En forgeant une image. Utopie, Heimat et le concept matérialiste d’histoire

Abstract

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image, this paper reads Ernst Bloch’s utopian Heimat figure as poetically staging the temporal dialectics of materialist history. Bloch combines romantic, messianic and materialist temporalities in a critique of the modern progress narrative, which inscribes historicity in the mere next-ness of each now. The continued oppression, exploitation and alienation of human beings under conditions of modern capitalism stands as testimony to the falseness of this assumption. Far from the simplistic teleology with which materialist theories of history in general, and Bloch’s in particular, have so often been identified, utopia as Heimat sets up a complex spatiotemporal matrix which fixes the present as the locus of possibility of transformative action. Only by activating the unfulfilled claims of the past in the interest of a more just future can human beings occupy utopia: that is the meaning which I argue Bloch’s Heimat image brings to bear on contemporary materialist thought and practice.