Ernst Bloch: The Pugnacious Philosopher of Hope 3030211738, 9783030211738

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 7
Acknowledgements......Page 10
A Note on the Texts......Page 11
Contents......Page 14
Chapter 1 Reintroducing Ernst Bloch: In Pursuit of Utopia......Page 16
Chapter 2 Toward the Realization of Anticipatory Illumination......Page 40
Chapter 3 Ernst Bloch and the Dialectics of Obscenity and Inequality......Page 57
Chapter 4 The Pugnacity and Speculation of Hope, or Why We Want a Better World......Page 78
Chapter 5 The Messianic Power of Fantasy in the Bible......Page 97
Chapter 6 Ernst Bloch’s Enlightened View of the Fairy Tale and Utopian Longing......Page 114
Chapter 7 The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J. R. R. Tolkien the Catholic......Page 130
I......Page 133
II......Page 140
III......Page 147
Chapter 8 Kitsch, Colportage, and the Liberating Potential of Vor-Schein in Fairy Tales......Page 160
I......Page 163
II......Page 168
III......Page 179
Chapter 9 Epilogue: Why Hope?......Page 187
Eagleton’s Bewildering Critique of Bloch......Page 188
Following in the Footsteps of Bloch......Page 189
Bibliography......Page 198
Author Index......Page 216
Subject Index......Page 219

Citation preview

Ernst Bloch

The Pugnacious Philosopher of Hope Jack Zipes

Ernst Bloch “As Jack Zipes points out in this excellent study, Ernst Bloch was a philosopher who was always out of step: A Marxist who disagreed with most Marxists, an atheist theologian, a utopian thinker who disagreed with most utopian thinking, a man who believed in hope as our “invariant of direction” and yet who lived through the horrors of fascism, war and Stalinism. This much neglected thinker has been done a great service by this study.” —Peter Thompson, Professor, Director of Ernst Bloch Studies, University of Sheffield

Jack Zipes

Ernst Bloch The Pugnacious Philosopher of Hope

Jack Zipes Minneapolis, MN, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-21173-8 ISBN 978-3-030-21174-5  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In Memory of Anna Donzelli

Preface

Out of Step Ernst Bloch was, is, and will always be out of step. He was a bad dancer with the times. He stumbled while numerous politicians and thinkers waltzed over the bodies of little people in step to the same music. Monotonous militant music. Bloch tried to add some color and bounce to the music, and in the process, he alienated many people including himself. Banged about from country to country by wars, betrayed by vile rulers of the world and the perverse conditions of his times, he fought with bare knuckles to survive while endeavoring to save what was vital in the remnants of civilizing processes that had gone awry. He stumbled but landed on his feet. Stumbled more than once. What a clumsy dancer Bloch was! I wish I had known him. I came close, very close. In the summer of 1961, after he fled East Germany, before he could be arrested for his treasonous ideas against Stalinist communism, he accepted a position as visiting professor at the University of Tübingen in West Germany and gave his initial lecture, “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” in November of that year. From what I heard, the auditorium was packed and all the seminars of this seventysix-year-old professor remained packed until his death in 1977. I actually studied at the University of Tübingen during the summer semester of 1962, but unfortunately, I didn’t study with him. I was enrolled in a

