Poetics Today

Beyond the Turn:

Ernst Bloch and the Future of Speculative Materialism

Cat Moir
University of Sydney, Department of Germanic Studies

Abstract This article makes a case for the relevance of Ernst Blochs philosophy to
thinking through the political consequences of contemporary speculative materialist
theory. Quentin Meillassouxs speculative materialism offers a vision of the world in
which a future of justice may be materially possible, but there is little or nothing human
beings can practically do to bring it about. Meanwhile, according to Blochs under-
standing of the concept, human beings are capable of bringing about a better future for
all through practical political struggle. Comparing these two thinkers, I argue that the
future of speculative materialism, both in the sense of the future such a theory imagines
and in that of the future of the theory itself as a politically viable materialism, must
engage with the heritage of Blochs thought.
Keywords Ernst Bloch, Quentin Meillassoux, speculative materialism

Ernst Bloch and the Speculative Turn

The term speculative materialism designates an emerging current within con-

temporary European thought. As the editors of the recent volume The Specu-
lative Turn (Bryant et al. 2011b) acknowledge, it is difficult to identify a single
thread uniting the various new developments brought together under the
speculative materialist heading; nevertheless a central common orientation is
visible. There are signs, we are told, that the high moment of the anti-realist
trend in continental philosophy is on the wane (Bryant et al. 2011a: 3).
Phenomenology, structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, and

Poetics Today 37:2 ( June 2016) DOI 10.1215/03335372-3481979

q 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

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postmodernism are all named as exemplars of a focus within modern Con-

tinental thought on discourse, text, culture, consciousness, power, or ideas
as what constitutes reality (ibid.: 2). Faced with twenty-first-century chal-
lenges the prospect of ecological catastrophe, the increasing technologiza-
tion of the lifeworld, and so forth there is a sense in which, so say The
Speculative Turns editors, the antirealist position now actively limits the
capacities of philosophy in our time (ibid.: 3). There is thus once again a
turn toward speculating about the nature of reality independently of thought
and of humanity in general. Those who would take flight at the suggestion of
a return to a precritical metaphysics are assured that this is not on the agenda.
Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (ibid.) affirm that the
speculative turn does not represent an outright rejection of the advances
of post-Kantian philosophy. It aims rather to recuperate the precritical sense
of speculation to move beyond the critical and linguistic turns (ibid.).
Much emphasis has been placed on the innovation and excitement of these
recent developments. In the works of what we describe as The Speculative
Turn, say the editors, one can detect the hints of something new (ibid.).
These are, we are told, exciting times to be a Continental philosopher,
particularly for the young new breed of thinker . . . turning once more
toward reality itself (ibid.: 1, 3). Perhaps the most visible representative of
this so-called new breed is the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux,
whose book Apre`s la finitude (2006; English translation After Finitude [2008])
has enjoyed a rich critical reception.1 In his book-length introduction to
Meillassouxs thought, Harman (2011: 5) is full of praise for this young
philosopher in the midst of emergence and anticipation of what he might
do next.2 So far, according to Harman (2011: 4), he has developed a novel
position called speculative materialism, which, according to Alain Badiou
(2008: vii) in his preface to Meillassouxs After Finitude (2008), has opened up a
new path in the history of philosophy. Although Meillassoux (ibid.: 36, 38,
121) does indeed refer to his own philosophy as a speculative materialism and
1. Hereafter I will quote from the English translation Meillassoux 2008.
2. However, Harman is able to do more than speculate as to what Meillassoux might do next.
Admittedly, he is not alone in being able to do so, since Meillassouxs forthcoming publication
is, as Harman (2011: 90) acknowledges, probably the most famous work in present-day con-
tinental philosophy that no one has read, with the exception of a handful of dauntless archivists
who may have consulted the microfilm resources of the Ecole Normale Superieure. Harman
refers to Meillassouxs doctoral dissertation Linexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence,
1997), the publication of which has, as Harman (2011: viii) notes, been eagerly awaited for
several years. Since Harman himself is one of the handful of dauntless archivists he describes,
he is in a position to say something about this as yet unpublished work. His book on Meillassoux
contains an extensive appendix of excerpts from the dissertation and a chapter of commentary
on its main ideas that has been indispensable in informing my discussion here.

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although his position about which more will be said below can certain-
ly be seen to be novel in certain respects, he is not the first thinker to call
himself or be called a speculative materialist.
Although Ernst Bloch developed an ontology during the course of the
twentieth century which he explicitly called speculative materialism, he is
conspicuously absent from the contemporary literature on the topic, perhaps
partly because the main work in which he develops his speculative material-
ism Das Materialismusproblem: Seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism
Problem: Its History and Substance, 1972) is, like much of Blochs work, as yet
unavailable in English. Hans Heinz Holz (2012: 484) has recently asserted
that Bloch was the first to apply the term to his own philosophy. Admittedly,
the genesis of Blochs main work in which the term appears, Das Materialism-
usproblem, is complicated. The books epigraph tells us that it was written in
1936 37 and revised in 1969 71, a fact to which Blochs German biogra-
pher, Peter Zudeick (1985: 300), elsewhere attests.3 However, the earlier
manuscript, written while Bloch was in exile in Prague, is incomplete, and
although Bloch certainly refers to the speculative dimension in his materialist
writings from this period, it is not clear that the term spekulativer Materialismus
(speculative materialism) appeared as such in the 1936 37 manuscript.4
Already in 1960, however, Jurgen Habermas had published an essay in
3. As yet no complete biographical introduction to Bloch exists in English, and although many
readers may not be familiar with Bloch, especially given that much of his work is available only
in the original German, for reasons of space and concision I am not overly concerned to give an
overview of his life and work here. For readers familiar with German, I highly recommend
Zudeick 1985, which remains the most complete biographical introduction in any language
and is a thoroughly engaging read. For English readers, Hudson 1982, though over thirty years
old, provides a strong biographical contextualization, as does the more recent introduction
Geoghegan 1996.
4. Zudeick (1985: 158 59) explains that Blochs exile in Prague was a highly productive time for
him despite the imminent threat of Nazi invasion; the pregnancy of his wife, the Polish Jewish
architect Karola Piotrkowska; and the birth of their son Jan-Robert during this period. In
particular, Zudeick describes Bloch working on a long-planned manuscript on logic, which,
however, was never completed in full although parts of the larger project went on to form Das
Materialismusproblem and the later Experimentum Mundi (1975). Blochs work on logic was fre-
quently interrupted, Zudeick tells us, by his expansion of what was initially intended to be a
single chapter on the concept of matter. For two years Bloch worked on expanding this chapter,
which later became Das Materialismusproblem, into a book-length study of its own, even making a
neat copy, although unfortunately the logic manuscript later went missing. However, Gerardo
Cunico, editor of the volume Logos der Materie (Bloch 2000a), a collection of Blochs unpublished
writings from the period 1923 49, explains that the volume is primarily based on a recon-
struction of the scattered remains of a 1934 37 manuscript, presumably the remains of the logic
manuscript. Although the formulation spekulativer Materialismus does not appear as such in
Cunicos collection, one essay in Logos der Materie does include a discussion of konkrete Spekula-
tion (concrete speculation) in relation to Marxism (ibid.: 364 65). This essay, Einzige Invari-
ante: Tendenz auf Erscheinung des Wesens, dates from the period 1944 45, when Bloch was
in the United States. What appears to be an earlier version with the same title is included in the

