Teleology with Multiple Temporalities: Bloch’s Exercises in Non-synchronicity

• In Event: Critical Theory and Historicity: (Re)imagining an Emancipated Future

Abstract

Two of Ernst Bloch’s most consistent intellectual commitments stand in tension. On the one hand, he embraced an emancipatory Marxist philosophy of history centered on a coming future utopia without distinctions of class. On the other hand, he insisted on the “synchronicity of the non-synchronous,” a concept that foregrounds the simultaneous existence of multiple temporalities at any given historical moment. The first commitment is teleological and even inevitabilist; even the human acts that are the proximate motors of history only draw out tendencies already latent in the world, and Bloch’s ontological scheme leaves little room for creativity and choice of ends. The second commitment, however, pushes not only against any single goal of history, but also against the very division of time into past, present, and future, a phenomenological account of time’s lived experience rather than a normative-cum-ontological account of the future-in-the-present.

This paper puts this apparent impasse under the microscope, with the aim of not only making sense of Bloch but also in helping think more generally about multiple temporalities in history. I first treat Bloch’s abstract discussions of historical teleology and non-synchronicity, respectively, showing that he does not (alas) provide much detail in this regard. Then, I turn to several of Bloch’s accounts of figures in the history of philosophy and culture to get a handle on how these topics play out concretely, looking at his writings about the French medieval ontologist David of Dinant and the German Early Modern radical theologian Thomas Müntzer, both of whom came, per Bloch, before their time. I argue that, taken together, these abstract and concrete perspectives reveal three things: first, that Bloch’s thought is more complicated and internally rich than is often assumed; second, that this notwithstanding, for Bloch, historical teleology is compatible with and even takes priority over multiple temporalities in a way that flies in the face of many contemporary scholars who take his lead; and third, that to use non-synchronicity as an analytical tool requires further pluralizing the concept itself.

Author

• Loren Goldman, University of Pennsylvania