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series of lectures on contemporary German literature and politics held by Walter Jens, who was one of Bloch’s good friends. At that time, I had never heard of him. But soon I did and was overwhelmed. Bloch was one of the major German philosophers who supported the student movement to change German universities, often administered by ex-Nazis, and the society, often controlled by Nazi sympathizers, during the 1960s and 1970s. This movement was a belated reaction by young people to the Nazi period, and Bloch was outspoken in his critique of the reactionaries not only in Germany but in all Western societies. Though difficult to read, Bloch’s words of hope and resistance had a huge impact and resounded among young people. I know this firsthand because I kept encountering diverse thinkers, critics, professors, and students who were either close friends of Bloch or followers of his philosophy. Among them were the renowned literary critic Hans Mayer, the radical philosopher Oskar Negt, the East German singer and dissident Wolf Biermann, and the entire editorial boards of the prominent left-wing journals Telos, New German Critique, Ästhetik und Kommunikation, and Allemagnes d’aujourd’hui. During the 1980s and 1990s, I began writing on Bloch, and published The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (1987), a translation of his significant essays, with Frank Mecklenburg, and edited a special edition of New German Critique on Bloch and Heidegger in 1988. At one point, while I was teaching at the University of Florida in 1987, I invited his son Jan to come to Gainesville and deliver a few talks. This was the closest I ever came to the Bloch family. Yet, Bloch has filled my life with the spirit of utopia as he has with thousands of people throughout the world. Despite my sadness about the present state of the world, bordering at times on depression, it is Bloch’s philosophy that still gives me hope we can change the world for the better. It is through collaboration with numerous young friends and groups resisting the tides of neo-fascism throughout the world that I have turned once again to the gawky dancer Bloch with hope that the future will be better than the present. Strangely, but perhaps understandably, Bloch wrote most of his famous three-volume book, The Principle of Hope, in America, where he was unwelcome. Despite his vehement critique of capitalist America, Bloch and his wife Karola had fled with their infant son Jan to America to escape the Nazis

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in 1939. Not to Russia, a country that symbolized a possible new world of communism to them. They remained in America until 1947 and even became American citizens. Their friends, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, formidable critical thinkers, who transferred the Institute for Social Research (now known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) to New York, refused to help Bloch, who was more or less blacklisted in America. Because of their communist sympathies, few people helped Bloch and Karola. Consequently, they were poor and had to live under difficult conditions. Ironically, in 1948, after he was offered a professorship in philosophy by the University of Leipzig, Bloch returned to Stalinist East Germany in 1948, hoping to restore democracy to this new nation-state, where he remained until he could no longer bear the hypocrisy and deceit. Disappointed but still hopeful, Bloch moved to West Germany. Ironically, it was there that Bloch became famous until his death in 1972. And he still is. Somewhat. Bloch is not well known outside of contemporary Germany. Americans have no idea who he is, and it is doubtful that Brits and other English-speaking people have the slightest clue who he is. I do not think my book will bring fame to Bloch. This is not my intention. It is a personal tribute before I die to a great thinker who changed my life. Minneapolis, USA

Jack Zipes

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Tom René, who supported my proposal for this book at Palgrave Macmillan, and Vicky Bates and Ellie Freedman, who have carefully supervised the entire production. Also, I am very grateful to a group of artists, actors, and writers who met with me throughout 2018 and 2019 to discuss Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Thomas Piketty, and Zygmunt Bauman. They—Maria Asp, Sonja, Kuftinec, Emily Zimmerman, Leif Jurgensen, David Hanzal, Wendy Richardson, and Steve Matuszak—were given the name crazy Marxists because only the insane can maintain sanity and humanity in the world in which we live. They are the markers for the future. Of course, the craziest of them all is my wife, Carol, who has put up with me for over thirty-five years. It is to her that I dedicate this book with hope.

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A Note

on the

Texts

The chapters in this book include three essays published in three other books I have published: “The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic in Contemporary Fairy Tales for Children” from Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization by Jack Zipes. © 1985 Taylor and Francis Group LLC Books. Reprinted by permission. This article first appeared in New Literary History 13 (Winter 1981–82): 309–325. “Epilogue: A Curious Legacy: Ernst Bloch’s Enlightened View of the Fairy Tale and Utopian Longing, or Why the Grimms’ Tales Will Always be Relevant” from Grimms Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes. © 2015 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission. “Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination” from Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays translated and edited by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Introduction, Jack Zipes. © 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted by permission. “The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J. R. R. Tolkien the Catholic” from Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes. © 1979 Jack Zipes. xiii