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which he specifically describes Blochs philosophy as a speculative material-

ism. The essay, Ein marxistischer Schelling: Zu Ernst Blochs spekulativem
Materialismus (A Marxist Schelling: On Ernst Blochs Speculative Mate-
rialism, 1960), was in fact a review of Blochs recently published Das Prinzip
Hoffnung (1959).5 Given that Habermass article predated the publication of
Das Materialismusproblem in 1972, it could be that Bloch explicitly incorporated
the term spekulativer Materialismus into the work during its revision. Although
this question may be resolved by further archival research, given Blochs
allusive style and nonconformist editing practices, it is difficult to get a
clear picture of whether it was Bloch who first applied the term to himself
or Habermas who applied it to him. However, what is certain is that Bloch
did develop a philosophy which he called speculative materialism some forty
years or more before Meillassoux emerged on the scene.
Although the term speculative materialism has been applied to both Blochs
and Meillassouxs respective work including by the thinkers themselves
the philosophies they develop under this heading are in many ways very
different. Meillassouxs recourse to speculative thinking signals a return
to pre-Kantian philosophy, notably bypassing G. W. F. Hegel for reasons
shortly to be explained, while his materialism can be seen as epistemological
rather than ontological, involving a strict separation of matter from mind,
following Rene Descartes. Meanwhile, Blochs speculative thought draws on
both Immanuel Kant and Hegel, and his materialism is a Marxian inherit-
ance. Admittedly, there are also important ways that aspects of Meillassouxs
speculative materialism are prefigured in Blochs. Both are thinkers of imma-
nence who take seriously the heritage of religious thought, although Bloch is
more explicitly atheist than Meillassoux. Significantly, Meillassoux adopts
a humanist position strikingly similar to Blochs: they both suggest that the
human, not only as a biological being but as a principle, incarnates the
possibility of that radical new which has a part to play in the emergence of
a substantially different future. Furthermore, for both thinkers this future can
only be a world adequate to the human. The World of justice (Harman
2011: 99) Meillassoux envisages is in many respects not very far from Blochs
(1959, 1986) utopian Heimat (homeland). Neither Bloch nor Meillassoux after
him sees the realization of such a future as guaranteed. However, it is the role
and capacity of the human being in shaping the future which is at stake in the
difference between these speculative materialisms. I suggest that while, as the

Erganzungsband (supplement) to the Gesamtausgabe (collected works) (Bloch 1978: 260 64); how-
ever, the discussion of concrete speculation does not appear there.
5. The essay also appears in Habermas 1978: 11 32. Although the important subtitle is missing
from the latter publication, the two texts are almost identical.

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radically unknowable frontier of a hyperchaotic reality, Meillassouxs future

resists human intervention, the future Bloch describes is the emerging hor-
izon of a process in which the human being itself can hope to play an active,
mediating role. In agreement with Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, I believe it
is imperative for thought today to be able to face the social, political, and
ecological challenges of the present. I will argue here, first, that a speculative
materialism such as Blochs, which posits the real possibility of change
through action, is preferable to one like Meillassouxs, in which although
literally anything can happen, we can neither anticipate nor affect what takes
place in time. Second, however, I propose that for speculative materialism
itself to have a future beyond this recent turn, to sustain inquiry and con-
tinue to generate productive criticism, it will benefit from a serious engage-
ment with Bloch.
Let us turn now to the question of what speculative materialism can be seen
to consist in for Meillassoux and for Bloch. I am not especially concerned
here systematically to pinpoint problems in either Blochs or Meillassouxs
thought.6 Needless to say, they exist in both cases. What interests me is what
kind of visions of the future these philosophies offer and how useful they are in
helping us, human beings, respond to the challenges facing us, regardless of
the extent to which those challenges can be said to have been of our own
making up to now.

Meillassouxs Speculative Materialism: Absolute Contingency

The question motivating Meillassoux (2008: 9) is how we are to make sense of

scientific statements regarding, for example, the origin of the universe, the
formation of the earth, the origin of life on earth, and the origin of human
life. He calls such statements and the reality they describe ancestral in that
they are anterior to the emergence of the human species or even anterior
to every recognized form of life on earth (10). Meillassoux (ibid.) asks, How
are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the
world that of thinking and/or living as a fact inscribed in a temporality
within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an
order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin?
6. Existing accounts already do this sufficiently well. With regard to Meillassouxs speculative
materialism, in addition to Harmans monograph, see Toscano 2011, Johnston 2011, Hag-
glund 2011, Hallward 2011, Brown 2011, and Brassier 2007: 49 96. The only commentator to
discuss Bloch explicitly as a speculative materialist is Holz, whose 1975 book Logos Spermatikos
offers an illuminating introduction, though it is available only in German. Holz 2012 also
discusses speculative materialism, but it too is currently only available in German. For a
brief introduction to Blochs speculative materialism in English, see Moir 2013.

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The object of such a discourse is what Meillassoux (ibid.) calls the arche-
fossil or fossil matter. These are not just materials indicating the traces of
past life, according to the familiar sense of the term fossil, but materials
indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to
terrestrial life (ibid.). The epistemological question of how we can know that
these things really happened or really existed is thus the foundation stone of
Meillassouxs speculative enterprise.
According to Meillassoux (ibid.: 5), modern European thought is ill
equipped to think such questions; the problem he identifies in this respect
he calls correlationism. Perhaps already since George Berkeley but cer-
tainly since Kant, says Meillassoux (ibid.: 3), the idea that thought can dis-
tinguish between those properties of the world which result from our relation
to it and those properties of the world in itself, indifferent to our relation to
it, has become an indefensible thesis. Why? Because, says Meillassoux
(ibid.: 3 4),
thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is in itself to
the world as it is for us, and thereby distinguish what is a function of our
relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone. Such an enterprise
is effectively self-contradictory, for at the very moment when we think of a property
as belonging to the world in itself, it is precisely the latter that we are thinking, and
consequently this property is revealed to be essentially tied to our thinking about
the world.

