The title Spuren [traces or tracks] puts childhood experiences of reading Indian stories to work in the service of philosophical theory. A broken twig, an imprint on the ground speak to the expert eye of youth, which does not confine itself to the things everyone sees but engages in speculation instead. There’s something here, something hidden here in the midst of normal, everyday life: “Something’s going on” (15).* What it is, no one quite knows, and at one point Bloch says, speaking with the Gnostic school, that perhaps it does not even exist yet and is only in the process of becoming. But il y a quelque chose qui cloche—something’s wrong—and the more mysterious the source of the track, the more insistent the feeling that this is what it is. This is the point on which speculation focuses. As if mocking phenomenology with its self-possession and scientific circumspection, speculative thought seeks out aconceptual phenomena and experiments with interpretation, feeling its way. Indefatigable, the philosophical moth flies at the plane of glass in front of the light. The enigmas of what Bloch once called the form of the unconstruable question are to crystallize into the answers they happen to suggest at the moment. The traces come from the unutterable domain of childhood, which once said all there was to say. Many friends are quoted in the book. Most likely they are friends from adolescence, Ludwigshafen relations of Brecht’s Augsburg pals, of George Pflanzelt and Müllereisert. In the same way, half-grown boys smoke their first pipe as though it were the pipe of perpetual peace: “Wonderful is the coming of evening, and beautiful is the talk of men together.” But these are men from Brecht’s city of Mahagonny in Dream-America, along with Old Shatterhand and Winnetou from Leonhard Frank’s Würzburg gang of thieves, a smell that is more pungent between the covers of a book than it ever was by the fishy river or in the smoke-filled bar. The grown man, however, remembering all this, wants to turn the cards he played then into a winning game, but without betraying the image of them to his all too grown-up reason; almost any interpretation first assimilates the rationalistic interpretation and then undermines it. The experiences are no more esoteric than whatever it was about the ringing of the Christmas bells that seized us and can never be completely eradicated: the feeling that what exists here and now cannot be all there is. Something has been promised, and it seems, even if that is an illusion, guaranteed as only in great works of art—with which Bloch’s book, impatient with culture, does not want to have much to do. Under the compulsion of artistic form, all happiness is too little and is in fact not happiness at all: “Here too something is growing more luxuriantly than the familiar breadths of our subject (and the world) allow; excessive fear and ‘unfounded’ joy have concealed their causes. They are hidden within the human being and not yet loose in the world; joy least of all, and yet it is the most important thing” (169). Bloch’s philosophy wants to tear the promise of joy away from cozy petit-bourgeois security with the grappling iron of the literary pirate, rejecting what it wants in the here and now and projecting what is closest to hand onto something that is supreme, something that has not existed. Happiness, divided à la Goethe into the happiness of what is close at hand and the happiness of what is highest, is forced back together until it reaches the breaking point; the happiness close at hand is happiness only when it signifies happiness in the highest, and the highest is present only in what is close to hand. The expansive gesture wants to transcend the limits set for it by its origins in what is close at hand—in immediate individual experience, chance psychological phenomena, mere subjective mood. The arrogance of the initiate takes no interest in what the state of permanent amazement says about the one who experiences it. It turns its attention instead to what the amazement reveals, indifferent to the question of how the poor fallible individual subject reached that state: “The thing-in-itself is objective imagination” (89). The individual’s fallibility, however, is incorporated into this construction. The inadequacy of finite consciousness makes infinite consciousness, which it is to participate in, something uncertain and enigmatic; but at the same time it confirms it as something compelling and definite, on the grounds that its uncertainness is nothing but subjective inadequacy.
