IMLR, School of Advanced Study, University of London 18 January 2014

The hermeneutics of desire

Johan Siebers
The idea that philosophy must offer some hope of transforming the world that, for a pessimist, philosophy is unnecessary, as Badiou says (2009) traverses the entire history of metaphysics, when read against the grain, against the idealist tendency to seek this transformation in a realm beyond the world to which the subject might have access via the philosophical life.1 After a bad press since Nietzsche was systematically misunderstood, this idea is now back in the philosophical literature (Badiou, iek 2009). Meaning is seen less to lie in the fusion of horizons of modes of interpreting the world or in the deconstruction of attempts at meaning (appropriation) that reveal their nature most clearly at the point where they become mute, than in the confrontation with a transgressive event, a rupture that restores our contact to what is unfamiliar and a cause of wonder, that redraws the border between what is possible and what is impossible and becomes the starting point of a new creation. The event is the encounter with truth, breaking out into the new, orientated towards an ultimate that may remain at bay, that cannot be given a definite identity from within each present context, but that therefore is also in a sense always the same, or universal. The contemporary philosophy is again a philosophy of wisdom as the theory-praxis of eros and desire. A profoundly classical, platonic view of philosophy is being translated to a temporalised ontology of eventuality that can once again affirm the centrality of truth to the very idea of philosophy. Truth exists in and as transgression, enacting what Badiou calls, in a dialogue with iek
I would like to thank Che Brandes Tuka, Erasmus University Rotterdam, for pointing out, in a Facebook post, the quotations from Badiou, iek 2009 which I use here as a platform to introduce the Blochian hermeneutics of desire. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the International Communication Association conference in London, June 2013.
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(Badiou, iek 2009) the idea that the true life is present, without which philosophy is not worth an hours effort. (T)he true life is present in the choice, the distance, the event (2009). The transgressive meaning that the philosophical experience of the event manifests is of the nature and quality of love. For Badiou, as for Plato, the question of love and of the power of love is central to what philosophy is. Love plays out at the changing borderline of the possible and the impossible. I will return to the question of love later on. These thoughts bear a clear resemblance to the philosophy of hope that Ernst Bloch worked on during his entire writing life, from the early years of the 20th century to his death in 1977. For Bloch the transgressive event is the front of existence. It is a moment, in the world but not of the world, where philosophical wonder as the disrupting inconstructable question takes hold of our existence. In Blochs works it becomes the basis of a philosophy of culture, and of a hermeneutic of desire. Blochs reformulation of the task of hermeneutics, namely localise meaning in the constitutive gap that becomes visible in the moment of transgression, can help us to understand contemporary cultural realities in a better way than most other available theories. It can also add something to the contemporary question of the role of philosophy in the transformation of the world. For Blochs philosophy investigates how the transgressive moment is not just a confrontation with a traumatic real, but also the place and form of hope. In their discussion reported in Philosophy in the Present, Badiou and iek agree on the claim that philosophy is not a dialogue. iek says: I am of the same opinion as Badiou, when he emphasizes, with Plato, that philosophy is axiomatic, and asks how the true philosophy could actually be known. Youre sitting in a caf and someone challenges you: Come on, lets discuss that in depth! The philosopher will immediately say, Im sorry, I must leave, and will make sure he disappears as quickly as possible (2009). From Socrates (who, like Nietzsche, is also
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IMLR, School of Advanced Study, University of London 18 January 2014