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A Note on the Texts

It is important to note that they have all been revised and lengthened a great deal to engage with our present times. Two other chapters are based on talks delivered at conferences. For the most part, they have been thoroughly updated. Three more essays stem from seminars I have directed in the last ten years. At times, I have duplicated Bloch’s quotations and concepts whenever they have suited the topics of the chapter. In fact, this was a method that Bloch himself employed to emphasize the comprehensive application of his thinking, which, he knew, could be baffling. Repetition is not the same in different contexts. Bloch’s language is difficult and, at times, almost impossible to translate. Not only are his concepts complex, but they are also obtuse and constantly changing, just as he also changed his texts after their original publications. In his insightful study, Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries, Ivan Boldyrev notes that “Bloch’s language is at times deliberately enigmatic. Many passages require supplementary commentaries, and his literary style, like that of any other apocalyptic writer, does not really contribute to the clarity of philosophical distinctions. But when his philosophy unfolds—in aesthetics, in politics, and in a dialogue with the contemporaries—it undoubtedly becomes clearer, as we begin to understand what constitutes its meaning and purpose.”1 In this regard and with great care, I have translated most of the Bloch quotations in this book, but I have also used at times the excellent translations by valorous scholars, who have, I am sure, pondered for hours over his aphorisms. Therefore, I have sometimes tweaked words and expressions in line with my thinking and understanding of Bloch’s intentions. For instance, I prefer to use the term temporally non-egalitarian (Ungleichzeitigkeit) rather than non-synonymous or non-contemporaneous. Bloch was concerned more with social justice and inequality than he was in shifts of time. This is not to diminish the effects of temporal changes. Rather, I propose to analyze the impact of shifts and shocks and how people react to them personally and politically. In Thomas Piketty’s recent brilliant book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he discusses the disequilibria in the world that threatens to foster the rise of fascism and injustice. This disequilibria is exactly what Bloch was writing about in the 1930s, and Piketty strikingly recalls Bloch’s concern in his book: I focus not only on the level of inequality as such but to an even greater extent on the structure of inequality, that is, on the origins of disparities in income and wealth between social groups and on the various systems of

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economic, social, moral, and political justification that have been invoked to defend or condemn those disparities. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself; the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.2

Bloch pugnaciously decried disequilibria, and he was often knocked off his feet as he endeavored to fight for hope in a better world. He was a contentious philosopher who bounced back from disequilibria to fight for social justice. Who could ask for anything more?

Notes 1. Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014): 14. 2. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017): 25.

Contents

1 Reintroducing Ernst Bloch: In Pursuit of Utopia 1 2 Toward the Realization of Anticipatory Illumination 25 3 Ernst Bloch and the Dialectics of Obscenity and Inequality 43 4 The Pugnacity and Speculation of Hope, or Why We Want a Better World 65 5 The Messianic Power of Fantasy in the Bible 85 6 Ernst Bloch’s Enlightened View of the Fairy Tale and Utopian Longing 103 7 The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J. R. R. Tolkien the Catholic 119 8 Kitsch, Colportage, and the Liberating Potential of Vor-Schein in Fairy Tales 149 9 Epilogue: Why Hope? 177 xvii

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Bibliography 189 Author Index 207 Subject Index 211

CHAPTER 1

Reintroducing Ernst Bloch: In Pursuit of Utopia

Born in 1885 in Ludwigshafen,1 Ernst Bloch’s personal reminiscences of his early years reveal how he grew to resent rigid authoritarianism and to sympathize with the lower and working classes who lived in impoverished conditions at that time. His parents were assimilated, well-to-do Jews, who had clear, but narrow expectations for Bloch and his future. His father was a senior official of the Imperial Railways and treated his son with a firm, governing hand. For the most part, he was concerned more about respectability than about helping Bloch develop his talents. As a young boy, Bloch felt the parental imposition of stultifying regulations as a direct impingement on his personal freedom. In the rare public remarks he made about his youth in his adulthood, Bloch always stressed how much he wanted to break away from his home and hardly mentioned his parents in his later years. Ludwigshafen, too, was not conducive to his childhood dreams and desires. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city was a dreary industrial center in which the living conditions of the workers were decrepit, and the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie boring and predictable. Compared with the neighboring elegant city of Mannheim, which was more affluent (marked by a residential palace) and had a more interesting cultural life, Ludwigshafen, the “proletarian” city, reminded Bloch as a boy and young man of the social and political inequities that disturbed him throughout his life. To a certain extent, it was the contradiction between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim that gave rise to Bloch’s early political consciousness, a contradiction that Bloch later sought to grasp as a major cause for the rise of fascism in Germany. © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_1