Thinking that follows trails is narrative thinking, like the apocryphal model of the adventure story about the journey to a utopian goal, a model for which Bloch would like to create a radiant image. Bloch is led to narrative as much by his overall conception as by his natural inclinations. To read Blochian narrative as mere parable would be to misunderstand it. The parable’s lack of ambiguity would deprive narrative of its color, a color whose optics place it outside the spectrum, like the trumpet-red in one of Leo Perutz’s ingenious thrillers. Instead, the narrative tries, through adventure and extraordinary events, to construct a truth that is not already in our possession. The reader is seldom provided with compelling interpretations. It is as though the audience for one of Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tales were sitting around listening to someone from some south-German Orient, where there is a city called Backnang and an expression that goes “ha no.” First one thing and then another is brought out—progressively, however, with a conceptual motion that says nothing about Hegel but knows full well what it is doing. Across the gap between something concrete that actually only stands for the concrete and a thought that transcends the contingency and blindness of the concrete but in return forgets the most important thing, there echoes the sound of someone who emphatically has something special to tell us, something other than the same old thing. The narrative tone presents the paradox of a naive philosophy; childhood, indestructible in the midst of reflection, transforms even what is most mediated into something unmediated, which is then reported. This affinity with the concrete, beginning with material strata devoid of meaning, puts Bloch’s philosophy in contact with the lower depths, with things ostracized by culture and openly shabby; only in these things does his philosophy, a late product of the anti-mythological Enlightenment, hope to find salvation. As a whole, one might define it as the philosophy of someone cast out into the great cities like the “poor B. B.” [in Brecht’s poem “Vom armen B. B.”], someone who tells belatedly of things never told before. The impossibility of narration itself, which condemns the descendants of the epic to kitsch, becomes the expression of something impossible, something that is to be narrated and defined as a possibility. At the moment we sit down to listen to a story, we concede the narrator something, not knowing whether or not he will fulfill our expectations. In the same way, one must take this philosophy on faith as an oral rather than a written philosophy. The gesture of oral delivery prevents the responsible production of text, and Bloch’s texts become eloquent only when one does not read them as such. The torrent of narrative thought, with everything it carries with it, overflows argument and captures us alive; this is a philosophy in which, in a certain sense, no thinking goes on at all—eminently clever, but not at all brilliant in the scholastic sense. The things that reverberate in the narrative voice do not become material for reflection but instead come to resemble that voice. This is true even of the things, and in fact precisely of the things, which the voice does not penetrate, stylize, and melt down. To ask where the stories came from or what the narrator is trying to do would be ridiculous in view of Bloch’s intention to achieve a second-order anonymity, to vanish into truth: “If this story is nothing, say the tellers of fairy tales in Africa, then it belongs to the one who told it; if it is something, it belongs to us all” (158). Accordingly, critique of this philosophy cannot criticize its flaws as though they were the faults of an individual, which can be corrected; instead, it must spell out the wounds of Bloch’s philosophy as Kafka’s delinquent [in his story “In the Penal Colony”] spells out his.
But this narrative voice is not at all authentic in the clichéd sense of “genuine.” Bloch’s ear, extremely refined even in the midst of his turbulent prose, notes how little something truly different would be captured by that philistine concept of pure identity with the self. “A soft, feelingful story in the dusky must of the nineteenth century, with all the romantic colportage the motif of parting requires. Its pulse is most appropriately colored in the tones of half-sincere feeling; parting itself is sentimental. But sentimental with a depth to it; it vibrates indiscernibly between illusion and depth” (90). This vibrato survives in the great popular artists of an age that no longer tolerates popular art. The voice of Alexander Girardi was exaggerated in this way, plaintive and insincere like someone having hysterics; what was authentic about it was its inauthenticity, its untamed quality, and the echo of its own impossibility. Masses in particular find themselves enraptured, not always to their advantage, by the kind of exaggerated expression whose excessiveness reminds the mediocre mind of the things that really count. Thus a servant girl created a variation of Scheffel’s “Das ist im Leben hässlich eingerichtet” [“Things are badly organized in life,” a line from J. V. von Scheffel’s The Trumpeter of Säckingen]: “entsetzlich eingerichtet” [“organized horribly”]. Bloch blasts away like Scheffel’s trumpeter. Naive philosophy chooses the disguise of the blusterer, the pianist at the piano bar, poor and unrecognized, who tells the astonished patrons buying his beer that he is really Paderewski. One of those historico-philosophical insights for which Bloch is famous sets this atmosphere ablaze: “Even the young music-maker Beethoven, who suddenly knew, or asserted, that he was a genius like no other, was perpetrating a scurrilous fraud when he considered himself to be Ludwig van Beethoven, who he had not yet become. He used this effrontery, for which there was no basis, to become Beethoven, and in the same way nothing great would ever have come into being without the boldness, even the brazenness of this kind of anticipation” (47).