Meillassoux (ibid.: 5) diagnoses a fundamental problem in the extent to which

modern European thought seems to have engendered philosophies of cor-
relation. Correlationism is thus for Meillassoux (ibid.) the idea according
to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and
being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. It consists
in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjec-
tivity and objectivity independently of one another, but this is precisely what
he says we must do if we are to make sense of the ancestral.
To circumvent correlationism and think an ancestral reality, Meillassoux
(ibid.: 7) therefore seeks to access the great outdoors, the absolute outside of
pre-critical thinkers. In his vocabulary, what is absolute is that which is
uncorrelated with thought, that is, that which exists independently of and
indifferently to thought (ibid.: 28). Philosophical speculation, he argues, is a
matter of thinking absolute, uncorrelated reality. However, as Meillassoux
knows, Kants critical philosophy had consigned speculation about what
cannot be accessed in experience to the philosophical dustbin, so how does
he intend to get around this without simply returning to a dogmatic meta-
physics? He attempts this in two main steps. First, to avert the charge of

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dogmatism, he draws a different distinction between speculation and meta-

physics from the one Kant drew. With Meillassoux (ibid.), speculation as
every type of thinking that claims to be able to access some form of absolute
is distinguished from metaphysics as every type of thinking that claims to be
able to access some form of absolute being. Declaring speculation once again
legitimate, Meillassoux proceeds to the second phase of his argument. As
Peter Hallward (2011: 131) argues, Meillassouxs move consists in a refor-
mulation of Humes problem. David Hume wondered how we can know
that a particular effect follows from a specific cause. As Hallward (ibid.)
reminds us, Hume concludes that it is not possible, either empirically or
rationally, to prove such a connection and, as such, there is no reason
why one and the same cause should not give rise to a hundred different
events. Admittedly, Hume did not pursue the full implications of his dem-
onstration. However, although Hume admitted that causal necessity could
not rationally be proven and was therefore immune to skepticism, he did
believe it was reasonable to accept its validity, not least because it does appear
to obtain consistently. For Kant, on the other hand, as Hallward (ibid.) notes,
this principle became an irreducible component of the transcendental
logic. Kant says that we can know the fundamental laws of nature with
complete certitude, including the law of cause and effect, because, as Paul
Guyer (2006: 2 3) puts it, these laws are not descriptions of how things are in
themselves . . . but are rather the structure that the laws of our own minds
impose upon the way things appear to us.
Yet as we have seen, Meillassoux is not content with this solution. He wants
to say that we can know how things really are in themselves independently of
all relation to thought. If we cannot, a statement about the formation of the
earth four billion years ago has no real meaning. Meillassouxs tactic is to turn
Humes problem into an opportunity by ontologizing Humes epistemology.
As Meillassoux (2008: 83) puts it in After Finitude, if we take Humes problem
seriously, then we must seriously maintain that the laws of nature could
change, not in accordance with some superior hidden law the law of the
modification of laws, which we could once more construe as the mysterious
and immutable constant governing all subordinate transformations but for
no cause or reason whatsoever.
The absolute reality to which Meillassoux claims to have speculative access
thus looks very different from the material world we think we know. To the
extent that he can be called a materialist in this regard, it is clear that in his
view the material is what is radically other than life, consciousness, and
thought. His materialism of matter consists in accepting that there is
nothing living or willing in the inorganic realm (Meillassoux 2008: 38),
admittedly a proposition which any materialist must take seriously (although

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he or she may not accept it). Yet for Meillassoux, who, as Adrian Johnston
(2011: 96) notes, remains haunted by the ghost of the Cartesian dualism of
thought and extension, the matter of materialism seems to be restricted
only to that inorganic realm, as such denying materiality in the fundamental
sense to living, thinking, historical beings (see also Brassier 2007).
There is another layer to Meillassouxs reality, a strange, disruptive time
which, although it does not function as the law of the modification of laws
that Meillassoux would want to avoid, does occupy the same ultimate pos-
ition, grounding the possibility of the modification of laws in an irrational
unground of absolute contingency. Johnston (2011: 97) notes that Meillas-
souxs radical resolution of Humes problem
leads him to assert the existence of a specific ultimate real as underlying material
reality: a time of discontinuous points of instantaneity which, at any point, could, in
a gratuitous, lawless, and reasonless manner ungoverned by anything (save for
the purely logical principle of non-contradiction), scramble and reorder ex nihilo
the cause-and-effect patterns of the physical universe in any way whatsoever
and entirely without constraints imposed by past states of affairs both actual
and possible/potential. This temporal absolute of ground-zero contingency,
as a necessarily contingent, non-factically factical groundless ground, is Meillas-
souxian hyper-Chaos.

Meillassouxs Future: Divine Inexistence

It is clear from Johnstons description of the ultimate reality of Meillassouxs

hyper-Chaos that, although he begins by questioning how we can know the
ancestral past, Meillassouxs answer to this question has profound impli-
cations also for the future. According to the view in which time is nothing
but a succession of discrete moments, the future becomes absolutely uncer-
tain. It becomes impossible to know what might happen from one moment to
the next; the very laws of nature could change at any time and for no reason.
This view of an absolutely discontinuous time and the ultimately uncertain
future it implies, coupled with the radical and apparently insurmountable
difference Meillassoux posits between inert, chaotic material reality and the
illusory order of human consciousness, raise serious questions about the
possibility of hope and action. Having implicitly answered Kants (1998:
A805/B833) question what can I know? with the resounding, if disconcert-
ing, I can know that there is absolutely no cause or reason in the world (cf.
Meillassoux 2008: 83), it is not at all clear what Meillassouxs response to
Kants two remaining questions, what must I do? and what may I hope?,
could be. If we cannot know whether our actions in the present will have any
consequences at all in the future, how can we, why should we act as if they

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might? If time is nothing but a series of disconnected points and everything

might collapse at any moment, what can we hope for?
According to Harman, the answers to these questions that Meillassoux
puts forward await us in the forthcoming publication of his doctoral disser-
tation Linexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence, 1997). The whole
purpose of this book, Harman (2011: 93) says, is to develop the conception of
an immanent God, albeit one that does not yet exist and might never exist.
Despite the somewhat problematic status of his absolute, discontinuous
temporality, Meillassoux is nevertheless fully committed to immanence,
Harman (ibid.: 92) says. However, it is precisely because of the inexistence
of this immanent God that we must believe in him and hope for what Meil-
lassoux calls his advent, which will inaugurate a messianic age of justice
(ibid.: 92, 121).
To unpack this challenging idea, I draw extensively on Harmans articu-
lation of it. The first link in the chain is Meillassouxs concept of advent, or the
spontaneous irruption of novelty ex nihilo (ibid.: 93). For Meillassoux, the
emergence of life and of conscious thought can be explained in terms of
a contingent advent (ibid.: 92 97). There was no reason that these things
should emerge. If we accept Meillassouxs principle of radical contingency,
Harman (ibid.: 93) says, a world that is capable of everything ought also to be
capable of not accomplishing those things of which it is capable. Yet accord-
ing to Meillassoux, life and thought do emerge spontaneously from the
material order not because they lie dormant in matter for Meillassoux,
as Harman (ibid.: 94 95) confirms, matter is purely lifeless, with no incipient
life harbored in its depths but because Meillassoux sees the progression
from matter to life to thought as a series of sudden leaps not contained in germ
in what came before. In the absence of a transcendent law to determine the
emergence from matter of life and then from life of thought, Meillassoux
instead describes what follows from these advents as three orders that
mark the essential ruptures of becoming: matter, life and thought (ibid.: 97).
These orders are what Meillassoux calls Worlds that emerge within the
nonwhole of the world with a lowercase w. The reason for this typogra-
phical marker is, according to Harman (ibid.: 98), that there is more in a
World than in the world, since there is more in what ensues than there is in the
origin. According to Meillassoux, there can be no certainty that another
World will arise out of absolute contingency. But if it did, he proposes that this
fourth World could only be that of the rebirth of humans in a world of
justice and immortality (quoted in ibid.: 99). Since Meillassoux considers that
humans have access to the eternal truth of the world namely, the truth of
absolute contingency the only way to pass beyond this stage of ontological
development would be in the form of the recommencement of the human in a

