Ernst Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit,

and the Philosophy of Being and Time

Peter Thompson

In this article I show how lateness as a concept can be dealt with philosophi-
cally as well as in terms of the chronology or typology of the works of a given
cultural figure. Time itself is not something that can be approached only in a
fixed and linear fashion. Rather, lateness can come at the beginning of an indi-
vidual’s or a historical moment’s cultural production just as genesis can come
at the end. Using the works of Ernst Bloch (1883–1977) and Martin Heidegger
(1888–1976), I investigate how lateness as a category is itself liable to be
undermined by contingent processual forces, so that one person’s lateness
becomes another person’s earliness. Indeed, even in the individual’s life early
and late aspects can themselves be inverted and nonsynchronous.
In Heidegger’s Dasein, the existence of the individual, as opposed to
Sein, or existence per se, is characterized purely by the certainty of death. It is
death that gives the individual’s existence its meaning and, leaning on Des-
cartes’s maxim cogito ergo sum, Heidegger contends that we live as sum mori-
bundus, or being-toward-death.1 That death can be thrust on us at any point and
cannot be avoided means that time itself becomes the carrier of the bacillus of
death and not just a background to existence. Lateness in the works of an indi-
vidual is thus not linked explicitly to the age of that individual. If someone dies

1. Martin Heidegger, A History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1992), 317.
New German Critique 125, Vol. 42, No. 2, August 2015
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2889248  © 2015 by New German Critique, Inc.

49

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 50  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

young, do we consider his or her works “late works” merely because they
come near the end of that person’s life? If Gordon McMullan’s argument that
we become more creative in proximity to death is correct, then is not the cre-
ativity of individuals dependent on their fundamental recognition that death is
always near whether or not the hour is late? If this is the case, then it is not a
matter of “lateness” in any temporal sense that is important but the proximity
of death.2 Thus we must take a view that sees those works in a longer and
greater context of style and type that goes beyond individual temporal exis-
tence and helps us understand an age or epoch in its entirety and locate it in
time as well as locate the author psychodynamically in relation to the concept
of death.
For Bloch, as an explicitly Hegelian Marxist writer—often described as
the left-wing Heidegger—universal becoming (werden) is greater than any
individual, even though it is dialectically carried and formed by the individual
subject. Individual death in Bloch is thus not only the ground and proof of
existence and the “absolute anti-utopia” but also a stage in the establishment of
a greater being.3 As Fredric Jameson puts it:

Now it may be clearer how the Utopian instant, or indeed the Utopian eter-
nity, if it cannot abolish death, may at least rob it of its sting: for where nor-
mally at the moment of dying the individual is brutally wrenched from that
future in which alone he might have found completion, now the transfigured
time of Utopia offers a perpetual present in which there is a specific, yet total
ontological satisfaction of every instant. Death, in such a world, has nothing
left to take; it cannot damage a life already fully realized.4

But who is to decide whether that life is fully realized and what criteria could
be used to determine this? Bloch argues that if the individual life contributes
to the advancement of humanity—that is, if it is part of the Hegelian negation
of the negation—then it is fully realized, not in the sense of its own complete-
ness, but in its place within the construction of something greater, whatever
that might turn out to be. Thus, when we say that people become great by
standing on the shoulders of other great people, this is precisely to locate late-
ness in a chain of being that stretches beyond the individual’s existence and his
or her own labors.

2. See Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proxim-
ity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 8.
4. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 143.