Like the pianist in the piano bar, philosophy as colportage has seen better days. Ever since it began bragging that it had got hold of the Philosopher’s Stone and was in on a mystery that would necessarily forever remain a mystery to the hoi polloi, it has contained an element of charlatanism. Bloch absolves it. He competes with the barker at the unforgotten annual fair, he screeches like an orchestrion in an empty restaurant waiting for its customers. He disdains the impoverished cleverness that tries to hide all that and invites in the kind of cleverness that high idealistic philosophy excluded. As a corrective, his oral exaggeration confesses that it itself doesn’t know what it is saying, that its truth is untruth when judged by the criterion of what exists. The narrator’s victorious tone is inseparable from the substance of his philosophy, the rescuing of illusion. Bloch’s utopia settles into the empty space between the latter and what merely exists. Perhaps what he aims at, an experience that has not yet been honored by experience, can be conceived only in an extreme form. The theoretical defense of illusion is also Bloch’s own defense. In this he bears a profound likeness to the music of Mahler.
What remains of the total music of German Idealism is a kind of noise that intoxicates Bloch, who is musical and a Wagnerian. Words become heated up as if they were to start to glow again in the disenchanted world, as if the promise hidden in them had become the motor of thought. From time to time Bloch gets tangled up with “all that is powerful,” and waxes enthusiastic about “open and collective battle” that “is to force things to go our way.” This strikes a note dissonant to his antimythological tenor, the appeal he is trying to win for Icarus. But the impulse in him that opposes the law of eternal invariance of fate and myth, the impulse that opposes entanglement in the natural order, feeds on nature, on the power of a drive that philosophers have seldom allowed to speak so freely. Bloch’s phrase about the breakthrough of transcendence is not spiritualistic. He does not want to spiritualize nature. Rather, the spirit of utopia would like to bring about the moment when nature, pacified, would itself be free of domination, would no longer need domination and would create a space for something other than nature.
In the Spuren, which are developed out of the experience of individual consciousness, the rescuing of illusion has its center in what Bloch’s book The Spirit of Utopia called Selbstbegegnung, encounter with the self. The subject, the human being, is not yet himself at all; he appears as something unreal, something that has not yet emerged from potentiality, but also as a reflection of what he could be. Nietzsche’s idea of the human being as something that has to be overcome is modified to become nonviolent: “for the human being is something that still has to be invented” (32). Most of the tales in the volume are about the human being’s non-identity with himself, with a knowing look at wayfarers, fairy tale lads, confidence men and all those who are led astray by the dream of a better life. “One meets less self-interest here than vanity, insatiable amour-propre, and folly. If amour-propre takes aristocratic forms, it does not do so in order to step on those below, like the parvenu or even the servant become master. Nor is the aristocracy actually affirmed; the self-styled seigneur is not class-conscious” (44). Instead, utopia rattles the cage of identity, in which it senses the injustice of being precisely this person and only this person. At the level on which this book was written thirty years ago, Bloch deliberately and directly juxtaposes two aspects of this non-identity. The first is the materialist: that in a society of universal exchange human beings are not themselves but agents of the law of value; for in previous history, which Bloch would not hesitate to call prehistory, humankind has been object, not subject. “But no one is what he intends to be, and certainly not what he represents. And everyone is not too little but rather from the outset too much for what they became” (33). The other aspect is the mystical: that the empirical “I,” the psychological “I,” and even the person’s character is not the Self intended for each man, the secret Name with which alone the notion of rescue is concerned. Bloch’s favorite figure for the mystical self is the house in which one would be at home, inside, no longer estranged. Security is not to be had, there is no ontologically embellished Befind-lichkeit [state-of-mind (Heidegger)] in which one can live; instead, Bloch notes the way it should be but is not. Bloch’s traces are in complicity with happiness, but this alliance does not barricade itself up in the positiveness of happiness. Instead, it holds positiveness open as something promised, and all positive, actually existing happiness remains under suspicion of a breach of faith. Such dualism is an easy target for criticism. The direct contrast between the metaphysical self and the social self that is to be produced takes no account of the fact that all the defining characteristics of that absolute self stem from the sphere of human immanence, from the social sphere; Bloch, the Hegelian, could easily be convicted of interrupting the dialectic at a central point with a theological coup de main. But to leap to this hasty conclusion would be to invade the issue of whether a dialectic that does not negate itself at a certain point is even possible; even the Hegelian dialectic had its encapsulated “maxim,” the identity thesis. In any case, Bloch’s coup de main renders him capable of an intellectual modus operandi that does not otherwise tend to thrive in the climate of the dialectic, whether idealist or materialist: nothing that exists is idolized for its necessity; speculation attacks necessity itself as an image of myth.