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World of justice (ibid.).7 For only a thought reaching to a higher truth than
that of contingency could re-enact the rupture inaugurated by thought with
respect to animality (quoted in ibid.). This higher truth is precisely that of
justice and immortality, including retrospective redemption for the already
dead. Although the advent of the fourth World has not yet occurred, Meil-
lassoux tells us that it exists already, as an object of hope, of the desire of every human
qua rational being (quoted in ibid.). Thus hope does have a place in Meillas-
souxs philosophy after all as the relation of human beings to this inexistent
fourth World. Above all, it is this relation which Meillassoux sees as defining
us: Hope as desire crossed by thought: the desire of humans torn between
their present contingency and the knowledge of the eternal by which they
reach the idea of justice (quoted in ibid.: 100).
Meillassouxs vision is thus one of what Harman calls human suprem-
acy. Against the potential objection that this sort of humanism is a typically
banal modernist gesture that has now outlived its usefulness, according to
Harman (ibid.: 109), Meillassoux maintains that human preeminence has
never seriously been maintained by any other thinker. He suggests that the
human has been valued either in terms of its likeness to God or as the victor of
a Darwinian struggle of survival of the fittest. For Meillassoux, the problem of
classical humanism is that it has been overly concerned with the negative
knowledge of our finitude; however, he proposes that it is precisely through
the negative knowledge of our finitude that we obtain the positive knowledge
of our possible rebirth (ibid.). It is the fact that the fourth World has been
awaited, has been the object of hope, which constitutes its novelty as an
advent. In this way, as Harman (ibid.: 114) notes, we ourselves are involved
in the coming of the fourth World, even though blind becoming is not
affected by our desire that the dice land with a particular side pointing
upward. According to Meillassoux, and in language that would not be
out of place in Bloch, human beings have always aspired to give birth to
God just as matter gives birth to life and life to thought. We are the possible
ancestors of God rather than his creatures, and further, we bear God in our
wombs, and our essential disquietude is nothing other than the convulsions of
a child yet to come (quoted in ibid.: 119 20). Meillassoux coins the phrase
the divine inexistence to describe what he sees as the proper attitude
toward God in the face of radical contingency: to believe in him not because
he already exists but because his inexistence is the index of his possibility
7. For Meillassoux as for Bloch, the word human is not restricted to the species as we now know it.
For Meillassoux, the human includes all rational beings capable of grasping the absolute
truth of contingency, and not simply the bipedal species in which such a reality now happens to
be encountered. Bloch uses Humanum to express a similar idea, although an absolute truth of
contingency does not play the same role in Bloch.

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(ibid.: 121). It seems there is hope for the speculative materialist Meillassoux
after all.
Yet it is, I think, a wan hope that Meillassouxs account offers. After all, in
this view all we can do is hope; there is no possibility of actually bringing about
this fourth World, of giving birth to this immanent God, at least not deliber-
ately, it seems.8 Meillassoux does say that the World of justice must be
actively awaited by acts of justice that display the fervor linked to a belief
in the radical requirement of universality, and in the discovery of the non-
absurdity of such a requirement (quoted in ibid.: 11). But display to whom,
for what purpose? Surely not to a God who does not yet and may never exist.
Surely not to a matter which would know to bring forth the World of justice
as recompense for our just acts. The divine justice for which Meillassoux
suggests we maintain an active, if potentially completely hollow, hope is
purely contingent. Meillassouxs disavowal of history as a symbol, a marker
of our understanding of the relation between universal values and the actual
world, has a neutralizing function here. He sees the historical symbol in a
state of decline, since it, like its predecessors the cosmological and the natu-
ralistic symbols, is metaphysical in the sense that it relies on the absolute
necessity of a particular being or entity: in this case, the human community as
a whole (ibid.: 105 6). It is time to renounce the historical, says Meillassoux,
as the last metaphysical symbol of our relation to an external reality and
accept his factial symbol, the truth of absolute contingency (ibid.: 103). No
longer must we place false hope in the ability of history as an objective process
to liberate humanity from its ignorance. In this view what we have learned
from history appears indeed to have been, as Hegel said, that we learn
nothing. Instead, we can hope for a world of justice, immortality, the advent
of a redeeming God in the certain knowledge that these things are possible.
But in the end our knowledge of their possibility does not make them any
more likely. As Harman (ibid.: 107) puts it, we can know that this is neither
the best nor the worst of all possible worlds, but one that has the potential to
be either of these. Despite the immanence of this potential, however, it
seems that even the human is powerless to unlock it.

Blochs Speculative Materialism: Radical Possibility

The materialism problem in Blochs title Das Materialismusproblem is what

the analytic philosopher David Chalmers (1995: 200) has famously referred to
8. Indeed, the idea of the human being pregnant with an inexistent God appears to be in
direct contrast with the notion that each leap from one World to the next is not based on
anything which was previously present in germ.

