Agata Bielik-Robson

Theology & Religious Studies

University of Nottingham

Dreams of Matter.
Ernst Bloch on Religion as Organised Fantasy

Where man is not, nature is barren.

William Blake

Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere.

Novalis

Auch die Materie hat ihre Utopie; in der objektiv-realen Möglichkeit hört diese auf, eine abstrakte zu
Sein.
Ernst Bloch, “Avicenna und die aristotelische Linke,” 75.

The aim of this essay will be to reconstruct Bloch’s philosophy of religion as

the defense of fantasy. For Bloch, religious systems, centered around fantastical
images, constitute unique forms in which matter itself can express the most intimate
dreams about its utopian, not yet realised possibilities. By creating religious imagery,
the human mind, itself being a part of the material world, allows matter to become
aware of its own ‘latent tendency’ which so far can only come to the fore as a
fantastical image. This day-dreaming, therefore, is not just an opium of the matter,
creating nothing but an escapist illusion of freedom. It is also and foremost – as Marx
stated in the introduction to his famous essay on Hegel – the only protest against the
opressiveness of reality principle which still rules the material universe: “The
wretchedness of religion is at once tan expression of and a protest against real
wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”1
To understand religious imagination, therefore, means to engage in a specific
Traumdeutung, where the dreams of matter become subjected to a thorough analysis
which tries to detect its secret wishes and desires. Bloch believes that dreams enjoy
more than a merely subjective mode of irrational ‘night events.’ His revision of Freud
demands that dreams, objectified as Tagträume, capable of withstanding the ‘light of
the day,’ acquire an ‘unarbitrary’ status of an important testimony in which the Real
itself comes to the fore as a dreamer. Bloch, being an integral materialist, reproaches
Freud for falling a victim to the lingering Cartesian dualism which makes dreams
merely an affair of an isolated human mind, wishing to regress to its lost sense of
bliss. In Bloch’s all-encompassing materialism, the psychic life capable of dreaming,
is also a mode of matter which needs to be taken as the final subject of the dream
process: in the end, it is only matter which produces those fantastical images which
repeat themselves often enough to create a center or, as Freud would have it, a ‘knot’
around which religious beliefs begin to crystallize.

1
Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’” in Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, trans. Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 131.
Bloch often quotes Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge, written in 1843, which directly proceeds his
“Contribution” composed only a year later: “It will then become evident that the world has long
dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality”;
quot. in Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Steven Plaice and Paul Knight,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995, vol. I, pp. 155-6. Later in the text as PH.

1
 The formulation – ‘dreams of matter’ – must thus be understood both
subjectively and objectively: as matter actively dreaming through human mind and as
matter dreaming about its future self, liberated from its oppressive present form.
Those desires are not just merely Freudian, subjective and arbitrary, past-oriented
‘wishes to regress,’ in which the psyche finds a nightly respite from the harsh
demands of reality principle, but motions latent in matter itself, “unarbitrary and
objective,” which point directly to the possible future of the whole material universe.
We could thus say that Bloch turns his seemingly improbable dream argument on its
head by producing a shocking transcendental vista; what appeared only as a weakness
of the subject escaping from reality into an irresponsible Schwärmerei, emerges as the
message coming from the deepest crux of the Real. This is why Adorno in the
conversation with Bloch makes here an association with the ontological proof of God,
in which “the element of his reality is already conveyed by the power of the concept
itself.”2 The power apprehended by Bloch in the dreamy images of the Real-Possible
conveys the element of reality, which cannot be reduced to a simple subjective
illusion.3
Religious systems, therefore, are valuable not because they secure the
ontological vision of reality as it is, but as imaginary projections through which man,
the only material being capable of dreaming, allows matter to visualise its utopian
future. Already in The Spirit of Utopia, which first appeared in 1918, Bloch
champions his futuristic and anti-ontological concept of religion:

God, who was initially proposed as the quintessentially One, as causa sui, and
so something immobile, in itself fundamentally unenigmatic, the universal
shelter of logic, has to include the greatest enigma. We and we alone, then,
carry the spark of the end through the course… And the spark is still open, full
of unarbitrary, objective fantasy.4

2
“Something Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the
Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays, trans.
Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, p. 16. Later in the text as SM.
3
Bloch’s special use of psychoanalysis as – ultimately – the dream testimony of matter itself refutes
Habermas’ famous accusation, blaming Bloch for reawakening the pre-Kantian demon of ‘speculative
materialism’ which Kant exorcised once and for all in his transcendental critique. Bloch’s ingenious
psychoanalysis of matter is in its own way transcendental for it deduces the possibility inherent in the
material world not by a method of irresponsible speculation but from the very piece of matter which is
human mind and its capacity of dreaming and fantasizing. But, although wrong in attributing to Bloch a
pre-Kantian position, Habermas is quite right by calling him a Schellingian Marxist; Schelling’s
obsession with the Kantian transcendental apperception of Ich bin, which contacts us directly with the
Real, the Ding an sich beyond the machinery of constituted knowledge, is fully shared by Bloch who
takes it as his own point of departure. See Jürgen Habermas, “Ernst Bloch – A Marxist Romantic,” in
Salmagundi, no. 10-11 (Winter 1969-1970), pp. 324-325. This point has been nicely summed up by
Johan Siebers: “In the philosophy of Bloch, philosophical anthropology is ontology. Access to
ontological categories always passes through the pathos these categories attract in human existence:
desire, not-yet, passing over, darkness of the lived moment, hunger for realization. We understand all
these ontological constants first and foremost in relation to ourselves and our concrete experience of
them”; Johann Siebers, “Ernst Bloch’s Dialectical Anthropology,” in The Privatization of Hope. Ernst
Bloch and the Future of Utopia, eds. Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek, Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 76-77 (my emphasis).
4
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000
(translation based on the second revised edition of Der Geist der Utopie, 1923), p. 227. Later in the text
as SU.

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To insist that – as Terry Eagleton has recently declared – “the Real is after all not so
unfriendly,” 5 means, in fact, the same as to concede that the Real does not have to
consist in the tragic shattering of every fantasy; that fantasy too can be unarbitrary
and objective, bearing on the potential internal shape of the Real and carrying in itself
“the topos of an objective-real possibility” (SM, 6). The Real, as Bloch conceives it,
is not the Lacanian Real which can reveal its monstrous void only after all the
phantasms are finally disenchanted and traversed; the Blochian Real can also
succumb to the ‘dreams of a better life,’ fantasizing about itself as the dynamic ‘Real-
Possible.’ What Žižek calls ‘the plague of fantasies’ is Bloch’s natural element; not
only does he refuse to traverser du fantasme, but he also wishes to preserve its most
precious core, bitterly protesting against disenchanting practices of modernity as the
only possible meaning of enlightenment.6 In his messianic search after the
“unarbitrary, objective fantasy,” he wants to turn what the enlightenment deemed as
merely an arbitrary curse and subjective irrational plague – into a blessing, and more
precisely: the typically Hebrew ‘blessing of more life,’ l’hayim. For, as he says in
Atheism in Christianity: “Messianism is the burning mystery of all revolutionary, all
fulfilled enlightenment.”7
The whole of Bloch’s work is the apology of fantasy, but also a hermeneutics
of fantasy, a guide of the perplexed through the land of fantasy – which allows us to
wander across the piles of fantasmagoric rubbish left by the dreaming mankind
throughout the ages, and “pluck its living flower”8; that is, filter out all dubious new-
age’y magic and go the very core of the ‘unarbitrary, objective fantasy’ which shows
the ‘latent tendency’ of matter itself, matter also dreaming about its better mode of
existing, free at last of all rigid laws and necessities; or, in his own words, to filter out
the abstract utopia, which plays a merely compensatory function, and find instances
of the concrete utopia, which actively anticipate the Real-Possible. We could also say
that Bloch wishes to realise the early romantic project of creating a New Mythology

