Bloch’s astonishment targets the future’s latency in being, not being itself

Evidence

Bloch refuses the “metaphysical question” as Heidegger formulates it (“Why is it that there is something, rather than nothing at all?”), inasmuch as for him being is precisely incomplete, in process, not yet altogether there: what astounds is therefore not so much being itself, but rather the latency of being-to-come at work, the signs and foreshadowings of future being. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 245

Categorization

• XREF: The refusal of Heidegger’s Seinsfrage from a utopian-process standpoint is a classic Frankfurt-school-influenced break; connects to Jameson’s broader treatment of utopia and Bloch’s Not-Yet as read in Adorno’s critical debts. — connects to: Astonishment already contains the narrative arc of the incomplete striving toward the future — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 245; Bloch and Sartre share a doctrine of the future-directed present. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 269