| Sumario: | Robert Musil's monumental, unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943) utilizes its vast possibilities to inscribe a re-figuration of dominant historical materialism. It reflects on different approaches to history beyond a "mnemotechnic" of inscription, instead encouraging engagement with textuality through open hermeneutics—and not only in nominally literary or aesthetic discourses. Musil's novel invites applying this approach to history, where his narrator explores how we might consider the happenings of the world (and their discursive restrictions through writing) differently, by attempting to think with their opening to possible interpretive futures. By emphasising the possibility of allegory over historicist mnemotechnics, Musil's purposefully unfinished text maps its philosophy of a writing that is unpredictably material onto history, which can only happen—endlessly—in the future.
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