5
Terry Eagleton Holy Terror, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 28-29.
6
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 2009. Although, this final therapeutic act is
apparently not that simple: “To traverse the fantasy paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with
the fantasy – namely, with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily
reality”: Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates, Verso: London, 2002, p. 17. We could argue, however, that it indicates nothing but a pointless
act of maladaptation, which simply disenchants the fantasy – while the very value of the fantastical
consists precisely in harbouring hope for the radical transformation of both the Real and the Symbolic
order. This difference may be subtle, but it is nonetheless decisive. Žižek continues: “A fantasy is
simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the
abyss of the Other’s desire) and shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality” (ibid., 18). Yet,
Bloch’s answer to this duality would be strictly anti-Lacanian: he would prefer to mobilise the very
dialectics of fantasy, in which its escapist aspect would be neutralised for the sake of the disturbing one
– but then, not just disturbing, but also containing the element of an ‘enabling trauma,’ which points
towards a hopeful reorganisation of our material life.
7
Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann, London: Verso, 2009, p. 225 (later in the text
as AC). On the special, messianico-vitalistic connotations of the original Hebrew “blessing of more
life” and its bearing on the utopian concept of life in 20th century Jewish messianic thinkers (to whom
Bloch, as I will try to prove it here, belongs), see most of all: Harold Bloom, The Book of J (New York:
Harper Publishers, 1990) and my “Taking Life out of Nature. Jewish Messianic Vitalism and the Issue
of Denaturalization“, in Radical Orthodoxy. Theology, Philosophy, Politics, vol. 1, No. 1 & 2, August
2012, pp. 167-187.
8
To quote again from Marx’s famous lines on religion: “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers
on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but
so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower”; Marx, “Contribution,” p. 131. Bloch
often uses the flower metaphor himself.

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which, to quote Friedrich Schlegel, would be able to find a ‘new centre’ for the
fragmented rationality of modern mankind in the once again retrieved “beautiful
chaos of fantasy.”9 Indeed, the analogies between Bloch’s use of utopian fantasy and
Schlegel’s neue Mythologie are striking: Bloch’s Rettung des Mythos durch Licht
[salvation of myth through light] which “looks beyond a partial, superficial form of
Enlightenment, sweeping away not only the fog but everything else that is not crystal
clear”10 corresponds well with Schlegel’s attempt to rescue the ‘lower’ faculty of
imagination that, unlike the sonnenklar reason, can also appeal to masses. There is,
however, one significant difference: pace Schlegel who wished to rejuvenate
modernity by regressing to its premodern Dionisian origins, Bloch wants to deliver a
catchy mythological idiom which will be able to sparkle the united imagination of all
people with one commonly shared dream of the ultimate messianic utopia.
Thus, while for Schlegel the liveliest mythopoetic fantasy resides in the
Olympian “tumult of old gods,” for Bloch it is rather the Hebrew God of Exodus who
remains the matrix of the most vital, objective and unarbitrary, fantasy striking the
universal messianic chord in everything that still has a heart in this heartless world:

Indeed, the image of Yahweh as a counter-pharaoh is susceptible to

disenchantment only through those features it has in common with the heathen
overlord-god (with all its despotic and military qualities), as an ideological
hypostasis of the tribal chieftain. Nevertheless, mythos is still present here,
though of a unique, not just moralizing, but promising kind (LE, 298-99; my
emphasis).

In the all-encompassing scope of Principle of Hope no stone of fantasy ever dreamt

by mankind gets unturned, but in Bloch’s later book, Atheism in Christianity, the
focus narrows to a more specific type of most promising kind of fantasizing which
Bloch associates with the Judeo-Christian religion. Just like in The Spirit of Utopia,
here also the main educational factor in creating a disciplined and organised form of
dreaming is assigned to the God of Exodus. It is the Judeo-Christian religion of yetziat
mitzraim [getting out of Egypt] which teaches mankind how to exit the seemingly
hermetic world of immanence; how to procur a way out from the universe with no
apparent ways-out. The key to the difference between abstract and concrete utopia
seems to lie in the choice of the proper religious idiom: not any religion, realising any
type of fantasy, but the peculiar language of revelation which inaugurates a specific
evolution of sacred images – from God the Creator to the Lamb of the Kingdom.
Against the enlightenmental prejudice, Bloch does not see fantasy as the
escapist mode of irrationalism, which merely wants to avoid the reality principle. To
the contrary, Bloch’s investment in fantasy follows from his full awareness of the
curtailing power of realism which needs to be resisted if thinking is to be possible at
all. In Bloch, fantasy and thinking form one amalgam in which the former constitutes
the transcendental condition of the latter. Without fantasy, which boldly goes where

9
See Friedrich Schlegel, “Speech on Mythology” (being part of “Dialogue on Poesy”) in Jochen
Schulte-Sasse, A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesotta Press, 1997, p. 187. Ruth Levitas offers here a similar parallel with William Morris who
insisted on maintaining the mythopoetic, dreamy-utopian element in socialist thought and talked about
‘disciplined’ and ‘undisciplined’ dreaming, as well as ‘education of desire’; Ruth Levitas, “Educated
Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia,” in Utopian Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (1990), p. 13.
10
Ernst Bloch, “Destruction and Salvation of Myth Through Light,” in Literary Essays, trans. Andrew
Joron, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 296. Later in the text as LE.

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no one has gone before and sets the final frontier of possibilities; without this
Kierkegaardian “possibility of possibilities” which opens a new dimension of
freedom, thinking would be condemned to remain within the “myth of what is,”
timidly bowing to Realitätsprinzip, and its “arid wisdom” of unimaginative
repetition.11 We can thus read Bloch’s restitution of fantasy along the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, as a parallel project of recovering the other meaning of Aufklärung as
not just the reign of disenchanted instrumental and realistic reason, but the era of
promise and hope, which must dream in order to remember what it is for. But Bloch’s
fantastical enterprise exceeds Adorno and Horkheimer in philosophical daring.
Bloch’s conviction is that human reason cannot stretch at all unless it stretches as far
as the ultimate utopian fantasy, the non plus ultra of fantasy beyond which there is
nothing more to dream about: the absolute complicity between matter and mind,
which Bloch designates as the dream of homecoming or the final rest – Sabbath. Only
such fantasy – objective and unarbitrary – can create a critical mass of hope which
allows thinking to break the barrier of reality principle and push forwards in a
constant effort of Exodus, towards the “vast open land” of possibilities. For Bloch,
therefore, the preservation of the ultimate fantasy is the necessary transcendental
condition of thinking which deserves its name – that is, thinking which is
simultaneously critical, unreconciled with what happens to pass at a given historical
moment for hard laws of actuality.
The contemporary reader might be puzzled by Bloch’s stubbornly religious
imagery, but she must bear in mind that all these fantastic personifications which
constantly pop out in his writings – God, Satan, Son of Man, Adam Kadmon, Messiah
and the Lamb – are indispensible moments of his transcendental messianic strategy
the aim of which is to breathe the living air of possibility into the seemingly
necessitarian universe of dead things. The fantasy of prosopopeia – the rhetorical
device of enlivening the dead – serves here as something more than just a metaphor:
its purpose is to shake the apparent deadness of the material cosmos and tell a
different story of matter which may not be so completely hostile to those instances of
lively imagining; a story which I want to call a fantastical materialism.

