Daly, Frances. (2013). The zero-point: Encountering the dark emptiness of nothingness. in Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek (eds.) The privatization of hope: Ernst Bloch and the future of utopia. Durham: Duke University Press, 164-202.

Summary:

Daly analyzes many of the recurring images in Bloch’s work to find “zero-points” as both darkness and emptiness within lived experiences but also as the condition for the possibility of hope.

Keywords: philosophy, theory, utopia

Quotations:

“Humanity is conceived as a possibility, as a challenge to become, not as a given, and this means that no actual assumption concerning the content of being can be made” (p. 172).

“Bloch writes persuasively of a need to learn hope as much as we have learned fear” (p. 198).