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 Peter Thompson  51

Universalized, death may be a harsh anti-utopia for the individual but

also part of a greater leap forward for humanity. As Bloch says at the end of The
Principle of Hope (1959): “Man everywhere is still living in pre-history. . . .
True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.”5 In this light, a linear tem-
poralization of the world and of being as a closed and finished category within
that temporality misses what is essential in universalized human existence,
namely, incompleteness and change. Time therefore becomes merely a chaotic
place for the development of the conditions for history proper to start, and
within it the building blocks of history can appear at seemingly random points,
or ungleichzeitig (nonsynchronous), as Bloch has it.
In Erbschaft dieser Zeit (The Heritage of Our Times, 1934), for example,
Bloch argues that “not everyone exists in the same Now. Only their appear-
ance is present in that they are visible today. But that does not mean that they
are living at the same time as those around them.”6 For Bloch, space and time
do not exist as part of a linear continuum but rather—in categories borrowed
from both Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the Lurianic
Kabbalah—are relative concepts subject to the same forces of bending and
shifting as the expanding universe (PH, 664). Thus, in the multiversal reality
of existence, any idea or action can exist outside experienced time as an
“invariant of direction.”7 Everything that exists has both a past and a future as
nonsynchronous realities and driving impulses.
Referring to Jimmy Mahoney in Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the
City of Mahagonny (1930), Bloch also contends that our prehistory is charac-
terized by the sense of something having gone missing in the chaos of our
times. The need to rediscover this missing something, with the implication
that we once had it, as well as to find for the first time some future state of
perfection, at present only glimpsed or imagined, becomes a real compulsion
in the opaque present moment of our lives. Bloch maintains that the search for
the something missing is what drives us, but when we find our way to it, we
arrive where we have never yet been, namely, a home that we remember but
that has not yet emerged. Bloch’s categories for understanding this imagined

5. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 1375. Hereafter cited as PH.
6. Cf. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter,
New German Critique, no. 11 (1977): 22, which is taken from Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, enl. ed.
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 104. Hereafter cited as EZ.
7. Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 30. Hereafter cited
as EM. See also Rainer Traub and Harald Wieser, eds., Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 263.

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 52  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

reality are therefore atemporal conceptions of time. They include the “not yet”
(Noch nicht), “nonsynchronicity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit), “preillumination”
(Vorschein), and the “darkness of the lived moment” (Dunkel des gelebten
Augenblicks).
We may well exist in time, thrown into the world, as Heidegger puts it,8
and thus eternally separate from it, but Bloch’s purpose is thus quasi-Gnostic,
in that he uses the concept of time and humanity’s separation from the world
in time to reconcile with the world and its completion as something that cannot
yet be comprehended. He sees no separate ontology but that of incomplete-
ness, so that the transitive is given priority over the intransitive within being,
thus transforming it, in a Hegelian sense, into becoming. For Heidegger, time
is just the shell or clearing (Lichtung) in which being exists;9 for Bloch, how-
ever, it is the means by which being can be transcended out of its own imma-
nence. For Heidegger, the human animal is a “being in time.” Bloch, on the
other hand, takes up Heraclitus’s epithet panta rhei (everything is in flux) and
combines it with Aristotle’s concept of dynámei ón (being-in-possibility), to
conceive of the human animal as a social “becoming” rather than an individ-
ual “being.”10
Bloch’s Hegelian Marxism of the 1920s and 1930s therefore stood
against the reification of thought—including that of Marxism—into a dogma
designed to close down history and make it into an automatic and determinis-
tic system of both reality and the control of reality. He described his own
approach as the construction of an “Open System” (EM, 28) in which not only
his own philosophy but also ontological reality itself was not yet fixed. His
view was that most philosophers had no true concept of ontological reality, as
they had no true concept of reality as an unfinished and autopoietic process.
Rather, reality, in his view, and in particular Marxist reality, always contains
the future. The future here, however, also stands for the past, as time becomes
a multiversal and nonsynchronous reality. Ideas, concepts, and movements
that appear to us from a former age can thus also suddenly be preilluminations

  8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962), 448.
  9. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1976), 53.
10. Elsewhere I have coined the term Gattungswerden (human-becoming) to describe Bloch’s
anthropological approach to the philosophy of future possibilities for humanity. See Peter Thompson,
“Mensch,” in Bloch-Wörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Blochs, ed. Beat Dietschy, Doris
Zeilinger, and Rainer E. Zimmermann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 277.