The Exodic Fantasy

This highly original apology of fantasy – not as an irrational force of anti-

enlightenment, but, to the contrary, as the true and most precious core of the
enlightenment rightly understood – puts Bloch in a peculiar position towards all his
significant precursors: most of all Hegel and Marx. Instead of the Hegelian-Marxian
“sublation of religion into philosophy,” which was to secure the progress of mankind
in secular terms, Bloch consciously proposes a counter-move: a return to the religious
idiom of revelation as a more natural element of the category of hope without which
no progress can take place. According to Bloch, the Hegelian-Marxian sublation is, in
fact, unwillingly regressive because it leaves us – once again – with the impersonal
powers of immanence (this time called ‘the laws of history’) from which the
revelatory religious idiom wished to free mankind in the first place, thus offering a
hope for something utterly new, breaking with the preestablished, eternal rhythm of
being. The stubbornly religious prosopopeia, in which Bloch seemingly indulges
while refusing to speak the language of philosophy proper, has a serious function to

11
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical
Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Ed. G. Schmid Noerr, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

5
fulfill; it is not just his fancy, but the expression of a more objective fantasy which at
the beginning only fantasizes about freedom – yet, in the course of history, it also
proves to be strangely effective, giving mankind more liberty than any realistic
thought which sticks firmly to the factualy given. The whole of Bloch’s project relies
on this assumption that the fantastical, which haunts our dreams, possesses more
mobilising and thus historically creative power than any sober realism which
measures its goals merely according to the rational calculation. Even if, in the end, the
ultimate fantasy may turn out to be wrong (though, according to Bloch’s logic, there
is no end and therefore no possibility to falsify the dream), it has an enormous ability
of mobilisation which gives human subjects an extra strength in opposing the
resistance of physical reality. This is why, rhetorically speaking, Bloch’s narrative is
built in the mode of exhortation: by fostering the boldness of the ultimate fantasy, it
inspires “hope for what seems hopeless,” contra spe spero.
Thus, instead of the Hegelian progress of Aufhebungen, Bloch proposes a
progress of successive Exoduses which build up the historical strategy of
“transcending without transcendence” (PH, I: 146). The subjectification of the
immanent forces figures here as the necessary condition which allows to form the
critical attitude of protest against the reality principle, or what Adorno in Minima
Moralia calls “the disgrace of adaptation.”12 The latent tendency of matter itself, das
Widersächerische in matter itself, dreaming Tagträume of a better life, must be
selected, isolated and dramatised – that is, acquire a name – in order to be activated
against all other more inertial tendencies which also operate within the materialist
immanence. It must be chosen and thus become a stake in the complex messianic
theo-drama,13 in which it will constantly clash with the opposing forces until the
cosmic struggle is over – and the latent tendency either wins, by turning the whole
material universe into the Kingdom of Freedom, or loses, by giving in to the
reactionary power of status quo and inertia. In The Spirit of Utopia, Bloch resorts to
the dualistic scenario of a ‘revolutionary Gnosis’ which, despite recent attempts to
read him away from the Gnostic paradigm, seems to be his life-long thema regium:
the perception of matter as being at war with itself. This war translates itself into a
personified conflict in which the latent tendency takes the prosopopeic form of Jesus
as the embodiment of the “anti-demiurgic principle,” while the opposing forces,
which culminate in Death – the final loss of faith or adapative resignation to the
natural rhythm of transience – are called by Bloch ‘the Obstacle’ or simply ‘Satan.’14

12
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott,
London: Verso, 2005, p. 64.
13
The term ‘theo-drama’ was originally coined by Hans Urs von Balthasar, a thinker otherwise very
different in temperament from Bloch. But the coinage was made for similar reasons, namely in order to
get away as far possible from the self-secured teleological idiom of modern historicism. See especially
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2: Dramatis Personae: Man
in God, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.
14
In his conversation with Adorno, Bloch states firmly that “there is a very clear interest that has
prevented the world from being turned into the possible” (SM, 6) and that “the hindering element is
also in the possible” (SM, 17). In what follows I want to emphasize this conflictual perception of
matter as torn between what it is and what it could be – that is, what later on, in his work on Avicenna
and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch will call the rift between “being-after-possibility” (kata to dynaton)
and “being-in-possibility” (dynamei on). While praising the romantic artist for being capable of seeing
into the dynamic living heart of natura naturans and disregarding the shards of natura naturata, he
says: “The resistant matter is the one of ‘being-after-possibility,’ which acts as a disturbance and
obstacle [Störung und Hemmung]; yet the suppressed plastic nature, which is still in the process of
formation, is the matter of ‘being-in-possibility,’ which is then realised by an artist”: Ernst Bloch,

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 In Atheism in Christianity, the theo-dramatic plot thickens and becomes more
dynamic due to the dialectical mechanism of Exodus which repeats itself through the
whole religious evolution from Yahweh to the Lamb – Bloch calls it a “subterrenean
Bible” – starting with the crucial figure of Job the Rebel. For Bloch, Job marks the
truly revolutionary moment in the history of mankind, in which man for the first time
dared to challenge the universal arrangement of the world for the sake of his own
sense of justice and put his singular life on the scales against the cosmic power. If Job
were nothing but a tragic hero, he would not be able to raise a voice of protest against
the impersonal power of Ananke; he would die in silence and give the “disgrace of
adaptation,” knowing that no words can address the mechanical verdicts of Fate.15 In
order to speak – for himself and against the cosmic power – Job needed a personified
enemy, God the Creator.
For, if Job were to become the first spokesman of the latent tendency of matter
dreaming of freedom16, he had to speak against something that could also be appealed
to: God who is not just the Creator, but also God of Justice; God who not only
represents the Real as it is and forever must be, but also the Real-Possible, pointing to
its future potentialities. With Job, therefore, the ‘latent tendency,’ which thus found
its first Fürsprech, first outspoken advocate, can become something more than just a
subjective fancy, quickly silenced down by the fateful powers of the cosmic status
quo which cannot be addressed. Even though Job’s dialogue with his God is far from
successful – Job speaks with ethical concern, while Yahweh answers with the “voice
of nature” (AC, 97) – something truly new and revolutionary commences: by
appealing to God the Creator, representing the cosmic power of being as it is, Job
projects onto a God a secret possibility of his own divine development. In this
manner, the fantasy of a better life becomes indeed objective and unarbitrary; no
longer a futile ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’ in its lonesome dream of justice, but an
enboldened desire addressed at the Real personified as God who can change; who can
transform himself from the oppressive and all-powerful Creator into a loving Son of
God; who can exit from himself into his other, so far latent and hidden, possibilities.
It is with Job, therefore, that the latent tendency stops being merely latent: articulated
and thus strengthened, it becomes the dominant tendency of the Real, dramatised into
the figure of a processual God torn by inner tensions.
The same logic of the dramatic prosopopeia applies to all further stages of the
maturation of the messianic belief in which the Real-Possible struggles with the
forces of conservation which want to keep the ‘latent tendency’ for ever latent and at
bay. Bloch emphasizes all those moments in which his messianic story of subversion
against cosmic powers differs most from the tragic account of man’s rebellion, in
which the rebel is always inevitably punished for his hubris and returned to the fateful
totality of being. Thus, if Jesus were yet another tragic hero (as the Paulian and post-
Paulian protestant theology likes to portray him), he would “go down” silently on the
cross, without his famous cry of despair and protest – which was also an appeal to the

Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke, Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loening, 1952, p. 76. Later in
the text as AL.
15
On the non-existence of hope in the tragedy-dominated Greek thought, see Jürgen Moltmann’s
comment, very much influenced by Bloch: “Aristotle, it is true, can call hope a ‘waking dream,’ but for
the Greeks it is nevertheless an evil out of Pandora’s box”; Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope. On
the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch, Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1993, p. 17.
16
The idea that Job may be seen as the Fürsprech der Kreatur appears for the first time in Benjamin;
Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” in Gesammelte
Schriften, Bd. II, 2, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1977, p. 463.