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Here was the first sign of non-synchronism (Ungleichzeitigkeit) or the inequality of temporal change: Mannheim was a modern society (Gesellschaft) moving with the modern times toward secularization and cosmopolitanism while Ludwigshafen was still underdeveloped and harboring strong nineteenth-century notions of community (Gemeinschaft). The unequal temporal breach between the two cities led Bloch to grasp why fascism, which paid heed to the basic yearnings and customs of the lower classes and did not dismiss them, as did communism, was to have such a great appeal to the German people. At that time, however, during his youth he was more bothered by the void in his own life, which, he came to realize, was connected to the contradiction between Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. That is, his home was characterized by what he called “musty”—dreariness, lack of love, understanding, and stimulation. The Jewish religion played a minor role in his life and was meaningless in his family. He could only compensate for the gaps between him, his family, and their beliefs by filling the void with daydreams, voracious reading of fairy tales, popular literature, classics, philosophy, music and visits to the opera house and theater as well as letter-writing to eminent philosophers, rebellion against traditional schooling, and concern for social democratic politics. To make up for the lack in his home and in Ludwigshafen, Bloch left in 1905 to study philosophy and German literature at the University of Munich and then at the University of Würzburg, where he focused on experimental psychology, physics, and music and took an interest in the Kabbala and Jewish mysticism. After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1908 with a dissertation on Heinrich Rickert under the direction of Hermann Cohen, he moved to Berlin to study under the renowned sociologist Georg Simmel, and it was in Simmel’s seminar that he made the acquaintance of Georg Lukács, the great Hungarian political theorist, who became one of his best friends and later one of his foremost philosophical antagonists. Bloch studied with Simmel until 1911 and was strongly influenced by his Lebensphilosophie, that is, by Simmel’s notions about the “lived moment” and the impossibility to know the immediate. More important, Simmel was one of those remarkable intellectuals who believed that a philosopher must be concerned in everyday occurrences and minutiae. He had a broad range of interests and expounded on everything he encountered. In fact, Simmel was a man after Bloch’s own heart, and he left a lasting impression on him even after Bloch broke with him due to Simmel’s defense of German patriotism during World War I.

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Aside from Simmel’s influence, the period between 1909 and 1914 led to major changes in Bloch’s life. Like other young Jewish intellectuals of this period such as Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Landauer, Kurt Hiller, Salmo Friedländer, and Theodor Lessing, Bloch took a strong interest in the question of Jewish identity and Zionism and reflected on these issues in an essay entitled “Symbol: Die Juden” (1912/1913).2 Finally there is a certain pride to be Jewish that has awakened in us Jews and beats restlessly. These people remain mixed and ambiguous. There are flexible and hard, chatty and practical individuals among them, like everywhere and not like everywhere. But the unproductive and unsterile ones will rapidly disappear. At least there no longer appears to be a basis among the young Jews for the distinctive and formal inclination toward commerce. One sees here a waiting before them that had already once borne fruit among these people.3