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 Peter Thompson  53

of things not yet possible except as latent potential. In Bloch’s last work,
Tendenz-Latenz-Utopie (Tendency, Latency Utopia),11 which he was working
on at his death in 1977 and was published a year later, he himself brings
together essays from various points in his life to indicate the threads running
through his work. The title was chosen to delineate how latency is what carries
and gives fundamental expression to tendencies and trends in contemporary
theory and practice. How tendencies play themselves out in a given historical
juncture is an expression of latent possibilities within the “invariant of direc-
tion” that is the human desire for liberation. Taken together, tendency and
latency add up to the possibility of utopia. However, both quantities—in their
indeterminate nature—condition the nonprogrammatic nature of the utopia
arrived at. This is why Bloch describes his utopia as a “concrete” one in the
Hegelian sense of con crescere, that is, a gradual growing together of tendency
and latency to produce a contingent outcome. In that contingent outcome and
the process leading toward it there exists a nonreductive surplus of desire and
hope pulling us forward as a species. Bloch’s philosophy thus represents a
materialist “metaphysics of contingency.”12
Fundamental to Bloch’s philosophy, therefore, is what seems the simple
idea of the “Noch nicht,” or “Not Yet.” However, his Not Yet is one in which
everything is also always already present as potential. Bloch reaches back to
Aristotle and takes up the idea of entelechy to point out that history has not
come to an end and that the immanent potentiality in it is still very much at
work in creating an open future. The present is therefore not a stable interlude
within a linear and necessary progression of time but a contingent and unsta-
ble collision of comprehensions and interpellations of natural and experienced
time: “History is not an essence advancing linearly, in which capitalism, for
instance, as the final stage, has resolved all previous stages, but is rather a
polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity with enough unmastered and as yet by
no means revealed and resolved corners” (EZ, 68–69).
If we compare this understanding to those concepts of contingency and
possibility pursued by contemporary philosophers in recent years, it is clear
that Bloch’s system of a not-yet-ness that reaches backward as well as forward
becomes remarkably prescient and open. Slavoj Žižek, for example, argues

11. Ernst Bloch, Tendenz-Latenz-Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). Hereafter cited
as TLU.
12. See Peter Thompson, “Religion, Utopia, and the Metaphysics of Contingency,” in The Priva-
tization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, ed. Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 82–105.

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 54  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

that “it is not enough just to submit the standard notion of historical progress
to critical analysis; one should also focus on the limitation of the ordinary
‘historical’ notion of time: at each moment of time, there are multiple possi-
bilities waiting to be realized; once one of them actualizes itself, others are
cancelled.”13 For Bloch, however, this cancellation was not permanent in that
the alternative path not actualized could return at some point in a new guise.
This means that to master time in the sense of recognizing its essential nonlin-
ear nonsynchronicity and the multiplicity of contingent actions it creates, we
are required to short-circuit the linear model. Commenting on Jean-Pierre
Dupuy’s notion of the “time of a project,”14 Žižek uses a definition of contin-
gency and time almost identical to that offered by Bloch: “The future is caus-
ally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by
our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation.”15 Žižek also
points out that Alain Badiou follows this process in his use of the term futur
antérieur, in which we imagine a negative future that appears fated to come
about and then act so as to prevent it.16 However, the logical corollary of this
argument is that we live in the “darkness of the lived moment,”17 a situation
that presents us with the problem of finding a leverage point from which it will
be possible to make these choices about which future path to choose.
Positing a dystopia in order to ward it off is a useful intellectual exercise
but is, in effect, a tautological illogicality. If there is no predetermined future,
no given fate, then how do we find the point at which the outcome becomes
clear, given that our lived existence is one of perpetual arrival in our own
future? Is it not more the case, Bloch asks, that contingency is, by its very
nature, something that thrusts itself on us out of darkness rather than insight
(PH, 297)? We do not have free will in this area any more than we do in any
other, as we have relatively little concept of where an event or a decision has
come from and what its consequences will be. If actions are thrust on us by
contingency out of the darkness of the lived moment, we have nothing but
instinct to fall back on to guide us.
This is why Bloch, whose first philosophical experiences were with the
Simmel group, criticizes his mentor’s neo-Kantian attempts to find an Archi-
medean point from which it might be possible to get a grip on both natural and

13. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 459.
14. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 124–26, quoted in
Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 459.
15. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 459.
16. See the journal Futur antérieur, no. 43 (1998).
17. For a complete discussion of this concept, see Bloch, Principle of Hope, 295–316.