The fact that narration and commentary revolve around illusion in the Spuren stems from the fact that the boundary between finite and infinite, between phenomenal and noumenal, the intellect with its limitations and faith with its lack of logic, is not respected. Behind every word stands the will to break through the blockade that common sense has been placing between consciousness and the thing-in-itself since Kant. Bloch ascribes the very fact that this boundary is sanctioned to ideology, as an expression of bourgeois society’s restriction of itself to the reified world it has established, a world that exists for it, the world of commodities. This was the point where Bloch’s and Benjamin’s theories coincided. By tearing up the boundary posts out of a pure emancipatory impulse, Bloch gets rid of the rigidified “ontological difference” between essence and mere existence that is customary in philosophy here in Germany. He takes up motifs from German Idealism and ultimately from Aristotle and makes existence itself a force, a potentiality that is impelled toward the absolute. Bloch’s fondness for colportage has its systematic roots, if one may use such a term, in its complicity with the lower strata, both in the sense of what is materially unformed and in the sense of those who have to bear the social burden. The upper stratum, however—culture, form, what Bloch calls “polis”—he considers hopelessly entangled in domination, oppression, myth. The latter are genuinely superstructure: only what has been cast out contains the potential for something that would be beyond all that. This is why he hunts around in kitsch for the transcendence that is blocked by the immanence of culture. But the least of the reasons why his thinking operates as a corrective to contemporary thought is that it does not put on airs when it comes to facticity. He refrains from the contemporary German custom of classifying being as a branch of philosophy and thereby condemning philosophy to the irrelevance of a resurrected formalism. Nor, however, does he collaborate in the degradation of thought to a mere agency of reconstructive ordering. The lower stratum is neither dissolved nor covered up and immediately left behind, as in classificatory thought: instead, it is swept along like the thematic elements in certain music. The sphere of music takes up more space in Bloch’s thought than in almost any other thinker, even Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Its sounds reverberate in his thought like a railway station orchestra in dreams; Bloch’s ear has no more patience with technical musical logic than with aesthetic refinement. Nor is there any transition, any “mediation” between infantile pleasure in the merry-go-round and its metaphysical rescue: “And especially when the ship with music arrives, we find hidden in kitsch—non-petit-bourgeois kitsch—something of the jubilation of the (possible) resurrection of the dead” (165). Each such audacious extrapolation implicitly presupposes Hegel’s critique of Kant: that to set limits is always already to transcend them; that to qualify itself as finite, reason must already be in command of the infinite, in whose name it sets this limit. The main stream of the philosophical tradition distinguishes between thought and the unconditioned, but one who does not want to swim with the current does not want to refrain from knowledge of the unconditioned—for the sake of its realization. He does not knuckle under and resign himself. The “Es ist gelungen” [“It has been accomplished”] of the final scene of Faust, the Kantian idea of perpetual peace as a real possibility, sees the critical element in philosophy as postponement and denial. This mode of thought conceives fulfillment not as a task or an idea but in terms of the model of bodily pleasure, ἡδoυή. In this respect it is anti-idealist and materialist. Its materialism forbids the construction of a seamless Hegelian identity, however mediated, of subject and object, a construction that requires that all objectivity ultimately be assimilated into the subject and reduced to mere “spirit.” While Bloch, heretically, denies the boundary, he continues to insist, against Hegel’s speculative idealism, on the unreconciled distinction between immanence and transcendence; he is as little inclined to mediation in his overall scheme as in his individual interpretations. The “here” is defined in terms of historical materialism, and the “beyond” is defined through its refractions, through the traces of it one might find here. Without glossing over the distinction, Bloch philosophizes in a manner that is utopian and dualistic at the same time. Because he conceives utopia not in terms of the metaphysical construction of the absolute but in terms of the drastic theological conception—something the starving consciousness of the living feels cheated of when offered the consolation of the idea, Bloch can grasp utopia only as something illusionary. It is neither true nor not true: “Even an obvious mirage at least imitates or anticipates, impiously and deceitfully, a gleam that must somehow be embedded in life’s inherent tendencies, in life’s mere but nevertheless real ‘possibilities.’ For in itself a mirage is infertile; without palm trees there would not be even a fata morgana in the distances of time and space” (240).