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other God, the God of Exodus, whom he himself wanted to embody and thus continue
the exodic progress of Yahweh into a Son of Man; he would be nothing but yet
another tragic victim who fought in vain with Fate. As the repetition of Job, Jesus
represents once again the voice of singular subjectivity poised against the cosmic
indifference of ‘as it is,’ but as the repetition of Yahweh the figure of Jesus signals a
progressive evolution in the image of godhead which already took into account Job’s
complaint. The fruitful tension within divine subject itself propels the exodic
dialectics which is Bloch’s answer to – as well as revision of – the original Hegelian
sequence of Aufhebungen.
Bloch’s dialectical approach demonstrates the necessary instability of all these
subversive achievements and their religious topoi which are subject to constant
transformation; what once served as an image of rebellion inevitably congeals into a
conservative dogma. Thus, even the esoteric image of macanthropos, in which the
Son of Man became identified with the kabbalistic Adam Kadmon, eventually loses
its rebellious potential and turns into an oppressive macrocosm of the renaissance
thought, which merely perpetuates the naturalistic ‘astral myth.’ The early modern
image of the glory of nature, in which the Son of Man gets once again dehumanised in
order to become a cosmic blue-print for the whole of creation, marks the always
recurring ‘obstacle’ bequeathed by the pagan thought. This dogmatic fixation, in
which the glorifying tendency erases the latent utopian one, must be opposed by a still
more progressive image of the Spirit, this time untied and unbound by any form,
constituting the final and most mature expression of the unfathomable freedom that
lies at the bottom of man as homo absconditus, a man of mystery even to himself. Yet
the ultimate Exodus in this series, the exit from the Spirit, is still ahead of us. It will
be the last step on the desert, already at the threshold of the promised Kingdom; no
longer the world of nature, in which man is constantly exposed to regressive
naturalising tendencies, but a qualitatively new mode of existence, where the whole of
nature will become humanised, free at last to realise its latent potency – as already
prophesied by the Aristotelian Left (mostly Avicenna and Averroes). The ultimate
fulfillment of the messianic principle will be the utopian transformation of the Real.17
Every exodic passage, therefore, involves a necessary moment of a personified
struggle in which God fights with himself – in his changing historical avatars – finally
to pave the way to the stage of atheism where the cosmic struggle will be carried on
by human beings, already thoroughly taught the lesson of Exodus, enlightened and
educated in their desire by the dialectics of the Judeo-Christian theo-drama:
“Atheism-with-concrete-Utopia is at one and the same time the annihilation of
religion and the realization of its heretical hope, now set on human feet” (AC, 225).
Bloch remains here loyally Feuerbachian: even if the premis of the personified
transcendence is a false one, the whole implication that follows from it, remains true.18
Without the dualistic clashes inspired by the transcendent personifying projections,

17
The defining feature of the Aristotelian Left, which clearly anticipates Feuerbach and the Hegelian
Left, is that it “sublates any god-dispensed potency into the active potentiality of matter” (AL, 32-33).
But the Hegelian concept used here – aufheben – signals that what Bloch has in mind cannot be
reduced to the simple return to the undifferentiated static substance. This is the reason why Bloch will
later on use the “dramatic” notion of substance as sich-suchend-gesuchte (literally: itself-searching-
searched) which may be regarded as yet another synonym for the ‘transcending without
transcendence’; Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi. Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis, in
Gesamtauagabe, Band. 15. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 68..
18
It is true that Bloch had constant queries with Feuerbach, whom he reproached for a primitively
mechanistic view of matter, but it does not change the fact that his philosophy of religion is a variant of
the Feuerbachian scheme of projection and dealienation.

8
the worldly immanence would have never moved out of its lethargic inertia; without,
in Blake’s words, the dramatism of contradictions, all negations, though implicit in
the world of nature, would have lied forever asleep in the barren condition of Beulah
(which is Blake’s poetic equivalent of the dormant and undifferentiated Substance).
To transcend without transcendence – to progress in the sequence of Exoduses, or, yet
in other words, to perform the shtick of Baron Münchhausen who pulls himself out of
the swamp of immanence – is possible only if our thought engages into this half-
fantastical theo-drama, which gives us a palpable sense of a metaphysical struggle
between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness (as in Bloch’s favourite Essene
prosopopeia). Otherwise, we would be left only with a flat immanence with its
amorphic oceanic plasticity swinging chaotically in all directions, with no sense,
orientation or organised tendency, and in the end producing merely a bad balance of
mutually self-anulling oppositions – indeed as in Spinoza, Nietzsche (and we can also
add: Deleuze). To transcend without transcendence means to dramatise nature and
transform its barren negations into lively contradictions, which alone can shake
immanence out of its boring equilibrium and start a movement – instigate the
ontological progress. To transcend without transcendence means to invest in fantasy,
that is, in the negative power of non-being which exceeds being and turns against its
seemingly necessary ontological laws.
Hegel saw this passage as the indispensable move from Substance to Subject:
from the passive all-in-all or a static coincidentia oppositorum to the purposeful
movement propelled by the dialectic of self-alienation and self-return, which can only
be achieved by subjectivity. The difference can only be felt as a split within the
Subject – never within the Substance where it means nothing but an idle negation.
Only the Subject can choose: identify with one of the ontological tendencies present
in the Substance; only the Subject can fight: oppose his chosen tendency to others
which he perceives as hostile to the selected one;; and only the Subject can either win
or fail: make his choice victorious or sustain a metaphysical fiasco. It is not enough,
therefore, to say in the end that “God does not exist.” The vulgar atheism, which
forgets the history of its own concept and returns to the static notion of Substance,
loses all the intellectual gains won by the process of the theological subjectification of
the Real: the “Spinozist” regresses to the Stoic cosmos of rigid necessities where the
only possible attitude is passive amor fati and all the ctitical achievements, based on
the internal play of negations within the Subject, are lost without the trace. The
diagnosis of God’s non-existence can only be stated by an atheist who is capable of
the full appropriation of the history of successive exoduses, from God to Man; that is,
when religion is no longer needed. But the true atheist would never say that religion
was never needed, that it was an error in the first place.
Thus, man-after-God is not the same as man-before-God, just like the Real-
after-God differs essentially from the Real-before-God; while the pre-theological man
is also a pre-subjective element of undifferentiated Substance, the post-theological
man, the accomplished atheist, is a fully formed subjectivity acting upon the Real
which is now prone to the utopian transformation. Even if the entire Heilsgeschichte
were nothing but one fantastical dream of matter, it was not just the dream; it was a
process of a necessary self-hypostasis from Substance to Subject due to which the
latent tendencies of the Real, ‘asleep’ in the ocean of immanence, could awaken to the
status of mutual contradiction. The landscape after this cosmic battle, inhabited by a
new atheist, is not a simple return to the indifference of the Substance: it is
immanence irreversibly enriched by the tensions of the fantastical theo-drama which
allowed for the fragmentation of the immanent reality and the emancipation of its

