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Beginning Bloch in English

This is still true:

[Blochs philosophy] of hope and ontological anticipation, is itself an anticipation,

and stands as a solution to problems of a universal culture and a universal

hermeneutic which have not yet come into being. It thus lies before us, enigmatic

and enormous, like an aerolite fallen from space, covered with mysterious

hieroglyphs that radiate a peculiar inner warmth and power, spells and the keys to

spells, themselves patiently waiting for their own ultimate moment of

decipherment.Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form, 1971, p. 158-9.

And this is well-put, but not quite true. But its falseness, Adorno himself might have said, is an

authentic symptom of truthfulness; hopelessness the only way of being faithful to what hope once

was:

The title Traces mobilizes for the purposes of philosophical theory the primaryexperiences derived from reading Red Indian stories. A broken twig, a footprint on

the ground, speak volumes to the eagle eye of the child who speculates about

them, instead of resting content with what anyone can see. There is something

here, something hidden, in the midst of ordinary, unobtrusive normality: Theres

more here than meets the eye. What it is, no-one knows, and Bloch, taking a leaf

from the book of the gnostics, suggests that it may not be there at all yet, that it

may be in the process of becoming. But il y a quelque chose qui cloche, and the

more mysterious the source of the trace, the more persistent the feeling that

something is really there. This is the point at which speculative thought seeks a

foothold. As if in mockery of the dispassionate, scientific reflections of

phenomenology, the speculative thinker sets out in search of the ineffable, feelinghis way experimentally towards an interpretation. Indefatigably, the philosophical

moth flutters against the pane of glass between itself and the light. The

conundrums of what Bloch once called the shape of the unformulatable question

are made to crystallize out into whatever answers they may fleetingly suggest. His

traces are survivals of the ineffable experience of childhood which once upon a

time communicated everything. (Adorno, Blochs Traces: The Philosophy of Kitsch)

When we start to read Bloch, it is probably good advice to return to this remark from time to time.

Reading Blochs texts is not so much a journey from beginning to conclusion via the well-ordered

steps of rational argumentation, analysis, deduction, induction or abduction (Peirces term for an

inference to the best available explanation), but a being-abducted in a more disconcerting, literal

sensean exercise in track reading and in being transported into a dimension that escapes what can

be explained already in terms of what we know or what is there: the not-yet, Bloch s singular

thought, the one thought that permeates everything he has ever written, the single thought that

makes him the philosopher he is.

And so, as Nietzsche said of himself, we first have to learn to read Bloch. This learning process is not

the same for everyone, as everyone will have a different encounter with these texts. But the texts do

invite a particular action on the part of the reader. They open up a dimension of thought that often

exists only at the periphery of our awareness. They form, in many different ways, exercises in utopian

thinking. As so often with philosophy, these texts are themselves instances of what they speak of. I

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can be no other way in philosophy. Plato s texts are the way into the encounter with eidos.

Aristotles texts are the articulation of substance. Nietzsches texts are the arrow stretching between

man and bermensch. Derridas texts are themselves the act of deconstruction. This self-reflective

and, I would say, meditative quality is never far off, and is even there, often, when Bloch writes

cultural criticism or history of philosophy, or even where he comes most closely to a standard

academic, argumentative and systematic philosophical style, as in the book Experimentum Mundi,

which he intended as kind of overview of the categorial structure of this thinking. The text is its

enactment.

This latter feature, we can call it the absence of a distinction between score and act, is, incidentally,

also a characteristic of both jazz and punk, art forms which Bloch rejected (jazz) and would have

rejected (punk) if he had known about it, which goes to show that no philosopher can spare us the

task of thinking for ourselves. If a philosopher is any good, he kicks us out after a while, but then he

has given us enough to start off on our own. The kick is the final gift, the ultimate dab of the clothes

brush, the final intellectual there! (F. Scott Fitzgerald). Then that which Bloch calls heritage can

start.

