Hope is always thwarted because the future necessarily exceeds our anticipations

Evidence

This is why, for all the emphasis on hoping and wishing, such experiences in the concrete world of our own imperfect here-and-now are always themselves figures of a wishing that has not yet fully revealed itself: by the same token, those instants which satisfy the most intense wishes are always, according to ancient psychological insight, in their very essence disappointing. Thus the title of Bloch’s Tübingen inaugural lecture, in this context an astonishing one: “Can Hope Ever Be Thwarted?” receives an even more astonishing answer: hope is always thwarted, the future is always something other than what we sought to find there, something ontologically excessive and necessarily unexpected. Thus the negative is reabsorbed back into the positive, not as facile consolation, but as a kind of via crucis of hope itself, an enlargement of our anticipations to include and find satisfaction in their own negations as well. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 267

Categorization

• XREF: Bloch’s ‘hope is always thwarted’ — the via crucis of hope that absorbs negation into itself — is the utopian counterpart to Adorno’s negative dialectics, and Jameson’s framing shows the Frankfurt lineage of what the reader is studying. — connects to: The future is neither fully visible nor invisible but frustrates anticipation by surprise; The future’s anticipatory structure holds teleological necessity and surprise together — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 250; The For-itself can only found itself by projecting toward a future it never reaches — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 453 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The future is neither fully visible nor invisible but frustrates anticipation by surprise #corroborates (0.92)
• The future’s anticipatory structure holds teleological necessity and surprise together #expands (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 250
• Proust’s wish-structure reveals the future as necessarily more than expectation #exemplifies (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 293
• The For-itself can only found itself by projecting toward a future it never reaches #corroborates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 453
• The vulgar sequential conception of time erases all possibility of a genuinely surprising future #complicates (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 77