Editorial Introduction

Abstract

Writing in the shadow of Nazi Germany, Ernst Bloch bears witness to how a proliferation of ordinary and extraordinary hopes are part of Western everyday life.For Bloch (1961/1998), hope discloses tendencies and latencies that are on the horizon of the present: Consequently, not only hope's affect (with its pendant, fear) but, even more so, hope's methodology (with its pendant, memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance, and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy.(p.341) Bloch's emphasis on the sometimes scrumpled, sometimes folded, topos of hope dramatizes the problem that the articles in this special issue engage with-how bearing witness to spaces of hope involves thinking of ordinary, quotidian, life as notyet-become.Or, put differently, how the presence of hope heralds the possibility that the spatial/temporal here and now may become otherwise (whether hope is for a change from, or continuation of, that here and now).The link between hope and a potential or actual interruption of life is a theme shared by other writers on hope.For example, by contrast with Bloch's (1959Bloch's ( /1986, Vol. 1) concept of surplus utopia that locates utopia in traces of the past and the present, Lingis (2002) argues that hope "arises from a break with the past.There is a kind of cut and the past is let go of " (p.23).Massumi (2002),