In addition to his interest in messianic ideas, Bloch began studying Christian mysticism due to the religious convictions of Else von Stritzky, a gifted sculptress from Riga, whom he had married in 1913. By this time, Bloch had moved to Heidelberg to participate in Max Weber’s seminar with Lukács. Here, it was not so much Weber, who drew Bloch to Heidelberg, but Lukács with whom he shared a great deal, especially a concern with developing a philosophy that would transcend the rationalism of the enlightenment and provide more intuitive means for understanding experience and dealing with such problems as alienation, commodification, and instrumentalization. There was also a group of pacifist intellectuals including Karl Jaspers and Gustav Radbruch, who stimulated Bloch’s political thinking. Most important for Bloch at this time was his work on the important category of the noch-nicht-bewußt (the not-yet-conscious) that was to be related to the noch-nicht-geworden (the not-yet-become). Here, he began to connect messianic aspects of his thought with a study of everyday phenomena and art and literature to critique existing sociopolitical conditions. It is not by chance that the conception of some of Bloch’s most radical philosophical categories coincided with the outbreak of World War I, which compelled him to link questions of individual awareness and cognition with the need to transform if not revolutionize sociopolitical conditions. Though an anarchist, Bloch sided with the left social

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democrats and opposed the Wilhelminian government’s militaristic policies. His efforts now went toward bringing an end to the war, but it was extremely difficult to act against the German nationalism because the state took emergency and police measures to prohibit the publication of protest articles and books and because the German people became caught up in the chauvinistic furor of the time. Due to his opposition to the war, there were few opportunities for Bloch to earn a living and make his ideas known, once he left the university. So, in 1917, Bloch decided to emigrate to Switzerland with his wife, who was suffering from an ailment that would eventually take her life in 1921. There, in Bern, Bloch undertook a study of utopian currents and political strategies for the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. In addition, Bloch hoped to earn money as a political journalist because most of his articles could not be published in Germany due to censorship. However, he overestimated his chances in Switzerland, and, despite a small monetary subvention from a wealthy businessman, he and his wife endured many hardships due to lack of money and political squabbles and intrigues. His contact with Hugo Ball, founder of the Dada Movement in European art at this time, reinforced his own position of religious anarchism and led him to explore the ideas of Franz von Baader and Thomas Münzer, early radical theologians of the Reformation. In addition, he wrote numerous articles against the war and Germany (often under pseudonyms) while also conceiving his first major philosophical publication Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia, 1918), but the poor living conditions caused Bloch often to act in desperate ways so that his first major work on utopia was his concrete means of countering harsh social and personal realities. Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, which he revised and expanded in 1923, indicated the path that he was to pursue during the 1920s. This book was an expressionist and utopian effusion that rejoiced in the apocalyptic ending of Wilhelminian rule and the breakdown of the alienating conditions that had existed in Germany. According to Bloch, the apocalypse would allow for a “warm” messianic redemption, but one that depended on communal action: Life is going on all around us and does not know where it is going. We ourselves are still the lever and motor. The external and especially the revealed sense of life is faltering. But the new ideas have finally broken out, into the full adventures, into the open, unfinished, dreaming world, into

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Satan’s rubbles and darknesses, providing the cutting off itself. Life also goes around girded with despair, with our spiteful presentiment, with the tremendous power of our human voice, to name God and not to rest until the innermost shadows are expelled, until the world is doused with that fire that is behind the world or shall be ignited by it.4