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 Peter Thompson  55

experienced time and see it as a totality. Far better, he maintains, to adhere to

a principle of hope in which there is neither dystopian nor utopian telos but
merely a latent possibility for things to differ from the way they are at present.
The quasi-religious dimension of this line of thought immediately becomes
obvious in that the only thing we then carry with us is a faith in the future,
albeit one based in experience, and a hope that what we decide will in some
way negate the existing unsatisfactory conditions. All our actions must be
measured against the future we want to see rather than the one we do not.
Bloch’s Marxist starting point means that he uses an analysis of the social
relations of production as his fulcrum. Nevertheless, he is aware that these
relations themselves are not eternally fixed but are shifting on their own axes
and changing at every moment under the impact of contingent and distantly
determined realities that take place in what Bloch called the “blind spot of the
present.”18
Bloch underpins this positive Marxist approach with an Aristotelian one
by taking the two concepts of kata to dynaton (what is possible) and dynámei
ón (what might become possible) and using the dialectical tension between
them to develop a conception of history and time as an interwoven process.
However, in contrast to Georg Simmel, Heidegger, and later poststructuralist
thought, Bloch sees time not as a more or less random series of nondetermined
events linked only through radically contingent coincidence but as the build-
ing blocks of necessity.
Thus, for Bloch, there is no human being as such but only a human
becoming, in which the individual human life, or Da-sein, is to be seen both as
an ontic being in its own right and as a temporary resting place for a greater
process of collective ontological becoming, in which the processual nature of
nature itself makes existence into a gigantic experiment of its own becoming—
an Experimentum Mundi, as he called it (see n. 7). All that we have is an
unknown knowledge of the unknown as latent possibility, and “there would be
no process if the universe were already complete, if the world were not still to
be changed into all recognition.”19 In other words, the world we wish to see is
the one we already instinctually know.

18. “This darkness can be explained by the blind spot in our eye at the point where the optic nerve
enters the retina and where we cannot see. Only when the point of the blind spot has been passed do
we see the pencil point again as it goes by” (Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang: Sechs Interviews mit
Ernst Bloch, ed. Arno Münster [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977], 167). Slavoj Žižek too uses
this approach in The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
19. Ernst Bloch, Philosophische Aufsätze zur objektiven Phantasie (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1969), 289; my emphasis.

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 56  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

Within this process the temporal event or cultural product, be it early or

late, represents merely a staging post in a larger totality, where the given yields
to its latent possibility. However, the event or product is more than just a
marker. It is itself a constituent and constituting part of the process and con-
tains not only elements of what led up to its production but also elements bor-
rowed from the future. Bloch called these borrowings Vorscheine, or preillu-
minations, of a better world, messages of hope sent to us from a not yet possible
future reality but already known to us from our own need for the fulfillment of
past desires and memories as “anticipatory consciousness” (PH, 43).
The idea in Bloch of the eventual fulfillment of the subject thus contains,
but also goes beyond, the Hegelian and indeed Heideggerian essence of both
being and time as a journey undertaken by consciousness to arrive at itself via
substance and subject. In this sense Bloch would have agreed with Emmanuel
Levinas’s contention that G. W. F. Hegel’s work is essentially a Homeric odys-
sey, representing a repetitive and anamnestic circularity that traps Western
philosophy in an “adventure of a return to his native island.”20 Against this
closed Hegelian system of being and time, Bloch offers an open one in which
the anticipation of the new, the surplus that could exist outside the totality, is
simultaneously not yet comprehensible as well as already imagined along the
way. Thus the idea of an always already present and given telos to history is
replaced in Bloch by the sense that existing totality is merely the starting point
of the journey.
To the phenomenological and ontological investigation of what exists,
Bloch adds the essential aspect of process. For Bloch, time itself is an entirely
multitemporal reality in which speed, direction, development, progress, pro-
cess, stasis, past, present, and future are mixed up in the Not Yet. He sees the
world as an incomplete experiment, in which the philosophers of the past—
above all, Aristotle, Heraclitus, and Parmenides from antiquity, and Friedrich
Schelling, Hegel, and Marx from the modern age—are merged in an attempt
to find within their analyses of past and present a future both not yet present
and always already with us as potential. Paradoxically, therefore, he holds that
the ontology of totality contains its own unfinished autopoietic entelechy.
Thus resting in but also transcending Hegelian dialectics and the Eleatic
pre-Socratics, Bloch shows that the monistic unity propounded first by Par-
menides and then by Hegel can account for change and movement not over
potential time but only in the totality of a preexisting and predetermined telos of

20. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in
Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 345–59.

