“The Exodus into the Utterly-New”: Between Hope and Despair

Abstract

In my essay, I want to ponder on the psychotheology of hope: the messianic affects which attach themselves to the promise of Exodus—of yetziat, a liberating getting-out from the world imagined as a “house of bondage” or an “iron cage” without exits. In my juxtaposition of Bloch’s philosophy of Exodus with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of Western modernity as an Exodus gone wrong, I would like to focus on the intricate relation between hope (represented at its purest by the former) and despair (represented at its purest by the latter). I would like to prove that, contrary to appearances, the one cannot be thought without the other: hope can only come to the fore at the background of the darkest despair and vice versa—the despair can only be understood as a loss of hope. By correcting Bloch’s metaphysical optimism with the Frankfurt duo’s plunge into the abyss of hopelessness (recall Lukacs’s malicious joke about Adorno as an inhabitant of the “Grand Hotel Abyss”), I wish to reclaim the idea of despair for the messianic idiom which too often feels uneasy about it, wrongly convinced that it cannot let in a sense of the loss of hope.