often misunderstood) to Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein this is lasting trait of the real philosopher. It is the philosophers speechlessness in the face of the event that makes philosophy possible and that each human being has to find for herself as the birthplace of philosophical thinking. There is nothing to argue about. Arguments come later, if at all. Although Wittgenstein misunderstood the nature of the philosophical encounter with truth and took it to imply a quietism, he was very well aware of this aspect of philosophy: If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them (Philosophical Invesigations, 128). The demand that philosophy shows what it is good for, or that some philosopher give universally valid arguments for her claims (lets discuss that in depth!), is often a demand meant to hide the fact that the person putting it forward is unsettled by the openness of philosophical thinking. We cant stand the fact that philosophical questions exist, that we dont yet have anything to say in the face of them, and defend ourselves against the anxiety this provokes by dismissing them. A lot of the academic literature on the topic, maybe even to some extent that genre itself, is a mere symptom of this psychopathology, a point already made by Nietzsche in Zarathustras speech on scholars, by Heidegger in his ironical use of the term contributions to philosophy in the title of his text on the event and later by Marcuse in his discussion of the language of analytical philosophy in One-Dimensional Man. The unwillingness to discuss or argue that characterizes all creative philosophy goes against the ethos of the hermeneutical thinker, for whom the encounter with truth precisely occurs in the dialogue. In the case of the philosophy of the event, we can say that the transgressive moment that constitutes the encounter with truth acts as an axiom, a true philosophical principle. This allows us, retrospectively, to better understand why Bloch named one of his major works The Principle of Hope. Adorno lamented, when it was published, hope can be anything, only not a principle. Looking back, we can say that Bloch foreshadows
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the restoration of axiomatic philosophy and shows how it is a place of hope, of philosophy as the love of wisdom, understood as the love of transforming the world. But, in a renewed sense, there is still a hermeneutic at work here. The axiomatic philosophy of the utopian event incorporates a hermeneutics of desire (subjective and objective genitive intended). In this far-reaching book (The Principle of Hope), written between 1938 and 1948, Ernst Bloch engages in what he calls a 'hermeneutic of desire'. The book is a study of human desires, longing, hopes and utopian images throughout history. It aims to show that the active and creative imagination of a better world is an intrinsic aspect of human existence. Bloch uses the term hermeneutics in a rather non-specific sense, perhaps resonating more with Schleiermacher than with Gadamer. Throughout his work, Bloch seeks to combine the Hegelian idea that truth is historical with the idea that history is open and unfinished, although in a quite precise sense in all historical moments the same things is attempted; it is in its full extent unnamable other than by symbolic intention. The driving force of history is for Bloch a tendency-latency, a realizing force that is ultimately of a utopian (ou topos: no place) nature. The world, and we in it, does not yet know where we are headed, Bloch said in an interview in 1965. Another word he often invokes to indicate what he means is experiment. There is a single but as yet unspecified utopian horizon against which all of reality is a processual experiment in fulfillment. It is perhaps not surprising that the method by which to understand the open, experimental formations of hope that make up our world, shares some of its characteristics with hermeneutics, such as the emphasis on the historical nature of meaning, on contextuality, the notion of a fusion of horizons as a historical process and the symbolical nature of the real. If each thing is not yet what it can be, there is a dimension in which each thing also prefigures, or points towards, what it could be. Meaning goes all the way down. We have to say that Blochs method also differs from what we have come to understand by hermeneutics, in that Bloch holds