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 Peter Thompson  57

time. If everything already exists, as the Eleatic school argued, then there is no
place for change, and thus time is abolished in favor of space. Even Heraclitus,
who expounded the doctrine of panta rhei and who is often seen in opposition
to Parmenides, in fact agrees that existence is an immanent totality. For Heracli-
tus, as for Hegel, dialectic contradictions were there simply to bring to comple-
tion a preexisting telos. Everything may well have been in flux, but only within
the given. For Parmenides, too, stasis was a totalizing telos containing and
thereby negating all those preexisting contradictions at work in it. Either way,
everything was always already there. However, Bloch, in the last lines of his last
book, contends that “the Real in and around us has in it, as well as before it, the
surplus of enormous possibility above and beyond the given, according to Leib-
niz’s dictum—which could never have been formulated without Aristotle and
his concept of matter—omne possibile exigit existere (everything that is possi-
ble demands to exist). This is a new transcendence, namely, into an Immanence
which has not yet become” (TLU, 413). This is what “not yet but always already”
means. It is entelechy taken to its logical autopoietic and thus as yet nonexistent
conclusion, in which the process of becoming creates something that does not
as yet exist. Any truth claim for the future must therefore be both provisional
and an act of commitment to and faith in the potential of one’s own truth.
Moreover, it must be driven by a basic desire—for Bloch, the only truly human
characteristic—for a Faustian moment of fulfillment, which can extend into an
eternity of being of and for itself. Any attempt to incarcerate time within space
and to limit that space to a given set of coordinates is, for Bloch, reactionary in
that it disallows the transcendence of totality (TLU, 398–403).
We can see another way to understand this concept of an “Immanence
which has not yet become” with reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous
dictum from Zarathustra: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not
an end.”21 It follows that the injunction must always be “Become who you are!”
(TSZ, 249). In its reactionary and banal form, this injunction to “search for the
hero inside yourself” posits that who we are is always already present in us,
just as in Parmenides everything that can exist already exists in the totality.
What Bloch and Nietzsche mean by it, however, is that the human being is a
not yet completed animal and that it is only by becoming who we are that who
we will be comes into existence. “Immanence which has not yet become”
means precisely this: that the becoming is constitutive of the being, but that the
reality of becoming is a reality with the future in it, as yet incomplete.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (London: Macmillan, 1896), 8. Hereafter cited
as TSZ.

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 58  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

In volume 1 of The Principle of Hope Bloch states in this context:

That which is in itself and immediately proceeds as Now is thus still empty.
The That in Now is hollow, is still undetermined, as a Not in fermentation.
As a Not from which all begins and around which every Something is built.
The Not is not There but in that it is, in that sense, the Not of a There, it is
not simply a Not but at the same time a Not-There. As such, the Not cannot
stand being with itself for too long, but is much more driven to find the
There of a Something. The Not is the lack of Something and, as such, the
flight from this lack. . . . Because the Not is the beginning of every move-
ment toward something, it is in no way, therefore, a Nothing. Indeed, Not
and Nothing must be kept as far apart from each other as possible; the
whole adventure of becoming lies between them. (PH, 356; my translation)