9
fragments - most of all individual human subjects. Thus, if man were to become a true
subject, as the Blochian atheist definitely is, the Real had to be able to turn from
Substance to Subject – which is precisely the meaning of Bloch’s ‘latent tendency’ of
matter becoming gradually more manifest.
The only question left is: when is the right time to become an atheist? To
become an atheist too early may spell a danger of reverting to the indifferent laws of
the immanent substance – as it indeed happened to Spinoza whom the radical
enlightenment praised for his bold progressivism (vide Deleuze) but whom Hegel saw
merely as a philosopher of the ‘Oriental’ regress, pulling all things back to the
undifferentiated One. But not to want to become an atheist at all may spell the danger
of falsifying the message of the exodic religion and sticking to the conservative image
of God as Master and Sovereign, preventing any form of human emancipation. So,
not-yet or right-now? Bloch’s position on this is not completely clear; he seems to be
to the accomplished atheist as the Nietzschean Zarathustra is to the ‘accomplished
nihilism’ of the future Übermensch, that is, an apocalyptic prophet of his near
coming, almost there, at hand – but he is not a proper atheist himself, not yet. By
vacillating on the threshold, he still needs the dramatic narrative of Heilsgeschichte in
order to maintain the fruitful tension within the Real.

The Transcendent Detour

Feuerbach may indeed be seen as Bloch’s closest precursor – for he as the first
saw religious faith as primarily the expression of the deep underlying fantasy – but
with the necessary proviso that we read him more subtly that it is usually done in the
tradition of the Hegelian Left. Bloch praised Feuerbach numerous times, calling him a
“turning point in the philosophy of religion,” departing from which “the final history
of Christianity begins” (PH, 1286). His “anthropologization of religion” (PH, 1285)
revealed the true core of the religious fantasmagoria and plucked “the real, live
flowers, from the theological illusion” (AC, 212). Feuerbach first articulated the
hidden thread of the ‘subterrenean Bible’ which resisted the transcendent projection
of God the Creator by creating a dealienating countercurrent where “that which is
bringable from heaven to earth makes deep this-worldliness” (PH, 1290). The proper
result of the Feuerbachian dealienation of God should thus be the deepening of the
immanent realm; all the “treasures squandered on heaven” (Hegel) must now duly
return to earth to lend it its true depth (what Bloch calls die eschatologische Tiefe, AL
116). After the transcendent detour, which robbed this world of its hidden
potentialities, the reconquered innerworldliness must emerge in all its energetic glory;
regained, yet at the same time different than it appeared originally as the flat
immanence of the Substance.
In his recent essay on the philosophy of religion, “Fear of Four Words,” Slavoj
Žižek accused the “standard” Feuerbachian line in a very Blochian vein, precisely for
flattening the drama of the subjectification of the Real, which left us again with the
primordial horizontal indifference of the Substance. What Bloch dramatises as the
series of tensions within the divine Subject that lead to the dialectics of subsequent
exoduses from Yahweh to Man, Žižek sees as the move of ‘double kenosis’ in which
God becomes Man so “Man can become God who becomes Man.” Feuerbach’s aim –
the dealienation of God – is thus partly realised by God himself who undergoes a
radical kenosis. It is not not an atack of militant atheism on God as the otherwordly
thief of this-worldly energy, but a turn incipient to the very nature of the divine
subject –

10
 This double kenosis is what the standard Marxist critique of religion as the
self-alienation of humanity misses: modern philosophy would not have its own
subject if God’s sacrifice had not occurred. For subjectivity to emerge – not as
a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as
essential to Substance itself – the split, negativity, particularization, self-
alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of
the divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur
within God himself. In short, man’s alienation from God (the fact that God
appears to him as an inaccessible In-Itself, as a pure transcendent Beyond)
must coincide with the alienation of God from himself (whose most poignant
expression is, of course, Christ’s “Father, why have you forsaken me?” on the
Cross).19

In Žižek’s account, the reason why the standard Hegelian Left gets religion wrong is
that they see dealienation of the divine transcendence as a simple return to the
immanence ‘as it was’ in which the birth of human subject would not be possible at
all, for the genesis of subjectivity necessarily involves a complex roundabout process
of the transcendent projection and its ‘kenotic’ sacrificial fall back into the
immanence. Only via such a transcendent detour man can truly become what he is,
which Žižek portrays in Lacanian terms as “more than human monstrous subject”
(ibid.): the most intimate, but also repressed core of our psyche, which can reveal
itself only in the projective play of the religious theo-drama (and which Bloch calls
the secret unconscious dimension of homo absconditus).20
Bearing Žižek’s objection in mind, let us now turn for a moment to Feuerbach
and his anthropological interpretation of religious belief. If we forget the “standard
Marxist critique of religion as an alienation of humanity,” we shall immediately see
that Feuerbach’s attitude towards religion is much more subtle and ambivalent. This
ambivalence constitutes the often overlooked feature of his thought where religion is
at the same time the alienation and the protection of what remains the most valuable,
though still secret, heart of humanity. In The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach says:

19
Slavoj Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity,” in
John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011, p. 75; my emphasis.
20
Bloch would have agreed with this analysis, but only to a certain point. Žižek repeats Bloch almost
verbatim, without ever acknowledging him as a precursor, when he argues in favour of the ‘perversely’
atheistic core of Christianity. In “Fear of Four Words,” Žižek takes a stance which clearly echoes
Bloch’s thesis that “only an atheist can be good Christian”: “What, then, is the proper atheist stance?
Not a continuous desperate struggle against theism, of course—but not a simple indifference to belief
either. That is to say: what if, in a kind of negation of negation, true atheism were to return to belief
(faith?), asserting it without reference to God—only atheists can truly believe; the only true belief is
belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed figure of the big Other” (ibid., 101). In
Bloch, the atheistic belief could indeed be paraphrased as follows: if you believe in the ‘latent
tendency’ of matter and lend ear to matter’s ‘dreams of a better life,’ you are already a believer, a true
believer – truer than the one who believes in God the Sovereign and Master. All that counts ultimately
is to give chance to matter so it no longer resembles the dead lump, but acquires fully divine
prerogatives: it is to see the divine “fire, fire, fire” in the fiery truth of matter itself [feurige Wahrheit
der Materie AL, 78]. Yet Bloch and Žižek begin to differ when the latter switches from the Hegelian to
the Lacanian mode, which forces him to forget about the utopian potentialities of the Real-Possible and
stake on the Real’s untransformed, essentially tragic ‘monstrosity’ which forms an eternal ‘obstacle’ to
any ‘dream of a better life.’