IMLR, School of Advanced Study, University of London 18 January 2014

on to a dialectical understanding of the relation between thinking and being and to a dialectical understanding of the process of realization itself. The dialectic, moreover, is materialist in the sense that thinking seeks to think what is not thought itself, and seeks perpetually to correct itself by the reality of things and by seeing itself as a factor in the process of realization. In line with this, the basic structure of dialectical movement consists for Bloch in a transgressive negation of what what has already come to pass. Moments of transgression, whether in thought or in material reality, have the ability to illuminate, even if temporarily and never final, the utopian horizon of the identity between subject and object, between human being and world. This materialism makes the entire intellectual enterprise into a praxis, never removed from concrete human reality, always engaged with what is external to thought itself, in socio-political reality, existential reality, culture and also nature. As such, this type of thinking sees how human reality is structured ideologically. No thinking occurs in abstraction from interests. These can be emancipatory aimed at creating a society of free individuals or they can support the reproduction and perpetuation of existing social structures, which, apart from everything else they achieve, still express oppressive relations between people. The formations of thought that serve the latter interests are ideological: they function by virtue of masking what they in fact accomplish. Blochs thought is therefore a form of critical theory in Horkheimers sense (even if Bloch during his lifetime maintained his distance to the Frankfurt School). It is part of the intellectual side of the practice of liberation. From the point of view of common sense, which seeks to stabilize things as they are, there is always an unwelcome aspect to critical theory. Horkheimer sees this as inherently belonging to it, much the same as resistance or defense is triggered by the attempt to analyze repression in the individual in psychoanalytical practice. The air of the unwelcome also pertains to Blochs thought. The crux of a Blochian understanding of ideology (and here he differs from the classical
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Frankfurt School), however, lies precisely in the principle of hope: ideologies draw their motivational force in a parasitic way from the human hope and desire for the utopian. They are, as it were, inverted or skewed utopian experiments, which structurally place their exploitative or obscene visions of utopia (the law, the free market, the family, privatisation) in an idealized reality, one that is no longer unfinished and open, but already there as completed if only we understood (in whichever way this real presence is in fact to be understood, an aspect in which ideologies show a great variety). We only have to accept it. In this sense, and in this sense only, philosophical idealism is, with myth, the basic form of ideology. But we have to understand that the desire ideology falsely claims to satisfy pervades human and perhaps non-human reality. The project of a critical theory in this sense takes on the shape of a critique of human longing and, on the positive side, a schooling of hope (docta spes). In this way we can understand why we are liable to ideology; we are not only motivated by fear and uncertainty to accept a static order as the safest bet and to naturalize it in doing so. We are also positively disposed to seek identity and fulfillment of desire and liable to their mistaken identification. Bloch inverts Hlderlins well-known line: where there is rescue, danger also rises. With this understanding we can read The Principle of Hope on one hand as a hermeneutical engagement with the phenomenon of (utopian) desire, and on the other we can also read it as incorporating a hermeneutic in which desire is the operative term, in which the utopian becomes the horizon and condition of understanding (human and natural) reality: a far-reaching and exciting insight, that we can apply to many cultural formations, including, in our case, communication and communicative practices that are mediated by technology. We are familiar with ideological readings of the use of communication technology; we are also familiar with theoretical analyses of communication technologies which see these as extensions of human capabilities. But what would be the result of trying to look at

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communicative practices through the lens of the utopian hermeneutic of desire? What are the utopian dimensions that users invest these media with, and can we distinguish between ideological uses and understandings of them, and those that identify theoretically, and shape practically, moments of a utopian practice of liberation and hope? All utopian forms are located in the gap between what is and what could be, or what we would want to be. Utopia is the realm of fantasy. As we have seen, there is for Bloch an aspect to fantasy that we can call objective; it is the basic idea of the utopian philosophy. In communicative practice the gap between what is and what we would want to be occurs as the gap between mediation and immediacy, as the desire for total communication, which is always lacking. This desire immediately shows its impossibility: if there was nothing that was held back in communication, there would be no communication, and communication exposes us to a world of others whom we do not control and who experience us and our communicative actions in ways we can never share. We dont know what we are to other people. So we always communicate both more and less than we want or aim to, and in both directions communication occurs in a movement in which we go beyond ourselves or beyond the order in which we find ourselves. Communication is always and by nature transgressive; if it is not there is no illumination of self, world or other. What we call communication in non-transgressive instances is a mere circulation of meanings, an exchange of information content usually aimed at maintaining system equilibrium, relational homeostasis. There is a dynamic interrelation in such cases but what fails is the aspect of Mitteilung (message as, literally, co-participation), which requires an over-againstness of I and the other(s) that can only occur when communicative exchanges are at once a withholding and a sharing and occur in freedom. Thus communication is a paradox, a prime example of the kind of dialectical materialist practices that are investigated in The Principle of Hope.

When we understand communication in this way, we can see that it, indeed, lives in the same gap or lack as where objective fantasy lives. Communication is one of the ways in which we shape our creative activity, which is directed at changing self and world in the light of our desire. When communication is not face-to-face but mediated, the gap that opens up between self and self-representations becomes visible in a very clear way. We can create a representation of ourselves that we can put to communicative use. Ever since writing was invented, we have invented ways of occupying the space between self and selfrepresentation, in legal writings such as contracts and laws; in literature, either as self-expression or as the formation of the self by the creation of the author as a separate instance; in confessional and letter-writing. The love letter is a form of occupying a gap that gave rise to the very conception of romantic love. The distant lover needs to have a postal address for him or her to remain at a distance, and therefore all the more longed for, all the more loved, all the more there. Distance in these media is mostly a joint distance of time and space, or at least a neutralization of space that enables a temporal mediation to take place, as in the case of publishing. In this type of communicative practice we activate imaginatively the utopian lack that pervades existence, bridge it experimentally as it were and in doing so objectify these self-expressions as ways of worldmaking and ways of self-making, always marked by the underlying gap that they as much seek to cross tentatively as express radically. Every human being is an abyss (Bchner); that recognition is the basis of human togetherness and identity as a non-reified, open creation of self in relation with others. Something fascinating happens when the mediated communication forms that exploit the distance between self and representation that mediation affords become interactive, when the distance in space is decoupled from distance in time. The technology that enables this separation is the telephone line, but the vast difference between on one
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IMLR, School of Advanced Study, University of London 18 January 2014