The Now thus always carries within it both the Not and the Nothing and is
characterized only by its function as a place where linear time gives up its
need to exist in favor of a collision of past and future. Human beings are thus
driven not to seize the day but in fact to seize the future. The day, in the sense
of the Nowness of now, is an empty vessel, unavoidably present (in both senses
of the word) but eternally discarded along the way. The present is in this model
merely an invisible stepping-stone between a nonexistent past and future. If
you decide that the seizing of the day is the highest goal, then you will be stuck
on the stepping-stone as Heraclitus’s river rushes past without your stepping
into it even once, let alone twice.
Bloch’s duality of Not and Nothing are, of course, the bookends of life
itself. The Not is the state in which we do not find ourselves before our Da-
sein, our being-there, and the Nothing is the state in which we do not find
ourselves after it. This is certainly the case for the linear, the particular, and
the ontic level. Of course, we are born, we live, we die, and in that sense there
is a linear, and biological, progression to our temporal existence. Time as a
subjective concept, “historical” time, however, exists only in our heads, mean-
ing that we are not only at liberty but also condemned to treat it as we see fit.
And in that sense, the present—that is, historical, lived, and experienced
time—exists only as incomprehensible chaos and confusion on which we try
to impose order. In the face of this confusion, the Now, the moment of exis-
tence, is so full of everything that it can appear to us only as a void.
The question of being and time posed by Heidegger thus becomes in
Bloch a question of social being within collective time. For Bloch, time is a
class issue. As Bloch’s close friend and collaborator Walter Benjamin said in
his Arcades Project, “What Proust means by the experimental rearrangement

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 Peter Thompson  59

of furniture in matinal half-slumber, what Bloch recognizes as the darkness of

the lived moment, is nothing but that which is to be secured here at the level of
the historical, and collectively.”22 The barely perceptible contingencies of daily
life have to be given their place in the philosophy and politics of a historical
metanarrative for them not only to make sense in themselves but to become a
constitutive part of that metanarrative itself.
In this sense, then, we live like Schrödinger’s cat, and one that has been
reading too much Heisenberg at that: pretty sure of our own existence—
though sometimes willing to be convinced otherwise—but unsure about
whether there is anything outside the void of the present moment. In his 1962
foreword to Erbschaft dieser Zeit Bloch writes that existence is “a void with
sparks, that will probably be our fate for the time being, but it will be a void in
which we will be able to walk upright and with sparks which will gradually
make out a figure of direction” (EZ, 22).
It is this insight of Bloch’s that restores time as the forum of process to
the equation and gives it back its rightful place as the driving force of space.
This is important because it returns the argument to the question of lateness.
In this sense lateness both exists and does not exist within objective linear
time, but it can be rescued from anamnestic circularity and entrapment in tem-
porality only by a determined effort to recapture and transform it from the late
product of its producer into the early product of the as yet incomplete process
of human liberation.
If, as Heidegger maintains, time is simply a space for the individual to
exist as a component part of being, but there is no underlying substrate or nou-
menal realm from which our existence as individuals emerges, then time is,
for Heidegger, simply the framework in which we can comprehend the abyssal
and meaningless contingency of our individual existence. Our being in the
world, for Heidegger, is thus also part of a monistic or unitary phenomenon,
but this time with no telos and no purpose: it simply was, is, will be, and then
it will end. As Heidegger says, “The history of being is being itself.”23 For
Heidegger, therefore, the only role we have as ontic beings is as keepers of the
flame of ontological being.
The logic of this—plus the absence of any sort of class analysis—
explains why Heidegger was indeed won over by the banal interpretation of

22. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), K1, 2, 389.
23. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and
Row, 1975), 82.

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 60  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

the Nietzschean dictum of becoming who you are. Along with many other phi-
losophers and writers—from Rainer Maria Rilke, via D. H. Lawrence, to Paul
de Man—he transferred ontological significance to those heroic yet undoubt-
edly ontic figures praised by fascism who appeared to stand outside the mass
collective and commune with ontological being. For Heidegger, Adolf Hitler
seemed able to uncover the secrets of being by integrating limited and lost
ontic entities back into an ontological wholeness. The promise of the Third
Reich based on a people’s community (from the Nazi term Volksgemeinschaft)
was to create a realm of being for all in which it would no longer be necessary
to think about being, since the heroes of salvation, be they Christ or Hitler,
would take over that function. The term Third Reich itself was taken from
Joachim di Fiore, who maintained that the Third Reich would represent the
liberation of humanity through the return of Christ anew, the perfect example
of noncontemporaneity.
This is precisely why Bloch has sometimes been called the left-wing
Heidegger: because he too took di Fiore’s idea of the Third Reich and, instead
of rejecting it as fascist and eschatological, maintained that the Left had
missed a vital trick by not occupying it for its own universal rather than racial,
particularist, or nationalist purposes. For if Heidegger’s flirtation with Nazism
was the product of his inability to see the social and class dimension of being
and time, then, Bloch maintained, the Left should equally have been able to
see that the abstract desire for a return to a Heimat (home) in the form of a
Third Reich was, in class terms, an entirely understandable, and indeed laud-
able, aim that had simply been stolen from communism.
In Erbschaft dieser Zeit Bloch writes:

