinges on an incomplete analogy, for all things relate to that which is not-yet in existence; this not-yetness is the sustaining meaning of what is. In the final chapter I concretise my findings by turning to the question of language proper, reading “anacoluthon” as a speculative materialist figure of language which expressive this utopian analogic metaphysics. Anacoluthon denotes an interruption in syntactical flow (Greek: an-akóluthos, “not following“; German: Satzbruch, “sentence fracture/rupture“) and marginally features in Bloch’s corpus. But precisely because of its marginal status the figure possesses a real force in understanding language’s utopian materiality. Indeed, I read anacoluthia as expressive of the Blochian ontological composition. Anacoluthic discontinuities of speech are read as linguistic expressions of ontological incompleteness, ontological novelty, and ontological directedness to what is not yet. They linguistically express both the non-existence of ontological totality, but also, crucially, a real and open intending towards it: a utopian, creative, linguistically-based transgressiveness expressive of the world’s ontology. (shrink)

الحاد جدید وصف جریانی است که در دهۀ نخست قرن حاضر، با انتشار سلسله‌ای از کتاب‌های پرفروش و در واکنش به حملات تروریستی برخی افراطیون دینی، به عرصۀ افکار عمومی آمد. این جریان هرچند ریشه در گذشته دارد و مبانی و مفروضات آن همان مبانی و مفروضات ملحدان گذشته است، با اتخاذ رویکردی بسیار خصمانه، به جریانی توفنده و جدید علیه دین و دین‌داران تبدیل شد. سخنگویان، و به اصطلاح پرچمداران آن عبارت‌اند از داکینز، دنت، هریس، و هیچنز. برخی از (...) این ملحدان پیش‌تر به عنوان یک طرح کلان دست به عمومی و همه‌فهم کردن علومی چون زیست‌شناسی، به ویژه نظریۀ فرگشت و انتخاب طبیعی، زده بودند و اینک از آن جهت حمله به باورهای دینی استفاده می‌کنند. آنها در نقد خود به جای تکیه بر استدلال یا نقد دلایل و براهین مؤمنان، رویدادهای تاریخی و نیز رفتار و کردار برخی گروه‌های تندرو دینی، به ویژه اسلامی، را معیار داوری خود دربارۀ دین و خداباوری می‌دانند. همچنین ملحدان جدید بدون آن که مبانی و تکیه‌گاه‌های خود را اثبات کنند، با تکیه بر آنها چنین وانمود می‌کنند که باورهای دینی اموری فرگشتی است و در نتیجه می‌توان با توجه به این نظریه و نیز با تکیه بر جهان‌بینی طبیعت‌گرایانه آن باورها را تبیین تجربی و طبیعی کرد. در این مقاله با توجه به دیدگاه‌های منتقدان آنها، اعم از خداباور و الهی‌دان و خداناباور، نشان داده‌ایم که اولاً طبیعت‌گرایی آن ‌گونه که این ملحدان از آن می‌گویند و بر آن تکیه می‌کنند، یک نظریۀ علمی نیست، بلکه در واقع نوعی جهان‌بینی و نگرشی مابعدالطبیعی است. ثانیاً ملحدان در همین موضع مرتکب خطای آشکاری می‌شوند و آن خلط معانی گوناگون طبیعت‌گرایی است. ثالثاً بر خلاف نظر آنها میان علم و دین تعارضی نیست، بلکه اگر تعارضی هست به قول پلنتینگا میان طبیعت‌گرایی و علم است. (shrink)

During the last two decades, a sharp re-reading of St. Paul’s letters allowed several thinkers to embed a messianic element in their political philosophy. In these readings, the messianic refusal of the world and its laws is understood through the suspensive act of ‘subtraction’ – a movement of withdrawal which nonetheless proved too often ineffective when translated in political practice. -/- After having analysed Agamben’s declension of Subtraction in terms of ‘inoperativity’, this article focuses on the notion of Parousia as (...) a key element to understand his anti-utopian account of messianic time. In contrast with Agamben’s reading, Bloch’s interpretation of the Pauline Parousia envisages the messianic event as infra-historical, but at the same time opened to ultimate (meta-historical) purposes. Bloch’s messianic call – I argue – takes the form of mediation, a correction of subtraction towards the direction of a more committed political engagement. I conclude suggesting that the concrete implementations of this mediation perform their emancipatory function in so far as they assume the character of practical ethics, with the attention directed to the underprivileged and marginalised. (shrink)