The initial experiences Bloch presents are plausible enough: “Most people turn toward the wall when going to sleep, although in doing so they turn their backs to the dark room that is in the process of becoming unfamiliar. It is as though the wall suddenly began to exercise an attraction and paralyzed the room, as though sleep discovered something in the wall that is normally reserved only for the better death. It is as though in addition to disturbances and strangers sleep too instructed us in dying; to be sure, the scene seems to look different in that case, it displays a dialectical semblance of one’s homeland. And in fact a dying man who was saved at the last moment explained this in the following way: ‘I turned toward the wall and felt that what was out there, in the room, was nothing, no longer concerned me; what I was concerned with was to be found in the wall’” (163). But Bloch himself calls the secret of the wall a dialectical illusion. He does not let himself be lured into taking that insight literally. It is only that for him semblance is, psychologically, not subjective but objective illusion. Its plausibility is intended as a guarantee that, as in Benjamin and Proust as well, the most specific experiences, those which are completely submerged in particularity, are transformed into universality. What inspires the narrative profile of Bloch’s philosophy is his suspicion that this kind of transformation eludes dialectical mediations. As much as its didactic content is admittedly indebted to dialectics, this profile is undialectical. The narratives deal with what exists, even if only in the future; the form ignores the process of becoming that the content proclaims, trying only to emulate its tempo, so to speak. But the possibility of creating what has been promised remains as uncertain as in dialectical materialism. Bloch is a theologian and a socialist, but not a religious socialist. What haunts immanence in the form of the displaced meaning or “spark” of a messianic end of history is credited as meaning neither to immanence nor to its rational reorganization. Positive religious content is neither to justify mere existence nor to rule it transcendentally. Bloch is a mystic in his paradoxical unity of theology and atheism. The mystical mediations in which the transmission of the spark takes place, however, presuppose dogmatic doctrinal content which they then destroy through interpretation, whether it be the Jewish doctrine of the Torah as a sacred text or christological doctrines. Without a claim to a revealed core, mysticism presents itself as mere cultural nostalgia. Bloch’s philosophy of illusion, for which that kind of authority is irrevocably lost, is no more intimidated by that than were the mystical offshoots of the great classical religions in their final, enlightened phases; he does not deduce religion from a philosophy of religion. Speculative thought itself reflects on the dilemma this creates for it. But it prefers to simply put up with the dilemma, to acknowledge itself as illusion, rather than to resign itself to positivism or positive faith. The vulnerability that it takes pains to draw attention to is a consequence of its content. If that content were to be constructed and presented in pure form, the illusion that is its vital element would be artificially concealed.