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as the hard problem of consciousness. Although Chalmers articulates this

problem in terms somewhat foreign to Blochs lyrical philosophical style, his
argument remains absolutely pertinent. He says:
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of
how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that
when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing,
we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of
middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a
mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience
arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so
arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems
objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. (Ibid.: 201)

The problem of consciousness is a central challenge for any materialist

thinker, as Bloch knew. In his view it is one reason the history of philosophy
is replete with idealisms while materialism has tended to remain a marginal
paradigm. For the materialist, Bloch (1972: 129 30) argues, mind is just
as much of an embarrassment as matter is for the idealist. He follows
Friedrich Engels in defining the purpose of materialist thought as the impera-
tive to provide an explanation of the world out of itself, without recourse to
any transcendent reality or being (ibid.: 16). The question therefore of how
it is possible that there is consciousness can have only an immanent answer.
However, unlike Meillassoux, who begins with an epistemological ques-
tion how can we know absolute reality? for Bloch materialism always
involves an ontological claim, which, as Holz (2012: 485) argues, relates to
the substantial status of the world and stipulates foundational relations
according to which the stages of the living, the mental and the intellectual
are grasped as forms of appearance of material nature, consciousness as a
type of material being.
Meillassouxs starting point also presupposes an ontological claim, namely,
the dualist thesis that consciousness is something radically and irreducibly
distinct from matter. Holz (ibid.) opposes this epistemological materialism to
Blochs ontological claim that there is nothing that is not material.
Blochs response to the problem of consciousness is to rethink the concept
of matter. Isabelle Stengers (2011: 368) echoed this requirement in the 1980s
when she proposed that materialism must understand nature in such a way
that there would be no absurdity in affirming that it produced us.9 What
kind of matter can have brought forth life, consciousness, thought, and the
human being in all its complexity and potentiality? While it is characteristic
9. Stengers first published this view in Prigogine and Stengers 1980 and then in English in
Prigogine and Stengers 1984.

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for idealisms to posit an ontological difference between the material and the
mental, Bloch emphasizes that form, vitality, intention, figure, mind, and also
logical structure are all aspects of one and the same material being (Siebers
2012b: 242). Such a materialism is speculative in the specific sense that it
requires the concept of a totality, albeit one which is unavailable, because it is
inherently incomplete or not yet. As Johan Siebers (2012c: 403) acknowl-
edges, not-yet can be understood as the most succinct formulation of the
key idea of Blochs philosophy. He says:
Between actually existing being and that which could possibly be stands the not-yet
as an ontological category of intensity and of striving. Existence is neither simply
identical with itself in pure unity nor unmediated and differentiated in pure mul-
tiplicity; rather, the identity of everything is outstanding and therefore in motion or
process. Bloch calls the ontological interstice that is given here the not-yet. Existing
being surges, for Bloch, towards the realization of its identity, which he under-
stands as utopian and as such as possibility, and expressly not as a pre-given essence
to be realized or as a determinate outcome. (Ibid.)

Not-yet-ness is therefore, as Siebers affirms, a basic ontological structure for

Bloch, which has implications for his view of matter.
Blochs concept of matter has three layers of meaning. First, it is under-
stood as the substrate of every individual entity; second, matter describes the
mode of being of nature as a whole; and third, it also covers the idea of a world
in general. However, this world of matter is not closed and static but is
conceived of as an experimental process, radically open in a future-oriented
direction. As Holz (2012: 485) affirms, Blochs material world is grasped as
an animated material continuum, which includes its opposite, namely dis-
continuity, within it. Logically speaking: continuity is a comprehensive gen-
eral category, which includes two and only two forms, itself (continuity)
and its opposite (discontinuity). In Hegelian dialectics, this means that, in the
case of the actual world, being contains within it thought as that which is
not (simply) being. Bloch here reformulates Hegels concept of speculative
identity, or the identity of identity and nonidentity, to argue that the whole
of material reality contains within itself that which is other than itself in the
form of a hole or a fundamental lack. At one level, then, Bloch appears
merely to reiterate Hegels (1991: 144) theory of the speculative identity of
being and thought in the process of becoming.10 However, the hole in
10. We often hear it asserted that thinking is opposed to being. Regarding such an assertion
the first thing to ask is what is understood here by being. If we take being in the way that
reflection determines it, we can only assert of it that it is what is thoroughly identical and
affirmative; and if we then consider thinking, it cannot escape us that thinking is, at least, in like
manner, what is thoroughly self-identical. So the same determination accrues to both being
and thinking. But this identity of being and thinking is not to be taken concretely; it must not be

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Blochs speculative materialist ontology of not-yet being stands in for the

radical openness and incompletion of the process, that which is missing,
which drives it. In actuality there is what Theodor W. Adorno (2004
[1973]: 318) calls the nonidentical: that which escapes thought and sensibility
and yet makes experience possible.11 In a materialist reformulation of Hegels
thesis of speculative identity, Adorno posits the nonidentity of identity and
nonidentity. To continue the metaphor, we might say that the whole can
only be thought from the perspective of this hole, which Bloch calls the
darkness of the lived moment (cf. Block 2000b: 3). Blochs speculative
materialism can thus be seen to occupy a place somewhere between Hegel
and Adorno. Like Adorno, Bloch maintains the radical incompleteness and
openness of the world toward an as yet indeterminate future. He identifies
real contradictions in the world which are not yet dialectically resolved: in
particular, what he calls the aporia of the being-consciousness relation.
However, Bloch (1972: 461 66) holds open the ultimate possibility of positive
identity and maintains that its very possibility appears to us in anticipatory
consciousness, in aesthetic form (see also Holz 1975: 147).
However, such a view of the material world is possible only if matter as the
substrate of individual entities is neither a homogeneous mass nor an inert
passive stuff, as Meillassoux imagines it. Instead, it must be thought of as what
Bloch (1972: 469) calls the substrate of the objectively-real possible. In this
view there is no distinction between a general material substrate and the
forms it takes: a general matter no more disappears into its individual
manifestations than the particular forms it takes lose their materiality in
taking shape. As a complement therefore to Engelss consideration that
perhaps there is so little a general matter as there is a general fruit,
Bloch reminds that it is also possible not to see the material wood for the
individual trees. Drawing on Aristotle and using a metaphor of birth that
recalls Meillassoux as much as it does Karl Marx, he calls this substrate

taken as saying that a stone, insofar as it is, is the same as a human thinker. Something concrete
is always quite different from the abstract determination as such. But, in the case of being, we
are not speaking of anything concrete, for being is precisely just what is wholly abstract. In
consequence, the question of God, i.e., [of the being of ] what is infinitely concrete within itself,
is also of very little interest ( Hegel 1999: 144).
11. The principle of absolute identity is self-contradictory. It perpetuates nonidentity in sup-
pressed and damaged form. A trace of this entered into Hegels efforts to have nonidentity
absorbed by the philosophy of identity, indeed to define identity by nonidentity. Yet Hegel is
distorting the state of facts by affirming identity, admitting nonidentity as a negative albeit a
necessary one and misconceiving the negativity of the universal. He lacks sympathy with the
utopian particular that has been buried underneath the universal with that nonidentity
which would not come into being until realized reason has left the particular reason of the
universal behind (Adorno 2004 [1973]: 318).

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Moir Beyond the Turn 341

matter the self-bearing womb of its entelechial manifestations (ibid.: 475).