This passage is typical of the elliptical, metaphorical, and prophetic style that Bloch was to use for the rest of his life. It was his way of cultivating the “form of the inconstruable question” that would need art and literature to illuminate the way forward toward utopia. To be sure, as the last chapter of the book entitled “Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse,” indicates, Bloch was turning more and more toward the basics of Marxism to provide the framework in which he would pose questions about ontology, aesthetics, and utopia for the rest of his life. In fact, despite or because of his mystical and expressionist leanings, Bloch became more and more an iconoclast Marxist in his political opinions during the 1920s. The blend of religious mysticism and communism can be seen most clearly in his study Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (Thomas Münzer as Theologian of Revolution, 1921), in which he depicted Münzer as a forerunner of Marxism by interpreting the chiliastic aspects of Münzer’s thinking in relation to the Marxist notion of the classless society. Such an unorthodox interpretation of Münzer opened new approaches to both religion and Marxism. All Bloch’s writings, even the numerous articles he wrote for newspapers and journals from 1919 to 1933, were now related to the elaboration of Marxist principles in a manner disturbing to most orthodox Marxists, particularly Bloch’s friend Lukács, who had completed History and Class Consciousness (1923), a superb study of reification, and was more inclined toward following the Communist Party line than exploring the messianic-religious ties between Marxism and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet, these were the very ties that Bloch endeavored to grasp because their elaboration, he believed, would determine the political future of Germany if not Western civilization as a whole. The period from 1921 to 1933 was a trying one for Bloch, both on a personal and professional level. After the death of his first wife Else, he went through a long period of depression. A second, somewhat desperate and unhappy marriage to Linda Oppenheimer in 1922 lasted less than a year and ended in divorce. In addition, his books were known only to a small group of intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor

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Adorno, Gerschom Scholem, Siegfried Kracauer, and others like them who acknowledged the power of his remarkable ideas and were stimulated by them. However, Bloch sought a greater audience for his works since he was confident that his philosophical revision of Freud and Marx could have a great impact through a broader group of intellectuals. He never lacked confidence in his own ideas and mission as a philosopher, and many of his acquaintances even thought Bloch to be pugnacious, arrogant, and pretentious, though they were always impressed by his “genius.” Not only did Bloch have a stunning photographic memory, but he was an accomplished musician and storyteller. Moreover, like Benjamin, one of his closest friends, he was curious about the seemingly most incidental things and cultural artifacts and studied them with an uncanny understanding and appreciation of their significance. Bloch’s reverence for the small as well as the great drew him to the irreverent and experimental dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, whom he met in Berlin, and he became one of the Brecht’s avid champions and interpreters. Indeed, during the 1920s in Berlin, Bloch sought to grasp and learn from political expressionist writers and painters and used the montage technique and elliptical symbolism in his own writings to induce estrangement from the familiar. Here, he wanted to provoke his readers to break out and away from forms that prevented them from becoming conscious of what they were missing, things they had to define for themselves. Bloch’s emphasis on estrangement was similar to Brecht’s estrangement effect and the open endings of many of Brecht’s plays. In this sense, Brecht’s dramas were models of anticipatory illumination as can be seen in Bloch’s comments on his works in Spuren (Traces, 1930) and Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of Our Times, 1934) and in such later essays as “The Stage Regarded as a Paradigmatic Institution and the Decision within It” (1959). During the 1920s, it was almost as though Bloch actually wanted to put into practice his own philosophy of distancing and estrangement: He kept leaving and returning to Berlin, and between 1924 and 1926, he took trips to Italy, France, and North Africa. He also lived for a while in Paris, but he kept returning to Berlin, the city which had become the cultural center of experimentation in Europe and which kept challenging him to expand and expound his philosophical and political ideas. In 1925 he joined the leftist writers’ Group 1925 and was acquainted with some of the great writers of this time such as Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, Ernst Toller, and Erwin Piscator. In his newspaper articles and in