It is easy to calculate in advance that what is unconditioned cannot be known by something conditioned: Bloch’s philosophy itself is not immune to the apocryphal element it arrogantly intends to explode. What is narrated is consumed in the process of narration; when an idea that has not been thought catches fire there is a short circuit. For this reason, and not from a lack of conceptual power, the interpretations of Bloch’s stories are largely inferior to the stories themselves, like an antinomian sermon on the text “Behold, I will give you stones instead of bread.” The higher the sermon tries to reach, the more its straining increases the feeling of futility. The mingling of the spheres, which is as characteristic of this philosophy as the dichotomy between the spheres, adds an obscure element to it, an element that challenges all established notions of something existing purely in-itself, all Platonism. Even though Bloch would have it that the most extreme and the most trivial are one and the same, there is often a gap between them, and what is most extreme becomes trivial: “Is it good? I asked. For the child things taste best at other people’s houses. They soon see what is not right there either. And if things were so good at home they wouldn’t be so happy to leave. They often sense early on that things could be different in both places” (9). This is the gnostic doctrine of the inadequacy of Creation in the form of a platitude. Bloch’s sovereign attitude is not disturbed by involuntary humor: “In any case it is not always what is expected that knocks at the door” (161). This philosophy is not satisfied with culture, but at times it fails to measure up to culture and falls flat on its face. For just as there is nothing between heaven and earth that cannot be seized upon psychoanalytically as a symbol for something sexual, so there is nothing that cannot be used as symbolic intention, nothing that is not suitable for a Blochian trace, and this everything borders on being nothing. The Spuren are most suspect when they tend to the occult: once forays into intelligible worlds become established as a principle there is no antidote to the dreams of a spirit-seer. Bloch tells numerous superstitious stories about superstition; while he quickly underlines the sorry quality of backroom spirit-world gossip, he makes no theoretical distinction between his metaphysical intentions and a metaphysics reduced to the level of facts. Still, something speaks in Bloch’s favor, even where kitsch threatens to swallow up its savior. For it is one thing to believe in ghosts and another to tell ghost stories. One is almost tempted to concede true pleasure in these stories only to the person who does not believe in them but rather gets involved in them precisely in order to enjoy his freedom from myth. Both the reflection of myth in the narrative and Bloch’s philosophy as a whole are aimed at this freedom. In ghost stories one does not believe in, what remains is amazement at the inadequacy of the unemancipated world, something Bloch never tires of relaying. The stories are a means of expression: the expression of alienation.
Giving primacy to expression rather than signification, concerned not only that words interpret concepts but also that concepts reveal the meanings of words, Bloch’s philosophy is the philosophy of Expressionism. It holds to Expressionism in its idea of breaking through the encrusted surface of life. Human immediacy wants to express itself directly: like the Expressionist subject, Bloch’s philosophical subject protests the reification of the world. Bloch cannot, as art does, rest content with forming something which can then be filled with subjective content. Rather, he thinks beyond subjectivity and renders its immediacy transparent as something which is itself socially mediated, alienated. In making this kind of transition, however, he does not, as Lukács, the friend of his youth, does, extinguish the subjective moment in the fiction that a state of reconciliation has already been attained. This protects him from second-order reification. His historico-philosophical impulse maintains the perspective of subjective experience even where he has transcended it in the Hegelian sense. The intention of his philosophy is objective, but its speech remains unabatedly expressionist. As thought, it cannot remain a pure verbal expression of immediacy. Nor can it cancel out subjectivity as the basis of knowledge and the organon of language, for there is no objective order of being that could encompass the subject substantively, without contradiction, no objective order whose language would be identical to the subject’s own. Bloch’s thought does not spare itself the bitter knowledge that at the present time the philosophical step beyond the subject is a regression into the pre-subjective and works to the advantage of a collective order in which subjectivity is not superseded but merely suppressed by a heteronomous force. Bloch’s perennial expressionism is a shrill response to the fact that reification persists and that where its abolition has been asserted it has hardened to mere ideology. The breaks in his speech are an echo of a historical moment that compels a philosophy of the subject-object to admit the continuing breach between subject and object.