Depending on where someone stands physically, and above all in terms of

class, he has his own times. Older times than the modern ones continue to
have an effect in older strata; it is easy to make or dream one’s way back
into older times. . . . In general, various years are always beating in the one
which is just being counted and dominates. They contradict the Now; very
strangely, crookedly, from behind. (EZ, 104)

For Bloch, as a Marxist, this means that time itself, or rather the perception of
time, was determined not only by subjectivity but also by objective class posi-
tion. Our social being determines our consciousness of time, but to see its
crooked nature we have to be able to look at it crookedly and in inverted form.
Fascism’s genius, he maintained, was precisely in mobilizing nonsimultaneity
to create a crooked and inverted view of the world.

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 Peter Thompson  61

The conclusion Bloch came to in terms of temporal reality and the rela-
tionship between past and future thus has similarities to Heidegger’s but in fact
reverses its anamnestic base and contends that what humanity undertakes is a
form of nostalgia for something that has not yet existed but that we know in an
unconscious way has already gone missing. In perhaps the best-known quota-
tion from Bloch, he writes at the end of The Principle of Hope:

Humanity lives everywhere still in pre-history, indeed each and everything is

waiting for the creation of a just world. The true Genesis is not at the begin-
ning, but at the end, and it will only start to come about when society and
existence [Dasein] become radical, i.e. take themselves by their own roots.
The root of history, however, is the laboring, creative human, engaged in
reshaping and overcoming given conditions. Once he has grasped himself
and that which is his, without alienation and based in real democracy, so
there will arise in the world something that shines into everyone’s childhood,
but where no one has yet been: homeland. (PH, 1376)

We are creating the world as we work in it, and the work we produce out of the
darkness of the lived moment is the very thing that creates the spark to illumi-
nate the way. Every piece of work is the latest contribution to that process, and
each one is a Vorschein, a preillumination or glimpse, of a better world. Bloch
sums up his attitude to lateness and “the last” as a historically relative reality
in the final parable in his book Spuren (Traces, 1930). In this parable, “The
Pearl,” he shows how the desire for the end of struggle, of traveling, of exodus
and the constant search for home can lead people to mistake uniformity and
stability for oneness. The year 1930 came in the middle of the period in which
fascism was offering the stability and uniformity of the Volksgemeinschaft,
trying to convince the German people that the final goal, the end of history as
the thousand-year Reich, was within reach. In the Soviet Union, too, Stalin had
consolidated his power by promising the bureaucracy and the Soviet people
the stability of socialism in one country in place of the chaos of world revolu-
tion that had been promised by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In both
countries, second best was presented as the best of all real existing possible
worlds. Against this, Bloch claims:

There is no correct path without a goal just as there is no goal without the
power of a path to reach it, indeed a path which is contained within the
goal. So if we look around, here and now, within actively established time
within an actively transformed space, the traces of a so-called Lateness,
the last point we have reached, the home we have found, are in fact only the

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 62  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

footprints of a walk which still has to take us into the new. It is only from a
great distance that all the things which we meet and see along the way
merge into one.24