And so, we should think of being in an enchanted forest perhaps more than being in a lecture hall,

when we start to read Bloch. We catch glimpses of exotic, strange creatures. A faun beckons us. Was

that a dragon? We are swept from delight and recognitionwe have come home, finally - to feelings

of uncanniness and darkness on a single page; and all these emotions are our first and most sure

guides as to what is going on around us. We have to find our own way. We can only find our way by

backtracking often and by looking up through the foliage to the guiding star or to the place where it

might appear against the background of the red-golden hue that hovers over the leaves.

Bloch wrote in German, in, as I have sometimes said, a utopian, not-yet German, a constantelaborate play with the language and its unrealized potentials. The anacoluthon is a central stylistic

and philosophical operator for Bloch, the materialization in writing of to think means to transgress.

It is not going too far to say that we could deny the fact that these texts were written in German at

all. And if that is the case, the question of translation changes. It acquires a dimension that Benjamin

envisaged with the idea of pure language, and which Shelley conceptualized with his idea of the

insufficient void in poetic language. The poet seeks to make the insufficient void in language

palpable. Language, we might say with Bloch, is just another real thing, and shares in the ontological

incompleteness of the real. But it does so in a way in which that incompleteness can come to itself

more radically than otherwise. That function is the humanum. Well, the upshot of all of this is, to

my mind, that the question of translating these texts moves into the direction of translating poetry. It

becomes a mutually enriching affair for both source- and target language, and source- and target

text. English is particularly interesting language for the Bloch translator because of the fantastic,

insane possibilities that English, not only a language but the first post-language, offers. English is on

the road to embracing the anacoluthon as its only structural principle. Like, whatever. But: when it

does that, it itself will become the red-golden hue hovering over the dark waters of the real, an

experimentum mundi such as there has never yet been. We should view both translating Bloch into

English and getting to know Bloch in English as an eminently utopian undertaking.

An initial, necessarily limited, pathway into the English speaking Bloch could look something like this,

moving from the initial speechless experience of wonder with which all philosophy starts, to the

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historical-materialist praxis of liberation, dialectically fugueing warm stream and cold stream but

never fusing them lest we end up with a luke-warm mlange which is only worth spitting out. A path

towards the problems of a universal culture and a universal hermeneutic.

1. Spoken and Written Syntax: the Anacoluthon. Literary Essays, p. 497-505.

2.

The story of Rabbi Raphael, in Motifs of Concealmentand Wonder, in Traces, p. 94-97; 169-171.

3. Source and Outflow: Astonishment as Abolute Question, in The Principle of Hope, p. 288-290.

4. The Philosophy of Music, in Spirit of Utopia, p. 34-164.

5. Introduction, in The Principle of Hope, p. 3-18.

6. The Principle of Hope, chapters 13-20. (a more or less systematicpresentation of Blochs

basic philosophical concepts, including an interpretation of MarxTheses on Feuerbach)

7. The Principle of Hope, chapter 36:Freedom and Order, Survey of Social Utopias.

8. The Principe of Hope, chapter 48: Young Goethe, Non-Renunciation, Ariel. (Blochs critical

abilities at their best; the text reads like a Beethoven symphony(George Steiner).

9.

The Principle of Hope, chapter 55: KarlMarx and Humanity; Stuff of Hope.Apotheosis of this

book, outline of the praxis of liberation.

10.The Marxist Distance to Right and Even to Natural Right; the Problem of a Classless

Quintessenceof the Upright Pathin Natural Right, inNatural Right and Human Dignity, p.

209-228.

11.From the same book, the appendix:Christian Thomasius, a German Scholar without Misery.

12.Heritage of Our Times, part III, Upper Middle Classes, Objectivity and Montage(This section

contains among many other famous short texts Blochs review of Benjamins One Way

Street, and a very perceptive critique of phenomenology which puts Bloch s own thinking

into perspective for the philosophically (dis)orientated among us.)13.Atheism in Christianity, chapters 24-26 and 38-44.

14.Dialectics and Hope. This is chapter 25 of Subjekt-Objekt, Blochs monograph on Hegel. It was

published in the New German Critique, 1976, 9, p 3-10.