Bloch’s philosophy shares its most intimate theme with literary Expressionism. There is a sentence by Georg Heym that reads: “One might say that my writing is the best proof of a metaphysical country whose black peninsulas extend far into our fleeting days”—probably the same country whose topography was charted in Rimbaud’s work. In Bloch the claim to this kind of proof is intended to be taken literally; that land is to be hauled in by means of ideas. Because of this, Bloch’s philosophy is metaphysics of a different kind than traditional metaphysics. It cannot be reduced to questions of being, of the true essence of things, of God, freedom, and immortality, even though those questions reverberate through it everywhere. Rather, it wants to describe, or, to use Schelling’s term, “construct” that other space: metaphysics as the phenomenology of the imaginary. Transcendence, having migrated to the profane sphere, is conceived as a “space.” The reason it is so difficult to distinguish it from spiritistic colportage from the fourth dimension is that, devoid of any aspect of existence, it becomes a symbol, Bloch’s transcendence becomes an idea. And Bloch’s philosophy thereby turns back into the very idealism whose confines it was intended to escape. “This space, it seems to me, is always around us, even when we only suck on its edges and no longer know how dark the night is” (183). Bloch’s “motifs of disappearance” are intended to escort us into this space. Dying becomes a gateway, as in many moments in Bach. “Even the nothingness that unbelievers preach is unimaginable, fundamentally more obscure, in fact, than a something that would remain” (196). Bloch’s obsession with the imaginary as something existing gives rise to this remarkable quality of stasis in the midst of dynamism, the paradox of the expressionist as an epic poet. It also gives rise to the excess of blind, unprocessed material. At times Bloch’s work reads more like Schelling than Hegel, more like a pseudomorph of the dialectic than dialectics itself. The dialectic would hardly stop with a two-world theory that is at times reminiscent of [Schelling’s] ontology of strata, a chiliastic antithesis of immanent utopia and revealed transcendence. But here is Bloch’s comment on an anecdote about a young worker whom a benefactor temporarily treats to the good life and then sends back into the mines, at which point the worker murders him: “Is life, which plays with us, any different than the rich man, the good man? He himself, it is true, must be superseded, and the worker shot him; the social fate that the wealthy class imposes on the poor class must be superseded. But the rich man is still there, like the idol of a different fate, our natural fate, with death at its end, a fate whose crudeness the wealthy devil copies and makes palpable until it becomes his own fate” (50ff.). Or, in a variation, “In death, which is not and by definition cannot be anyone’s ‘own’ death (for our space is always life or something more than life, but not something less than it)—in death too there is something of the wealthy cat that lets the mouse run free before it devours it. No one could blame the ‘saint’ for shooting this god down the way the worker shot the millionaire” (51ff.). Bloch constructs an analogia entis, an analogy of being, between social oppression and life’s mythical bondage to death, but this Platonic chorismos continues to gape wide, and the creation of a rational order on earth would be like a drop of water falling on the hot stone of fate and death. Bloch’s hardboiled naiveté refuses to be talked out of this. It encourages cheap advice from both sides, both from dialectical materialism and from Being as the meaning of what exists. Just as everything progressive always also lags behind the things it leaves behind, so it is an element of earthiness that distinguishes Bloch from the polish of official philosophy, and something jungle-like that distinguishes him from the administrative sterility of Eastern-bloc philosophy. He thereby sabotages his reception as a cultural commodity, although he also facilitates an apocryphal, sectarian reception of his thought.
This architectonic schema shapes even Bloch’s thought itself. While his philosophy overflows with materials and colors, it does not escape abstractness. What is colorful and particular in it serves largely to exemplify the single idea of utopia and breakthrough, which it nurses and cherishes the way Schopenhauer cherished his: “For in the final analysis everything a person encounters, everything a person thinks of, is one and the same thing” (16). Bloch’s philosophy has to distill utopia into a general concept that subsumes the concreteness that utopia actually is. The “form of the unconstruable question” becomes a system, dazzled by a grandiosity that ill suits Bloch’s revolt against power and glory. The general concept, which washes away the trace and cannot plausibly genuinely sublate it, nevertheless by its very intention has to speak as though the trace were present within it. It condemns itself to a lifetime of overwork. This drowns out the Expressionist scream: the power of the will, without which no trace would be discovered, works against what is willed. For the trace itself is involuntary, spontaneous, inconspicuous, intentionless. To reduce it to an intention is to violate it, just as examples violate the dialectic, as Hegel said in the Phenomenology. The color Bloch is after becomes gray when it becomes total. Hope is not a principle. But philosophy cannot fall silent in the face of color. Philosophy cannot move within the medium of thought, of abstraction, and then practice asceticism when it comes to the interpretation in which such movement terminates. If it does, its ideas become enigmas. This was the path Benjamin took in his One-Way Street, a work which has many affinities with Bloch’s Spuren. Like One-Way Street, Bloch’s traces—even in their title—sympathize with what is small. In contrast to Benjamin, however, Bloch does not give himself over to the miniature but instead uses it expressly as a category (see p. 66ff.). Even the microscopic remains abstract, too big for itself. Bloch declines the fragmentary. Dynamically, he, like Hegel, goes farther, beyond what forms the basis of his experience; in this respect he is an idealist malgré lui. To use an old-fashioned expression, his speculative thought wants to take root in the air, to be ultima philosophia, and yet its structure is that of prima philosophia and its ambition is the grand totality. His philosophy conceives the end of the world as its ground, that which moves what exists, which, as its telos, it already inhabits. It makes the last first. That is Bloch’s innermost antinomy, one which cannot be resolved. This too he shares with Schelling.
