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55 EINBLICKE
23
One could call them experiences of happiness. I remember
building a city out of sand as a child.While I was playing inmy
city a ray of sunlight was suddenly reflected in a piece of glass.
This reflection had the power of conviction, something like a
proof of meaning.We collect all sorts of these experiences of
fulfillment in the course of our lives. And with themwe sense
that so much of our lives fails to live up to the promises of
thesemoments of fulfillment.This feeling is bound upwith the
"darkness of the lived moment". It doesn‘t supervene upon
our experience. It sits at the very centre of our experience.
EINBLICKE: Sowe‘re dealingwith something that is verymuch
part of our everyday existence?
KREUZER: Just like the "now" that has already passed.The dar-
kness in other words doesn‘t stand for somethingmysterious
or merely expected.The meaning of utopia is more decisively
oriented towards what is possible in the present, towards that
which according to Bloch is constantly updated as a working
programme – that which does "not yet" exist.This slips by in
themoment – it is the ray of light that suddenly lendsmeaning
to the city of sand, so to speak.
EINBLICKE: Possible in the present and written into it, but
not yet fulfilled: Kant, Hegel and Augustine all had a major
influence on Bloch‘s understanding of utopia. What exactly
did they contribute to Bloch‘s thinking?
KREUZER: This poignant sentence comes from St. Augustine:
"Those who are happy in hope, are not yet happy." What we
remember – thanks to the ray of light on the sandbanks of
human activity – as hope, of course we know "is not". Yet this
is the precisely the point: the negation of the present. It is a
touchstone with which and against which we can measure
what history has left us with. Kant called this sort of thing the
regulative use of reason.
EINBLICKE: Which comes under the Ancient Greek meaning
of utopia: the "non-place", the non-locatable.
KREUZER: And it‘s precisely here – to continue with our little
philosophical excursion – that both Bloch and Adorno join
companywithHegel and his concept of determinate negation.
What is contained in "not"? The "pre-visualisation" of what is
not yet there: this is what Bloch‘s encyclopaedia on utopia and
the meaning of hope is about. Or the strict ban on images,
which sees in the naming
of catastrophes the mirror
writing of their opposite –
this is something Adorno
undertakes. In his "Negative Dialectics" he shows that the
negation of the ray of light does not disappear as negated
evidence of meaning – but remains present, precisely as
negation: as the inadequacy of what is at hand.
Johann Kreuzer: „Der Sinn der Utopie richtet sich
auf das, was noch nicht ist.“
Johann Kreuzer: "The meaning of utopia is
oriented towards that which does not yet exist."
"
All that‘s left is a perpetual
obligation to react.
"