11
 God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of man – religion the
solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate
thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets… The divine being is
nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed
from the limits of the individual man, made objective – i.e. contemplated and
revered as another, a distinct being.21

Religion disowns man from his best essential part, by projecting a distinct figure of
God which embodies it – yet, simultanously, by projecting it into transcendent
regions, it defends this soft fantastical core against the onsloughts of harsh material
world. The religious projection, therefore, is both alienating and protective. By
forging the transcendent divine image, it produces a false sense of dependency of man
on the figure of the divine sovereign – yet, at the same time, it creates a safety deposit
in which all human wishes, dreams and fantasies of a better world can lie untouched
by cruel demands of reality principle and thus wait, coded and frozen in this symbolic
form, for their future realization (understood that way, even alienation helps to protect
this “absolute content,” for it builds a hedge around its sanctity, making it
untouchable and as such immune to profane abuses). The figure of God, therefore, is
most of all the figure of human potentiality: the encrypted evangelium of a futuristic
anthropology which cannot be actualised here and now, in present conditions of
immanence, at least – not yet. We could thus say, using psychoanalytic idiom (and
Feuerbach palpably anticipates psychoanalysis), that God is the outcome of an
indispensable defense mechanism in which human being defends himself against too
much curtailment (castration) suffered from the reality principle. Says Feuerbach:
“God is my hidden, my assured existence; he is the subjectivity of subjects, the
personality of persons… God is the existence corresponding to my wishes and
feelings: he is the just one, the good, who fulfills my wishes (EC, 173).
Thus, if properly used, the divine personification, far from oppressing its
human subjects, should serve as a point of resistance and protest against the realistic
demands to adapt – quickly and without murmur – to the necessities of life. This
principle of resistance is called by Feuerbach “love”: “Love… strengthens the weak
and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealizes matter and
materializes the spirit (EC, 48). Just like in Jesus’s Sermon on the Hill, the divine love
– simultaneously the essence of God and man, present in his most precious
inwardness – works as an antinomian factor: it inverts the laws that create the reality
principle, with its hierarchies of masters and slaves, the strong and the weak, the
fittest and the less fit. By acting as a force of contrariety against the Stoic wisdom of
adaptation, it creates an invigorating havoc in the natural hierarchy of powers: the
high and the low, the Spirit and the Matter – it materializes the former and
spiritualizes the latter. Love cannot thus be passive or purely contemplative: it must
eventually spill over the “hedges” built by the beautiful soul and begin to guide the
man of action, become operative in the creaturely reality. Thus, if Feuerbach criticises
religion, it is only against its false interpretation as a condition of the Hegelian
“unhappy consciousness,” in which the human subject cannot overcome its inner split
and congeals passively in the unsurpassable dualism of his higher and lower self. He
wants religious belief to become a motivating and active force: rebellious, protestant,
antinomian. Yet, on the other hand, Feuerbach (though much more implicitly, but

21
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans, New York: Calvin Blanchard
1856, pp. 12; 14. Later in the text as EC.

12
still) issues a warning against a too hasty translation of the divine image into a well-
defined earthly practice: it is essential that nothing of the imaginary deposit gets lost
in the discursive translation done by a philosopher, in his readiness both to interpret
and then change the immanent world.
For this, however, we need a different view on religion, not the one which sees
in the transcendence only the “great master” or the Lacanian “big Other”: the absolute
sovereign and repressive law-maker. This other tradition, coming mostly from the
angle of Jewish messianic theology, sees transcendence as a guarantee of freedom
against the oppressiveness of immanence which has a “natural” inertial tendency to
close itself in the rigid form of necessity and indifference opposed to all possibilities.
It is not to say that we are not allowed to think of this type of transcendence as a
personifying projection. To the contrary, it well may be the Feuerbachian projection,
but understood primarily as the protection, where a certain normative core,
crystallised for a moment in the vital flux, becomes exempt from the immanent
transience and acquires a separate form – as a fantasy of “higher life” (the living God,
Elohim hayim, or Life Infinite in Hegel). This is roughly how the Jewish messianic
thinkers interpret the most significant founding act of their religion: the Exodus. It
means to get out from the self-enclosed world of immanence to acquire a “breathing
space,” if only to facilitate a “sigh of the oppressed creature”22 – or, more positively
speaking, to create a presentiment of liberty which only then opens to the “possibility
of possibilities.” In other words: to reverse the usual existential priorities and put
fantasy over reality.
The Blochian Exodus is precisely such a reversal – Umkehr – of the lazily
realistic, inertial propensity to imitate Nature in its default mode of existence: to fall
under the spell of what already is at the expense of the abyssal not-yet that offers no
existential guarantee; to bow down in front of the natural power (the astral myth)
against which the enigmatic groundlessness of human negativity (homo absconditus)
appears as a mere weakness; to always choose the positive and the well-trodden paths
of ancient orthodoxies at the cost of the negative, hidden, puzzling, vague, merely
promising (“Hope is the opposite of security… This hope is not confidence,” SM, 16).
To reverse this default tendency, in which not just man but the whole nature leans
towards falling into dogmatic slumber, means to be able to invest in the Enigma and
find its fantastical, barely comprehensible message more appealing than any voice of
actuality. This is precisely the meaning of the word ‘faith’: the figure of God, creating
a transcendent detour, allows the crucial turn – the ‘leap of faith’ – due to which the
dreamy not-yet-existent becomes for the first time more important than anything that
fills immanence with its hard reality.

The Exodus into the Utterly-New: Marcion as the First Fantasy Writer

If there is a thinker who truly deserves to be called a ‘modern Judeo-

Christian,’ enacting all the possible antagonisms tearing apart this uneasy denotation,
it is certainly Ernst Bloch whose only theme is the ‘apocalyptic thorn’ he finds first in
the messianic Judaism and its immediate offshot, the messianic Christianity, and then,
again, in modernitas as an epoch which allowed the sharp energetic edge of revelation
to come fully to the core. He also believes that Christianity, especially in its early
pneumatic version, is closer to the living Jewish ‘spirit of utopia’ than to the rabbinic

22
Egypt, mitzraim means in Hebrew a ‘narrow place,’ die Bedrängung, which also echoes in Marx’s
phrase: die bedrängte Kreatur.

13
Judaism which threw out the messianic child with the Christian bathwater and turned
into a purely ‘katechonic’ formation, merely restraining the messianic finale. For all
these reasons Bloch’s favourite religious writer is Marcion, the 2nd century heretic
who preached the gospel of the Alien God. Even before Adolf von Harnack and Karl
Barth, two protestant theologians, widely assumed to be responsible for the peculiar
‘Marcionite aura’ of the troubled Weimar era, it was actually Ernst Bloch who already
in 1918 insisted on the actuality of Marcion and praised him for opposing creation
and revelation, the creaturely justice, which already realised itself in actuality, and the
messianic goodness, which so far exists only in the potentiality of noch-Nicht:
“Marcion comes to us not only from Paul, he comes equally from Moses; the true, or
alien god dawns in the God of Exodus, between Egypt and Canaan” (PH, 3: 1499-
1500). Pace the power-obsessed, protestant negative theology of Harnack and Barth,
with its “heteronomy glorified ad absurdum” (AC, 37), Bloch will champion his own
understanding of Marcion’s divine strangeness – not in terms of etwas ganz Anderes,
but as “something utterly new,” etwas ganz Neues; not in terms of the demiurgic
hyper-glory, but in terms of the “antidemiurgic principle” (SU, 217) which rebels
against all “mysteries of power.”
This emphasis put on the newness allows Bloch to see in Marcion the first
fantasy writer in the world; indeed, the mighty founder of the whole genre, who first
introduced all its basic categories: alien intervention and alien abduction, occurring
here and now, in material reality, where God the Stranger appears to take his chosen
ones on the cosmic ride, away from the cursed planet Earth. Marcion’s fantasy, in
which the Alien God rescues mankind kept hostage to the Evil Demiurg and
inaugurates a complete new era of the Kingdom, liberated from the system of Nature,
is as real as it gets; though Paulian to the tee, it represents a different line of
Paulianism than the Lutheran theology, which interpreted Paul’s famous antithesis of
material sin and spiritual grace in a purely idealistic manner, that is, as occurring only
in the depths of human soul. Marcion’s fantasy writing refuses such an easy way out
which consists in, as Scholem would have put it, “chemically pure inwardness,”23 and
opts for something infinitely more daring; his fantasy indeed “materializes the spirit
and spiritualizes the matter,” insisting on the antinomian fulfillment in the empirical
reality. While the Protestant mode of spiritualisation evades reality only to find an
escapist redemptive fulfillment in human inner soul, Marcion’s fantasy hits the reality
principle head-on, by creating an Atopos, a no-place firmly opposed to the place in
which we now live. There he stands and he can’t no otherwise – but this is a very
different kind of firmness than the spiritual choice of Luther.
Yet Marcion can be hailed by Bloch as a paradigmatic fantasy writer only
because his fantasy is not purely idiosyncratic: it is unarbitrary and objective. In
Atheism and Christianity Bloch says:

From the politico-historical point of view, the notion of the totally unmediated
Absolutely-new, Absolutely-alien is a lot of Jacobin nonsense. But in the early
Christian sense, seen against the light of a latter-day soteriology, it was a
different matter. Especially as Marcion touched off inside a streak of
expectant yearning which makes it easier to believe in what had not yet come
than in what has… This is where Marcion opens the door to the further depths
of the objectively surprising… These are the depths of an alien territory, one

23
See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality,
New York: Schocken Books, 1995, p. 17.

14
 that is utterly unfamiliar and yet, as our home, utterly familiar (AC, 178; my
emphasis).

