[…] the ‘absolutely negative expectant emotion: despair’. This is expectation as eliminated expectation, expectation in its negative form, despair as the flipside of hope. 

Analogously, the decisive incentive toward utopia I argue is present in Satantango is built on this permeating sense that something’s missing. The utopia exists, in the words of Adorno, ‘in the determined negation’, it comes into being through the false, cheap and cruel utopia (offered on the one hand by Irimias and, on the other, by the socialist and bureaucratic Hungarian regime). This is the negative dialectics of hope and utopia at work in the novel. One cannot cast a picture of it in a positive manner. 

In the midst of hopelessness, there is hope, a hope against hope. There is a dialectic between hunger and hope, a negative dialectics in the words of Adorno

Satantango, then, would be full of despair, but not disillusion. The one who is disillusioned can live quite comfortably with her disillusion, in her disillusion; the one in despair cannot. Disillusion belongs to cynicism, despair to hope. 

‘This is perhaps what Béla Tarr wants to say when he assures us that his films are messages of hope. They do not speak of hope. They are his hope’). This is in fact in line with the view of Béla Tarr himself, who insists that he is not a pessimist.