This week I picked up Keywords of Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle and it has been a treat. Since each chapter is around four or five pages long, I’ve been using it as a radical daily devotional.
This is from the chapter on hope:
Hope is not fantasy, faith, optimism, or wish, but rather the strongest of all human emotions. “Hope, this expectant counter-emotion against anxiety and fear is therefore the moist human of all mental feelings and only accessible to [humans], and it also refers to the furthest and brightest horizons. It suits that appetite in the mind which the subject not only has, but if which, as unfulfilled subject, it still essentially consists”(Bloch 1995, 75). In this view, hope possesses a utopian function, which enable us to engage with the “not-yet” dimension of reality that inhabits the present and can be anticipated her and now. Hope in this sense is willful rather than wishful: it informs people’s concrete behaviors to forge a better life.
black flag theology 