If this is indeed Marcion’s merit – the awakening of the expectant yearning which
makes it easier to believe in what had not yet come than in what has – then it cannot
be overestimated for it signifies precisely the birth of faith and hope as a new
principle, opposed to the old one which was based on knowledge and repetition. It is
only with Marcion that faith completes its axial turn it began with the first moment of
revelation and turns away from the positivity of ‘what is,’ with its solid continuum of
past-present, to the radical negativity of ‘what is not-yet’ which, as a pure fantasy,
boldly transcends the confines of being.
But this fantasy does not emerge completely out of the blue. To the Jacobin
nonsense of a pure creation of the New (here Bloch alludes mostly to the “Jacobin
calendar, whose year naught was ‘also’ intended as a totally new beginning”, AC,
177), Bloch opposes a more entrenched fantasy – the fantasy of homecoming, which
constitutes his own revision of the Hegelian-Feuerbachian move of dealienation. We
will easily detect the echo of the Jacobin nonsense in Badiou’s and Žižek’s attempts
to void and reset the political conditions, where the intervention of the Real erases the
actual symbolic order leaving us as if with a clean slate. But why should it be such a
nonsense?
Bloch is after all a Hegelian and from Hegel’s point of view any “unmediated
Absolutely new” must indeed be a nonsense, precisely because of its lack of contact
with what already actually exists, which renders the newness completely futile and
inoperative. Hegel – and Bloch with him – believes that the simple voiding and
resetting of the actual symbolic order can issue only in the recreation of the next
symbolic order which will inevitably repeat the whol system of repression in which
all symbolic orders are grounded. Unless the new strikes some chord in the already
existant set-up of being, unless it utters a promise that awakens some dormant
yearning – it is doomed to be either forgotten or, when executed, then deformed
beyond recognition. But, unlike Hegel, who roots the progress of the new in the
actually existing element of historical reality (the “absolute content” of Christian
revelation, fully incarnated into Christ), Bloch roots it in vague premonitions the
status of which is merely fantastical (Bloch, being a Jewish messianist, refuses to see
any fragment of this world as already redeemed).
Yet this is a true fantasy, which very much resembles the ambivalent structure
of the Freudian uncanny: both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time – a home, but
not the one in which we now live. To progress exodically, to dare the new, to
transcend without transcendence, is not a matter of voiding or resetting – it is a matter
of homecoming, of coming back and at the same time arriving at the home which we
never had. Just as Feuerbach believes that faith expresses the objective fantasy of
mankind which is on its way to reclaim and reappropriate it, Bloch plays on the
uncanniness of the secret identity of homo absconditus, which so far finds its
reflection only in the most daring futuristic dreams of home. This very much
resembles the structure of the presentiment of happiness in Walter Benjamin:
happiness, according to him, is not a memory of what actually happened but a
memory of what could have happened in that very moment we recollect. Here the

15
utopian modus irrealis feeds on a promising sign which for a second opened a gate of
expectation to another world.24

The Homecoming, or the Utopian Transformation of the Real

Once again Bloch evokes the old Gnostic topos – the hope for going back to the house
of our real father to whom we truly belong – which since Marcion has been fuelling
the most popular sci-fi stories, thus testifying to the vitality of its major, objective and
unarbitrary, fantasy. If we were to translate this fantasy into philosophical idiom – but
very cautiously, trying to loose nothing in the translation – we could say that its
ideatic core consists in the hope for the radical transformation of the Real. Just like
Novalis, who believed that philosophy is nothing but homesickness which tries to turn
the hostile world into our home, Bloch insists on making the Real “not so unfriendly”
as it is now, when the world appears to us as an indifferent stranger. The homecoming
which Bloch evokes is not an escape of the human spark into its original otherworldly
pleroma, which leaves the whole material cosmos untransformed – but a radical turn
that leads towards the “humanisation of nature” (AC, 232). Such is the ultimate stake
of the grand cosmic struggle between the Children of Darkness and the Children of
Light; while the dark inertial force of modernity gravitates towards the regressive and
thus wrong “naturalisation of man,” the counter-efforts aim at the very opposite – a
the “new, apocalyptic Day where the Lamb will replace the shining of the sun, and a
static nature will pass over into the Eschaton, the Kingdom” (AC, 208):

And, when that is done, the raw-material of matter is no longer a dead lump of
stuff, but is open to the more genuine Aristotelian definition of matter as the
substratum of dynamei on, of ‘being-in-possibility’ – a definition which is by
no means the ultimate in speculation. The eschatological logos, too, the logos
that is not concerned with this world at all, actually places the Utopia of new
heaven and new earth in this world – despite all its dallying with a purely
spiritual un-wordliness. It places it in a mythically and apocalyptically
exploded world, but one which, unlike its predecessor, belongs in the realm of
nature, and one whose topos remained within the fully logos-mythical but also
meta-physical framework of an Eschaton of New Jerusalem. There is no moon
or sun there, that is true – the Son of Man is the only lamp in that city; but it is
a city built on the territory, in the firmament, of a ‘nature’ that has been both
annihilated to form the ‘Kingdom’ and unveiled in all the splendor of its
eschatological truth. That is the final non-alternative between cosmos and
logos proposed by the new, antithetical, Exodus-revealing, Genesis images of
the Apocalypse (AC, 212-3).

To transform the Real truly radically means, therefore, to turn Nature into Kingdom:
to turn the boredom of nature’s eternal cycle and balance of complimentary powers
(sun and moon, male and female, sky and earth) into a new mode of material
existence which will no longer bow down to the seemingly necessary power of
physical laws, “so that man is no longer burdened with the world as as with a
stranger” (AC, 213). For Bloch, the true inspiration for such a radical change within
the very structure of being lies in early Marx and his dialectical recipe for

24
See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland,
Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389-390.

16
dealienation: “naturalisation of man, humanisation of nature.” Yet it is necessary to
remember that what Marx calls here “the naturalisation of man” means something
completely else than the wrong regressive naturalisation of man conducted by the
disenchanting enlightenment, which reifies human being by turning him into a dead
material object, the basic unit of nature scientifically conceived. In Marx it rather
signifies the utopian moment of reconciliation between man and nature, where the
latter becomes complicit with human efforts of dealienation:

Naturalisation of man – that would mean his incorporation into the

community, his final this-worldly awakening, so that, free from alienation, we
could really control our hic et nunc. Humanisation of nature – that would
mean the opening-up of the cosmos, still closed to outself, to be our Home: the
Hole once expressed in the mystical fantasy of new heaven and new earth…
with the great leap out of the realm of necessity drawing ever closer to man
(AC, 255).