Although Bloch explicitly speaks of a self of the material, he does not
believe that matter is not alive or does not contain life, consciousness, and
thought simply preformed within itself. Rather, like Meillassouxs time,
Blochs matter is an Agens (Bloch 1972: 499): it is energetic and dynamic,
tending toward the actualization of the latent potentialities in its capacity.12
However, this is not to imply that everything which could potentially be will
be: it is not pure, unbridled possibility. Aristotles category of possibility,
which Bloch takes over, has two components: on the one hand, it is dynamei
on, that which is in possibility. According to Bloch (ibid.: 473), it is precisely
speculative materialism which discovers in the [dynamei on] of matter and
its certainly most hazardous openness forwards the true basic impulse of
matter, the Logikon of which is called finality. He thus prioritizes this aspect
of material potentiality, but it is not its only characteristic. On the other hand,
there is also kata to dynaton, that which is according to possibility, by means
of which matter conditions, limits, and directs itself in the process of its
self-actualization.
The terms energeia and entelecheia are central to Aristotles theory of actuality,
and both have to do with the idea of work (see Bechler 1995). Energeia can be
described as the activity that makes a thing what it is, while entelecheia is the end
or completion, which has being only through energetic activity. The two
ideas thus tend to converge in the theory that all things that exist, potentially
and actually, have a tendency toward being at work in a particular way,
which would be a complete and proper way. According to Bloch (ibid.:
475), Aristotle already calls motion on the whole incomplete entelechy.
However, Bloch saw Aristotles concept of matter as still akin to the wax
out of which entelechial forms could energetically be pressed. Instead, if we
view matter not as wax, as something separate to the process which would
form it, but as the process itself, as the self-bearing womb of its own ente-
lechial forms, then in his view not only the motion of matter but matter itself,
as active dynamei on, is as yet incomplete entelechy (ibid.: 476). However, as
we have seen, Blochs ontology depends on the central idea not-yet. He
therefore does not take over the Aristotelian view of entelechy as a potentially
realized essence or form that simply realizes itself but is already determined.
Real, material possibility, says Bloch, is located not in an ontology of the
being of that which has existed up to now but in the being of that which is not
yet. Bloch therefore translates this Aristotelian concept of matter in motion
into his own terms. The material comprises tendency, which Doris Zeilinger
12. Despite the fact that Meillassouxs (2008: 61, 64, 67) ultimate temporal real is a chaos rather
than a continuum, he nonetheless speaks of it bringing forth at various points in After Finitude.

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(2012c: 555) describes as an objective characteristic of being of intensive

quality (a drive), containing within its core something logical, which, how-
ever, is still undetermined. In conjunction with this, there is latency, which,
according to Zeilinger (2012a: 232), asserts itself as the outstanding essence,
the placeholder of the not yet realized goal-content in tendency. As such,
latency is the cause of striving, which could not be if there were no goal and no
purpose. Tendency and latency work together like energeia and entelecheia
and roughly in correspondence with them. The following passage shows how
Bloch (1972: 469) sees this working:
Tendency is the energetics of matter in action, driving on in all its already achieved
figures towards exodus figures, on to the tendentially implicit of the entelechially
intended goal, as it is not yet become, but is utopically latent. Latency is the
entelechial of matter in potentiality, utopical, yet already concretely utopian
thanks to the exodus figures in the process, substantiated by the at all of that
entelechially intended goal, which shines forth from horizons with so many never-
thelesses in human history, in significant nature.

Although this is a dense and difficult passage, not least because of the chal-
lenges of rendering Blochs already uniquely creative German adequately
into English, it nevertheless demonstrates how he refashions an Aristotelian
conceptual framework around his central operator not-yet. What we end up
with is a concept of matter in which, as Bloch (ibid.: 20) says in the preface to
Das Materialismusproblem,
none of the forms, figures realizing themselves purposefully in matter has already
achieved its entelechy. And not the motion of all things and above all humans, but
matter itself and in general presents itself as incomplete entelechy. This is charac-
terized in forwards-matter and its uniquely adequate reproduction in a material-
ism which is no longer only empirical, but now also speculative. It concerns that
true basic impulse of matter, which drives on, full of finality, and holds its possible
fruit only in a latent not-yet.
In Blochs (ibid.: 464 65) speculative materialism, then, there is a goal,
latent as potential, in the material tendency toward self-realization, including
what he calls its self-reflection in consciousness and self-manifestation in
the qualitative leaps from one form of being to another. The process of
materialization has an inherent, logical orientation toward an ultimate
future, which Bloch (ibid.) captures in his concept of forwards-matter.
The world, including the natural world, it would seem, is going somewhere.
But where? Why? And who or what is driving it? Will it ever get there? If so,
how? These questions all hang on the vision of the possible future that Blochs
speculative materialism offers.

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Moir Beyond the Turn 343

Blochs Future: Hope and Heimat

Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we
waiting for? What awaits us? (Bloch 1986, 1:3). These are the opening words
of The Principle of Hope, which Holz (1975: 67) calls a phenomenology of
anticipatory consciousness. They are central questions for Blochs future-
oriented philosophy, in which matter itself is dynamic and open toward an
indeterminate future. Like Meillassouxs World of justice, the destination of
Blochs (1959, 1986) material process is also a utopian figure, which he calls
Heimat or sometimes the kingdom (of freedom). Heimat for Bloch is not a
geographically localizable, static goal but a continuous process of conver-
gence, which constantly develops new projections and impulses for action.
However, Heimat does have certain contours for Bloch: in particular, it
involves what Marx (1975) had previously termed accomplished naturalism
of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.13 Gerd Koch (2012: 168)
maintains that for Bloch Heimat means a humane, co-operative world con-
stitution, close to nature, in which humans can think and act differently from
the way they do in the actually existing world. In the framework of Blochs
thought, then, Heimat has the status of both an Ultimum and a Novum: it would
be something radically new but which is only realized at the end of a process.
Siebers (2012d: 413) explains that Blochs Novum is that which is new in the
strong sense of the word, to be distinguished from simple variety, incremental
change, or the succession of one now moment to another. The transition
from quantity to quality and the leap from one qualitative stage to another,
including the leap to life, consciousness, and thought, are all moments that
can be considered Nova in Blochs sense. As for Meillassoux, the new points
toward a finality conceived as a new beginning, what Bloch (1970: 376) calls
the fidelity to a beginning, which has its genesis only at the end. However,
contrary to Meillassoux, for Bloch the emergence of the radically new is not a
blind leap. Rather, it is always oriented toward an Ultimum, a limit notion
which Bloch conceives of as the possible identity of existence and essence,
of the contingent fact that there is a world with what that world actually is
(Siebers 2012e: 582).
13. Communism as the positive transcendence of the private property as human self-estrange-
ment, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; commun-
ism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being a return
accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This
communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed huma-
nism, equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and
between man and man the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the
individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be
this solution (Marx 1975: 298).