The utopian sense of the return to an as yet unknown home is central to Bloch,
so that the impulse both behind and ahead of us in temporal terms pushes us on
from what was, via what is, to what might be a preillumination of what we
already know. The darkness of the lived moment thus becomes the bridge
between kata to dynaton and dynámei ón. Where Franz Kafka saw culture and
art as the ax with which to break the frozen sea within, Bloch saw it as the
spark that would ignite the bright “utopian star” in us and thence in everything,
and he was convinced that, sooner or later, it would come to us all.25
Ernest Mandel and Fredric Jameson both describe the period since 1945
as one of “late capitalism.” For Mandel, this is a largely economic description,
which charts how finance capital has become the most important sector driving
the world economy, as opposed to the industrial capital on which the Western
world was built. Jameson, of course, concentrates instead on the ideological and
cultural consequences of this shift to finance capital.26 But both of them are
pointing out how economic systems are converging and accelerating toward a
fully commodified economic system—Marx called capitalism a system of
“generalized commodity production” (allgemeine Warenproduktion)—which,
in its wake, brings about precisely the melting of “all that is solid into air.”
In this sense capitalist society today is very different from the one that
both Bloch and Heidegger experienced. The social impetus (even in its per-
verted forms of fascism and Stalinism—both attempts in their day to “buck
the market”) is increasingly eclipsed by private interest and social atomiza-
tion. However, the apparent triumph of capital in this latest manifestation—it
would be too optimistic to imagine that it is really late capitalism—also gives
rise to its own negation. The revolts it is provoking stretch from the Occupy
movement in the metropolitan centers of the West via a socially conservative
clownesque and neo-Poujadist movement in the form of a Le Pen or a Nigel
Farage to the fundamentalist antimodernism of radical Islam. But, as different

24. Ernst Bloch, Spuren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 220; my translation.
25. Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollack, January 27, 1904, in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors,
trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 16; Ernst Bloch, The Spirit
of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 171.
26. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1975); Fredric Jame-
son, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).

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 Peter Thompson  63

as they are in their political complexion, they both appeal to a time out of time,
an Ungleichzeitigkeit, in which there is, on the one hand, an unfocused revolt
against the stifling conservatism and conformity of consumer society that
harks forward to a postconsumerist world and, on the other, a reactionary
harking back to the imagined certainties of a premodern and pristine life-
world. Where Jameson talks of “inverted millenarianism,” we could say now
that we are experiencing both full-blown Jihado-fascist millenarianism and a
weak anarcho-liberalism that seeks to bring about a new world but without any
structural analysis of how to achieve that.
We have not, in that sense, moved forward from the aporia between the
Not and the Nothing but have filled that aporia with pragmatic accommoda-
tion married to groundless privatized optimism. The postuniversalist death
of a programmatic utopia has perhaps liberated us from the constraints that
the program lays down for our ability to think beyond the quotidian, yet when
we do try to do this, it becomes difficult to identify what might come next.
Jameson famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than
it is to hope for a better one.27 Maybe this is the ultimate lateness: the sense
that it is too late to do anything to save what we have, let alone to dream of a
better future.
The ideological and political complexion of our world today is marked
by the ontological suspicion of collective utopias in any credible sense so that
the idea can emerge again only as an individualized abstraction. Hope has
been privatized so that Bloch’s “bright utopian star” exists purely within the
snow globe of individual consciousness and awareness of death.28 Heidegger’s
sum moribundus has been married with a banal and bowdlerized understand-
ing of carpe diem in which individual biography becomes more important
than the individual’s contribution to, and place within, the collective context.
In this context of the “end of history,” of course, lateness as a concept in its
own right becomes an all-embracing being toward death. However, if, as Bloch
puts it at the end of The Principle of Hope, genesis comes not at the beginning
of a process but at its end, then it can also be said that lateness can arrive not at
the end of a process but at its beginning. For now, the “darkness of the lived
moment” continues to limit our view of the future. If we now return to the

27. This remark is often attributed to Jameson, yet in the New Left Review essay in which it
appears (“Future City,” NLR, no. 21, May–June 2003), it is itself an unattributed quotation from an
informal conversation.
28. See Thompson and Žižek, Privatization of Hope.

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 64  Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, Being and Time

combination of lateness and latency outlined above, we could argue that the
darkness we are experiencing today is merely a rerun of all previous dark his-
torical moments, this time not as farce but as accelerated potentia in Aristote-
lian terms. It is not that we are approaching the end of history but that history
is beginning to give up its multiversal meanderings and focus increasingly
on the universal triumph of late capitalism. Here too, however, the term late
is to be taken not only as a temporal linear description but also as a quali-
tative description of a processual stage. The only question that remains is
“What comes next?”

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