hand the medial affordance of the telephone apparatus, which removes the ability to frame representations dramatically by its exclusion of any form of temporal organization other than real time, and on the other phone-line-enabled media such as email, blogging, video posting and most clearly the use of social media, shows why it is only with the arrival of the internet that the potential of the separation of space and time in mediated communication becomes visible. The cultural practices that can develop on the basis of this technological innovation reflect the gap between self and selfrepresentation back into itself, creating an adversarial logic within the subject. It is no longer the case that I am the letter writer here and now and the imagined subject of the pathos of love as imagined into another realm there and then; the there and then and the here and now (Munoz 2009) coincide in social media. I am both within and outside of myself at the same time, the logic of otherness is put back into the subject itself, which can now understand itself in a new way: no longer the present subject which projects herself into a future, crossing the abyss between now and then, here and there, but rather as the gap itself, which gives rise to here and now and there and then, the impossible but necessary coincidence of these two poles, a reality that cannot be grasped in any stable symbolization or meaning, something quite akin to the Lacanian traumatic real. More clearly than before in this constellation subjectivity becomes a process or practice of transgression, a radical lack which always functions as a surplus in any stable relational practice or social order; but a surplus that also harbors the ground figure of hope, of attempted realization. We discover a radicalized form of perfomativity here, for the operative moment in the construction of the subject is the performance of transgression, agency to materially change self and world. This constellation is, perhaps, becoming a ubiquitous reflective cultural trait with the emergence of interactive social media. It may help us to grasp in a better way the abyssal nature of self and community,
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and to shape selves and communities therefore in a more radically inclusive and open way than before. The practice of liberation, in this sense, is served by interactive social media. It is a praxis that is queer, hopeful and true precisely in its work of unsettling and destabilizing; it is a praxis of the new. Munoz' conceptualization of the queer as a 'cruising utopia', a space of 'there and then' moving within the 'here and now' can help us to give further voice to the nature of longing and self-representation that we find in interactive social media. Taken in a wider sense than the meaning it sometime has, cruising can be taken as indeed a possible name for the cultural practices of the experimental realization of the utopian in the schooled hope of dialectical materialism; illuminations of finality that remain unplaceable and unplaced. Shards of remembrance that show up the real that is impossible and necessary at the same time. All culture is a way of recognizing this impossibility in human existence; the social media can afford that recognition as well. As more and more communication takes place between 'non-existent' participants in the interactive processes of community making, fantasy become reality in the sense of an objective factor in the experience and self-realisation of individuals. But that non-existence is, as we can see with Blochs hermeneutic of desire, not only a dystopian catastrophic decadence into a histrionic politics of identity-by-disguise (a new form of alienation and commoditization); it is also a not-yet-existence in which what we might be can become real, in which the natural lure of life and the seduction that is the heart of meaning have found new and uncharted ways of informing agency. Precisely because of that, and like all cultural innovations, they move along the thing wedge between ideology and the possibility of a significant experience. Bloch's notion of 'objective fantasy' as a mode of knowing is a corrective to our often superficial understanding of virtual reality. So mysterious in his own time, it can now become the key to understanding what is happening with who we are in virtual space.

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Futurity opens up as a space of permanent displacement, against the horizon of utopia, a messaging in the not-yet. The there and then in the here and now. Bloch's double hermeneutics of desire allows us to understand the farreaching communicative innovation that interactive, real-time mediatisation has brought about. We are no longer where we thought we were, when we communicate. That is a hopeful message, it is the message of hope itself. References: Alain Badiou, Slavoj iek, Philosophy in the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press 2009. Ernst Bloch, The principle of hope. Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1986. Jose Munoz, Cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. New York: New York University Press 2009. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell 1958.