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What, though, is driving this process? Since Blochs is an immanent mate-

rialism, it cannot be a transcendent God or immaterial spirit. Perhaps unsur-
prisingly, it is Blochs processual matter itself as it strives toward completion.
Bloch (1986, 1:237) argues in The Principle of Hope that the transition from the
realm of necessity into that of freedom only finds land in unenclosed process-
matter (see also Bloch 1959, 1:273). Bloch conceives of this transition in
terms of a moment in which the Novum latent in matter as the determinate
negation of the preceding form tends toward its own self-realization. Bloch
therefore locates a subjective factor in matter itself as the substrate of
individual entities but also as the mode of being of nature. For Bloch, matter
and nature are not coterminous. Nature for Bloch refers to those structures and
forms of the world which, although they are given independently of human
praxis, nevertheless constitute its object (Zeilinger 2012b: 324). Nature too
has a subjective factor, which Rainer Zimmermann (2012: 374) describes as
the driving core of tendency. For Bloch (1986, 1:237; 1959, 1:273), nature
itself has a history and also a future, and his speculative materialism provides
a perspective form to understand natural and human history as sharing a
common horizon. Or as Holz (1975: 100) claims on exactly this point, The
species history of the human is itself a part of natural history at a qualitatively
new, higher level. Yet even if there is a subjective factor in the material itself,
even if the world is going somewhere, why should it be moving toward
Heimat? It is fairly simple, within the parameters of Blochs thought, to
say why natural and human history should share a common horizon. For
the immanent materialist, nature, as the world into which humans emerge
and in which they now live, is the only possible home the future can hold,
even if humans have the capacity to radically transform the given. But to put
it bluntly, what is in it for nature? Why would a subject of nature, however
difficult this idea already is, move toward a shared horizon with humanity?
Blochs theory does contain an explanation. Because there is no sheer cut
between natural and human histories, Bloch sees the very emergence of the
human being, with its ability to transgress the boundaries of the given, from a
matter which does not consciously think and act as evidence that the material
world possesses a logical core. In this regard he insists that the logical, as a
real attribute of the material, can no longer be defrauded, that is, materialism
must in particular on this point contrary to will, intention and conscious-
ness not adopt and become the willing maid of that dualism which has
ripped apart matter and mind and isolated them against one another, exclu-
sively in the interest of an intellectual-fetishist idealism (Bloch 1972: 472).
The entire material process, according to Bloch (ibid.: 473), develops
according to the same principle: that there is something which is not as it
should be or at least not yet as it should be; otherwise there would strictly

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speaking be no process. The human capacity to transform the world through

thought and action thus finds its ontological correlate for Bloch (1975: 100)
in natural history itself.14
There is therefore a claim for realization implicit in Blochs notion of
Heimat. Human beings find ourselves at the front of the material world
process, the most advanced but still in itself incomplete form yet to have
emerged. As Siebers explains, Novum, Ultimum, and Front together form
the basic triadic categorial structure of Blochs realization process. Front is at
once the most advanced and actual time segment in which the human being
lives and acts and in which the new arises and the qualitative now of the
lived moment as the possibility for action (Siebers 2012a: 161). Thus
although Bloch (1972: 467) understands the process by which the world
tends toward speculative identity as absolutely preexisting the emergence
of the human being, human history has accelerated the succession of
Nova. Now that we are here, he says, in language strikingly reminiscent of
Meillassouxs, we can bring about another awakening, which he describes
as a difficult birth (ibid.: 466 67). According to Bloch (ibid.: 467), our
action in the world opens yet more new in it. . . . For we stand at the Front of
world history; with consciousness, the way is open, it is up to us to move on,
complete the journey. Not only is it the task of human beings to complete the
journey already begun, but Bloch insists that we are capable of doing so
precisely because we are not aliens in the world. Bloch proposes that humans
are able to discern tendency in the world and to use it, as it were, to realize
specific goals. Volume 3 of The Principle of Hope is conceived in this respect as
an experimental manual outlining ways we can go about this. Bloch sees
technology as the one site of mediation between the human and nonhuman
worlds. However, our previous technology, he argues, stands in nature like
14. Of course the process of materialization is not always an unfolding or opening, as Bloch
portrays it here, but is also a disordering and falling away from. Although it is not possible here
to enter into a detailed discussion of Blochs treatment of this problem, it is necessary to point
out that he does deal with it under the heading of the question of entropy or Kaltetod. See, for
example, Mechanik und Entropie: Non omnis confundar in Bloch 1978: 300 307. Although
Blochs treatment of entropy as a physical phenomenon is undoubtedly no longer in step with
the most recent science, it remains for him a problem for serious theoretical contemplation. For
Bloch, the assertion that entropy should apply to the universe as a whole presupposes that the
universe is considered as a speculative totality, since entropy as he understands it applies to
systems. In line with his distinction between a cold stream and a warm stream in Marxism,
Bloch (ibid.: 306) opposes entropy as a primarily quantitative phenomenon with what he calls
Ektropie, which he understands as a coexistent and opposed form of entelechy according to
which qualitative transformations are able to overcome and negate wholly or partially what
would otherwise appear to be universally valid laws. Although this view appears to be and
indeed is highly speculative, it is not out of step with work being done today in which processes
of life, consciousness, history, and society are increasingly viewed as essential for a more com-
plete scientific understanding of reality. See, for example, Barad 2007.

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an army of occupation in enemy territory, and it knows nothing of the interior

of the country (Bloch 1986, 2:696). What is required is a technological
alliance with nature. Ilya Prigogine and Stengers (1980) have argued explic-
itly for such a direction, but the idea appears already in Bloch (1986, 2:690),
who writes in The Principle of Hope that the more a technology of alliance in
particular were to become possible instead of the superficial one, a technol-
ogy of alliance mediated with the co-productivity of nature, the more cer-
tainly the creative forces of a frozen nature will be released again.
As we have already seen, for Bloch the human is itself incomplete and as
such can become what it will be only in the process of mutual naturalization
and humanization. As Peter Thompson (2012: 275) explains, for Bloch the
human is that not yet determined being which finds itself in a state of
development. Bloch therefore distinguishes between the human as the par-
ticular form (species) that it now constitutes, which he calls Mensch, and the
Humanum, a principle of self-realization an entelechial principle, in the
terminology of Blochs (1972: 448) speculative materialism which does not
belong only to a particular form but is the principle by which Heimat can be
realized. Like Meillassoux, Bloch at no point suggests that the achievement of
Heimat, the construction of what he calls an ultimate concrete utopia, can be
guaranteed. Although Bloch posits the possibility of Heimat as latent in the
world process, he concedes that the possibility of failure is inherent too,
although he emphasizes the fact that nothing and everything are limit
notions of the utmost latency. In other words, at this point it is extremely
difficult to say what either might ultimately mean, concretely speaking (ibid.:
469). For Bloch, the correct attitude toward the as yet undecidedness of our
being in the world (Weltsein) is one of educated hope in the knowledge that
although nothing is certain, human beings have the capacity to influence the
world process of which we are a crucial part (ibid.).

