True hope is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is

Hope is to be reinvented. Would this mean that what this hope aims at is to be obtained through invention, a beautiful utopian future, or through the splendor of the imaginary that certain romantics are said to have had as their horizon? Not at all. The hope that passes by way of the ideal – the lofty heavens of the idea, the beauty of names, the abstract salvation of the concept – is a weak hope. Hope is true hope insofar as it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, what is. What is is presence. But hope is only hope. There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope. The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirms it: I hope little when what I hope for is almost at hand. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope. But at the same time we must not hope, as in a dream, for a chimerical fiction. It is against this that the new hope appoints itself. Hoping not for the probable, which cannot be the measure of what there is to be hoped for, and hoping not for the fiction of the unreal, true hope – the unhoped for of all hope – is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) pp. 40-41