Bloch’s conception of something suppressed forcing its way up from below, something which will put an end to the outrage, is political. About this too he tells stories, as if he were speaking about something predecided, virtually assuming the transformation of the world, unconcerned about what has become of the Revolution in the thirty years since the first edition of the Spuren and what has happened to the concept and possibility of revolution under altered technological and social conditions. The absurdity of the status quo suffices for his verdict; he does not enter into calculations about what ought to happen. “A drunken woman was lying in the rue Blondel. A policeman seizes hold of her. Je suis pauvre, says the woman. That’s no excuse for filling the street with vomit, growls the policeman. Que voulez vous, monsieur, la pauvreté, c’est déjà à moitié la saleté, says the woman and takes a drink. In this way she describes, explains, and cancels herself out in one stroke. Whom or what is the policeman to arrest?” (17). The strength to refrain from sophistry about what is rational is accompanied by the shadow of a political petitio principii, which has at times been exploited in regions where world history is declared causa judicata, a matter that has been settled. But Bloch does not allow himself to be constrained by what is authoritarian and repressive. He is one of the very few philosophers who does not recoil in fear from the idea of a world without domination and hierarchy; it would be inconceivable for him to disparage the abolition of evil, sin, and death from the perspective of some profound official wisdom. He does not infer from the fact that these things have not yet been abolished the perfidious maxim that they could not and should not be abolished. Despite all else, this gives what he promises, the transfiguration of the “happy end,” the ring of something that is not in vain. There is not a trace of mustiness in the Spuren. A heretic when it comes to the dialectic, Bloch is not to be bought off with the materialist thesis that a classless society should not be depicted. With unwavering sensuousness he delights in the image of that society, without stretching it deceptively thin. In the French worker eating lobster, or the celebration of the 14th of July there shimmers “a certain Later when money will no longer yap for goods or wag its tail through them” (19). Nor does he repeat the litany of the unmediated unity of theory and practice. To the question, Should one act or think? he responds, “Philosophy, they say, leaves people cold. But as Hegel remarked, that is not its job. And philosophy could exist without this job, but not even this job could exist without philosophy. For it is thought that creates a world in which things can be changed and not merely bungled” (261). There could not be a blunter way to tell vulgar materialism about genuine humanness [Humanität], which gives thought its due at a time when it is everywhere being reduced to a mere appendage to action. This kind of humanness makes possible, even today, what Benjamin once said of Bloch: he can warm himself at his thoughts. They are like the great green tile stove that is heated from outside and suffices for the whole flat, powerful and consoling, without a chimney-corner in the room and without filling the place with smoke. The person who tells fairy tales saves them from the fate of having outlived their time. The expectation that something will come is paired with a profound skepticism. The two are combined in a joke from a Jewish legend in which someone reports a miracle and then, at the climactic moment, denies it: “ ‘What does God do? The whole story is untrue’” (253). Bloch omits an interpretation but adds, “Not a bad statement for a liar, not a bad motto if it came from better people” (253). What does God do?—The casual question masks an unallayed doubt about God’s existence, because “the whole story is untrue,” because, Hegel and dialectics to the contrary, the history of the world is not yet the history of truth. Through the joke, philosophy understands itself as deception, and it too thereby becomes more than it is: “One must be witty as well as transcendent” (253). The joke opens up the same vast perspective contained in the lines by Karl Kraus: “Nothing is true, and it is possible that something else will happen,” and that the semblance it destroys will not have the last word after all. Philosophy should not let itself be talked out of what it has not succeeded in doing simply because humankind has not yet succeeded in doing it.