The Future of Speculative Materialism: Blochs Heritage

Holz points out that Bloch (1975: 123) intends the term speculative materialism
as a skandalon, a curious formulation which is at first sight paradoxical. In
a critique of Meillassoux, Alberto Toscano (2011: 87) openly questions the
possibility of a speculative materialism. Drawing on the Italian Marxist phi-
losopher Lucio Colletti, Toscano (ibid.: 89) proposes that speculation is the
pretension of philosophical thought to logically encompass being, while the
real, the material as that which is absolutely other than thought, by its very
definition, resists logical comprehension. This is why, according to Toscano
(ibid.), materialism is always to some extent an Unphilosophie, an anti-
philosophy. According to this view, Meillassouxs speculative materialism

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Moir Beyond the Turn 347

becomes in the end a form of idealism, as Slavoj Zizek also claims. Zizek
applies to Meillassouxs After Finitude the same criticism he levels at V. I.
Lenins Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). The idea, he says, that out-
side of our reflections there is objective reality presupposes that our mind,
which reflects reality, functions as a gaze somehow external to this reality
(Zizek and Daly 2004: 96 97). The point, according to Zizek, is not that
there is no reality outside our mind but rather that there is no mind outside
reality (ibid.: 97). A truly radical materialism must therefore be nonreduc-
tionist; that is, it does not deny being to so-called immaterial forms. However,
nor can an immanent materialism, as Meillassoux intends his to be, assume
an absolute distinction between thought and matter: to do so is to jeopardize
the integrity of material reality as such, the speculative (w)hole, or what
Zizek (2006: 168) calls the non-All.
We have seen here two very different ways of attempting to solve this
problem. In certain respects, Meillassouxs speculative endeavor is prefi-
gured in Bloch. Like Bloch, Meillassoux places the human, not only as a
specific being but also as a principle, at the center of his philosophy. Meil-
lassoux also posits the radical openness of the future, as Bloch does. Further-
more, both consider a humane future of justice to be immanently possible
and as such affirm hope as an adequate attitude toward this possible future.
However, as I hope to have shown here, these two speculative materialisms
also offer quite different visions of how indeed whether human beings
might have a hand in bringing about this possible future. For Bloch, the
human being, as the form at the front of the material world process, is capable
of grasping a tendency latent within matter itself toward the realization of
a radically new, simultaneously emancipated and redeemed world. As such,
docta spes, educated hope, is the proper attitude toward a future which is
potentially (utopically) immanent in the world. Even if we cannot be certain
that Heimat will ever be reached, we can try, and moreover, our efforts can
have an effect. Meanwhile, for Meillassoux, it is our absolute knowledge of
the truth of contingency that guarantees that the only possible next step is the
ex nihilo rebirth of the human in a fourth World of justice. However, the
mere fact that this next step is possible by no means makes it necessary.
Although we can hope for it actively by performing just deeds, since
there is no continuity, process, or latent goal in hyperchaotic reality, all we
can do is hope for the emergence of a redeeming God in whom we must
believe because he does not (yet) exist. Yet the emergence of this God is no
more likely than the advent of a fourth World, and so we are left with a hope
that can only engender political quietism.
There are admittedly many criticisms of Blochs and Meillassouxs
respective positions, which I have not addressed here. From a Marxist

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perspective, one could very easily ask what the point of such wild speculation
is in the first place. What use can metaphysical mind games about the ulti-
mate nature of the universe be to the concerns of a more practical political
materialism? Much of the discussion around the speculative turn has dealt
with this problem by focusing on sacrificing political materialism to the onto-
logical. As Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman (2011a: 16) argue in their introduc-
tion to The Speculative Turn,
It has become almost a matter of dogma within continental philosophy that poli-
tics is ontology, and ontology is politics, as if the basic determination of what is
were itself a contentious political matter. While not denying the importance of
politics, several of the materialisms and realisms proposed in this book tacitly reject
the strong version of this claim. If the basic claim of realism is that a world exists
independent of ourselves, this becomes impossible to reconcile with the idea that
all of ontology is simultaneously political. There needs to be an aspect of ontology
that is independent of its enmeshment in human concerns. Our knowledge may be
irreducibly tied to politics, yet to suggest that reality is also thus tied is to project an
epistemological problem into the ontological realm.

However, I hope that in this article I have at least adumbrated the very real
political stakes of ontology, particularly concerning questions of how we
imagine our relationship to futurity.
Recalling the twenty-first-century challenges that Bryant, Srnicek, and
Harman put forward, one might say that the need for real change has
never been greater, and of course science and technology are at the cutting
edge of this process. One advantage I see in Blochs speculative materialism
over Meillassouxs in this regard is that, although on the face of it Blochs
speculative concept of matter is less consonant with that of the natural sci-
ences than Meillassouxs Bloch even explicitly distinguishes between the
matter of physics and that of philosophy his resultant materialism is more
in tune with the methodological materialism of science. Meillassouxs specu-
lative materialism ultimately consists in a logical deduction of the absolute
illogicality (except for noncontradiction) of everything, which stands in direct
contrast to the very principles of scientific research. For Bloch, meanwhile,
the material world does have a logic and, moreover, one to which we have
access (see Hallward 2011). In other words, it may be rational to argue that at
any point everything might simply collapse or disappear, but it is not prac-
tically reasonable for either the scientist or the materialist who takes science
seriously. In this regard, Meillassouxs attempt to explain the intelligibility of
sciences ancestral statements paradoxically threatens to undermine the uto-
pian scientific hope that the advancement of knowledge in the interest of the
practical pursuit of peace and happiness is possible.

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Moir Beyond the Turn 349

Of course philosophy is not science, and Toscanos question about the

possibility of a speculative materialism still hangs in the air. Bloch certainly did
not see speculative thinking and materialism as at odds with one another.
In fact he writes that philosophy, with the best heritage in it, is the uni-
versal material science [Wissenschaft ] of tendency itself (Bloch 1969: 399).15
The materialist heritage in Blochs thought is above all that of a Marxist
tradition in which the concept of matter not only does not exclude the human
world but also makes it the primary site for a concept of material struggle.
Moving beyond her earlier position, in which she had spoken in favor of a
concept of matter not as defined by the sciences but as a challenge to the
sciences (i.e., the materialist demand that we understand nature so that
there would be no absurdity in affirming that it produced us), Stengers
(2011: 368) recently asserted that the demands of materialism today cannot
be identified in terms of knowledge alone, scientific or other. Rather, just like
the Marxist concept of class, materialism loses its meaning when it is sepa-
rated from its relations with struggle. It seems to me that for speculative
materialism to have a meaningful future, it too must be able to offer a
response to the manifold struggles in an increasingly crisis-ridden system.
Although the conditions of its articulation now lie in the past, I propose that
Blochs vision of the future is therefore a heritage from which speculative
materialism today can benefit richly.

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