The messianic times, therefore, will be the times of the final inversion “by which the
inward can become outward and the outward like the inward” (SU, 231). While in
Benjamin, the messianic redemption is the matter of inversed temporality – where the
future will close and the past will burst open (as if the messianic turn were operating
with the Hebrew “conversive vav” which changes the verb aspects from perfect to
imperfect and vice versa)25 – in Bloch the inversion occurs long the lines of subjective
inwardness and objective outwardness. In the messianic finale, the subject will no
longer have to dwell in the depths of its Innerlichkeit, protected as a precious core of
Ichheit against the onslaughts of hostile exterior. The human subjectivity, which now
keeps safe the pneumatic deposit under the disguise of the Kantian transcendental
self, will be able to express itself fully: exteriorise and finally meet the material Real
which, after all, may be not so unfriendly.

The Godless Belief

What does it mean, therefore, to believe in a godless, atheistic manner? This

objectless belief – distilled from the religious imagery and its transcendent detour
which gave fantasy priority over the actual – amounts to a pure hope. To believe, to
have hope, means to believe that more is possible than we currently think is possible.
It is to remember, against all cynical instructions in realism, that the constant
dismissal of the fantastical by the modern disenchanting reason (“the possibility has
had a bad press,” SM, 7) narrowed our presentiment of what Kierkegaard used to call
“the possibility of possibilities” – without which no hope makes sense as an
ontological category. If hope is to be such a category, it simply cannot flourish in the
world fully “naturalised,” that is, reduced to the ‘iron cage’ of its unimpeachable
laws. If hope is to be something more than just a miserable, purely subjective state of
mind – when all we can hope for is that the gods of this world will favour us in their
verdicts or, at least, leave us alone26 – then it must have an ontological footing. If hope
is to be, that is, to enjoy an unarbitrary status – there must also be the ontology of

25
See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” p. 391.
26
This is how Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, sees hope in the pagan world: reduced to a
fearful minimal expectation that, as Hans Blumenberg phrased it, “gods will accept man’s existence,”
albeit “with reluctance”; Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, p. 30.

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hope, in both subjective and objective understanding of this genitive construction: as
ontology securing the transcendental conditions for the concept of hope as such – and
as a hopeful ontology, opening the Real to its ‘latent tendencies’ leading towards its
final “not so unfriendly” transformation.
Here comes to the fore an important difference between Bloch and the
Lacanians, most of all Žižek, with his parallel to Bloch project of the atheistic
Christianity. In his preface to the Privatization of Hope, Žižek praises Bloch for the
ontology of not-yet which he inevitably interprets as metaphysics of incompleteness:
as if the Maker of this world botched his creation and left it occasionally in patches.27
But this is a wrong association, which simultaneously divulges the major dosparity
between Bloch and Žižek: the latter’s radical lack of hope, which makes his
declaration of “belief without God” hang in the vacuum. Bloch’s transcending
without transcendence cannot be reduced to the Lacanian understanding of the Real as
simply deficient, marked with inner lacunas and breaks. The Real cannot just lie
there: neutral, slightly awry, thwarting and disturbing all efforts of completion,
forever beyond reach of our utopian aspirations. Even if conceived as not-All, the
Lacanian Real will always be nothing but the indifferent Substance, untouched by the
drama of the Subject which will always remain hermetically enclosed within its inner
symbolic play. Contrary to this, Bloch’s hopeful ontology inscribes in the Real a firm,
objective and unarbitrary, possibility which asks us for help in assisting its
actualisation; there is no real hope without real promise. Human mind, the only bearer
of the ultimate fantasy in the material universe, where its promised ‘latent tendency’
became at least manifest in dreams, is asked for help by the unfinished Real – and this
call forms a ground for Bloch’s staunch messianic humanism which presses for the
“humanisation of nature,” against all the philosophical vogues that go for the
regressive ontologies of the inhuman.
For Bloch, this, in fact, is the only admissible sense of humanism which
cannot find a right articulation in merely secular terms: “No humanism would be
tolerable if it did not implicitly possess these far-flung but prfoundly happy images of
the Where-to, the What-for and the At-all to complement its morality” (AC, 255). Or,
to quote again The Spirit of Utopia:

Only in man himself can the movement toward the light, proper to all
creatures, become so conscious, or be carried out… Man , in other words, is
here the latest and yet the firstborn creature; only he broke through, exceeded
the genus fixed for so long among the animals… The pulse of life beats after
the leap toward the only creature that changes has succeded through work
above all: beats only within human beings (SU, 234)… In us alone does this
fire still burn, this final dream… in us alone does this absolute light still burn,
and the fantastic movement torward it begins, toward the external divination
of the waking dream, to the cosmic implementation of the principal concept of
utopia (SU, 248).

The reason for this messianic humanism is that, according to Bloch, man (so far) is
the only being in the universe which can actively transform its being, and not just

27
“The idea is that God who created our universe was too lazy (or, rather, he underestimated our
intelligence): he thought that we would not succeed in probing into the structure of nature beyond the
level of atoms, so he programmed the Matrix of our universe only to the level of its atomic structure -
beyond it, he simply left things fuzzy, like a house whose interior is not programmed in a PC game”:
Slavoj Žižek, “The Ontology of Not-Yet-Being,” in The Privatization of Hope, p. xviii.

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imitate the set patterns of beheviour or rely on the currents of random creativity. The
tool of this transformation is fantasy, a waking dream, exercising a power of ‘what is
not’ on the inertial mass of ‘what is.’ It is only due to this peculiar mechanism, which
grants to this fantastical non-being significance that surpasses the weight of what
already exists (a thought simply unthinkable for Parmenides), that man can pull all
these shticks which, rationally speaking, seem magically impossible: to get himself
out of the snares of immanence, to dramatise the latent conflicts of nature, to project
himself out of the existence dominated solely by the idiom of war and power. For
Heidegger, this is the outmost hubris in which culminates the Seinsvergessenheit, the
forgetfulness of being. But for Bloch, this is the last and the only possible justification
of modern humanism; the privilege given to the paradoxical creature which, being a
part of ‘what is’ puts over it a messianic dream, woven out of the subtlest texture of
noch-Nicht.
Let me simply end by quoting in full the fragment from Eagleton’s Holy
Terror, to which I have already alluded few times. In this very Blochian passage,
Holy Terry (as he calls himself in the preface) claims that faith makes sense only as
an act of belief that one day the Real, which pulls the strings of our material lives, will
show a different face:

To be ‘converted’ is to come to recognize that the horrific Real at the core of

the self, the unfathomable strangeness which makes us what we are, is not
after all unfriendly… This is part of what it means to call Jesus the Son of
God. He is the ‘son’ of God because he is the authentic rather than ideological
image of the Father, revealing him as comrade, lover, and counsel for the
defence rather than as patriarch, judge, and accuser.28

For Blake, prophetic religion was but an organised innocence, a system of belief for
real Tigers, firmly structured against the realistic wisdom of experience, represented
by the obedient Horses of Instruction. And similarly for Bloch, faith is an organised
fantasy, that is – fantasy purified, enforced, systematised and turned into a powerful
weapon against the oppressive demands of the reality principle, thus making room for
the true ontology of hope. The reason why Bloch, even while calling himself an
atheist, never gave up on the religious imagery, lies precisely in this: faith remains
bolder than even the most daring projects dreamt by our philosophy. It may indeed
grow on chains, but it still produces the most living of flowers.

28
Eagleton, Holy Terror, pp. 28-29.

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