The Spirit of Utopia

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PHILOSOPHY

"When this book was first published, it had a profound effect on major thinkers and artists in Weimar Germany. A poetical philosophical treatise with unusual insights into culture and political commentary, Bloch's book laid the groundwork for thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin, who may have disagreed with him but were strongly influenced by his work.

The Spirit of Utopia plays a significant role in the hisrory of German social, political, and cultural thinking." -Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

I am. We are.

That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of

Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the versIon here presented for the first time in English translation.

The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt ro rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and ro reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives ro continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his pro­ vocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. I am. We are. That's hardly anything.

But enough to start. MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS

Ernst Bloch (I88S-I977) was one ofthe great philosophers and political intellectuals oftwentieth-century Germany. STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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r THE SPIRIT OF UTOPIA

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher

& David E. Wellbery

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Editors

Translated by Anthony A. Nassar

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Stanford

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University Press

Stanford California

TH E SPI RIT OF UTOPIA

Ernst Bloch

Assistance for the translation has been provided by Inter N'ationes, Bonn.

The Spirit of Utopia follows the second edition of the original German text, published in 1964 as

Geist der Utopie: Bearbeitete Neuaujlage der zweiten Fassung von I923 © dieser Fassung Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1964. Stanford University Press Stanford, California

©

2000

by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America elP

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data are at the end of the book

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In Everlasting Memory of Else Bloch-von Stritzky t 2 January I92I ..

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Contents

Object ive (1918, 1923)

§

THE SELF-ENCOUNTER

An Old �it cher

7

7

The Production of the Ornament

10

The Philosophy of Music

34

Dream 34

On the History of Music 34

On the Theory of Music 94

The Mystery 158

The Shape of the Inconstruable Question On the Met aph ysics of Our Darkness, of the No-Longer-Conscious, th�'Not-Yet-Conscious, and the Inconst ruable We-Problem 187

§

KARL M ARX, DEATH, AND THE APOCALYPSE

The Lower Life 233

The Socialist Idea 234

The True Ideol og y of the King d om 246 The Countenance of the W ill 275

Tramlator's Notes Index ofNames

233

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OBJECTIVE

(19 18, 1 9 23)

I am. We are.

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That is enough. Now we have to begin. Life has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago. It pitches senselessly back and forth, but we stand firm, and so we want to be its initiative and we want to be its ends. What just was will probably soon be forgotten. Only an empty, awful memory hangs in the air. Who was defended? Foul, wretched profiteers. What was young had to fall, was forced to die for ends so alien and in­ imical to the spirit, but the despicable ones were saved, and now they sit there in their comfortable drawing roolllS.i Not one of them was lost, but those who waved other flags, so much bloom, so much dream, so much hope for the spirit, are dead. Th