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his own writing, he regarded himself as an expressionist and iconoclastic philosopher of expressionism. On one of his forays from Berlin, he made the acquaintance of Karola Piotrkowska, an art and architecture student in Vienna, and his attachment to her lent his work new meaning and vitality. By 1930, he and Karola decided to move and take an apartment together in a “red district” in Berlin, where numerous writers and artists of different left-wing persuasions lived and mixed. Both took a more active interest in politics, especially as the danger of fascism grew and life became more violent in Berlin. Karola drew closer to the Communist Party and eventually became a member in 1932, while Bloch maintained a critical distance from the Party. Indeed, Bloch felt that one of the reasons that the fascists were able to gain control in Germany was due to the fact that the Communists spent more time attacking the Social Democrats and on spreading a meaningless, rhetorical propaganda than addressing the needs, dreams, and wants of the German people, suffering more than ever due to the Great Depression of 1929. He wrote numerous insightful articles on mainstream politics and culture, often criticizing the inadequacy of bourgeois art and literature and the dangers of Nazi ideology and practice while at the same time trying to analyze why it was that the National Socialism appealed to the German people and captured their imagination. Bloch never had time to complete this analysis of fascism in Berlin. On March 5, 1933, when the Nazis “legally” took power in Germany, Bloch was in Ludwigshafen, and he received a phone call from Karola telling him to leave the country as soon as he could, since he was on a Nazi list of enemies and was scheduled to be arrested. The very next day Bloch fled to Switzerland, where Karola soon joined him. In Zurich, both he and Karola were active in resistance groups, but their activities were frowned upon by the Swiss authorities, who expelled them in 1934. Right before the expulsion, Bloch was able to complete Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of Our Times), a penetrating study of fascism, in which he elaborated the categories of synchronism and non-synchronism or temporal equality and non-temporal inequality to explain what it is that makes people susceptible to fascist movements and what the communist movement lacked that made it ineffective against the rise of fascism. Bloch was never tired of pointing out the mistakes by social democratic and leftist movements and their failure to recognize how modern technology and industrial change had created huge gaps in people’s lives, and how all social classes had difficulty synchronizing their lives to keep in

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step with the swift temporal changes in socioeconomic conditions. He maintained that “progress” brought about disorientation, especially for the agrarian and petit-bourgeois classes, and that the longing for bygone days, for conserving the old ways of life, for solid traditions, was not to be dismissed as reactionary. He called for creative and inventive communist programs that contended with modernism in all its forms so that the oppressed masses would not feel left out or left behind. Since the Communist Party and other left organizations used empty slogans and imposed paternalistic programs on the people that failed to capture their imagination and speak to their needs, it was no wonder that Hitler, a false messianic leader and National Socialism with its mythic ideology and concrete welfare programs, gave the Germans a sense of stability and hope for a better life. Bloch sought to expose the regressive and fallacious policies of the Nazis while keeping alive the genuine revolutionary impulse for change. After all, he nursed the notions of utopia and hope as though they were his own children, and he insisted that the communists and socialists could only combat fascism if they recognized the different types of contradictions they had to resolve: Thus, it is our task to extend the agitated Now. First, one must distinguish the falsely from the genuinely non-synchronous and unequal contradiction, the latter from the synchronous contradiction, and then, in both of them, the objective and the subjective factors of the contradiction. The subjectively non-synchronous contradiction is pent-up anger, the objectively non-synchronous one is unsettled past; the subjectively synchronous one is the proletariat’s free revolutionary act, the objectively synchronous contradiction is the impeded future contained in the Now, the impeded technological benefaction, the impeded new society, with which the old one is pregnant in its productive forces. The basic factor in the objectively synchronous contradiction is the conflict between the collective character of the productive forces developed within capitalism and the private character of their antipathy. … It is our task now to locate within contradiction a possible force even when it does not go beyond the non-synchronous rift. The latter remains favorable to the Now of capitalism only as long as the non-synchronous people lack the leadership, or even the magic spell spurring them to march into the present-day battlefield. The task is to extrapolate the elements of the non-synchronous contradiction which are capable of antipathy and transformation, that is, those hostile to capitalism and are homeless in it, and to refit them to function in a different context. Consequently, what remains is the ‘triple alliance’ between the proletariat and the immiserated peasants and the immiserated middle class, under proletarian hegemony.5

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As we can see from Bloch’s remarks, he was already preaching the necessity of a common front between communists and socialists even before the Volksfront (popular front)6 became the official policy of the Communist Party. Moreover, there is already a tendency here to hypostatize the proletariat in a way that would lead to his support of Stalinist politics. But, there is also politics of reading signs that emanated from his book Traces (1930) and contradicted Bloch’s own political observations: Crucial in Traces, an unusual collection of anecdotes, stories, evidence, political commentaries, and essays, is the designation and detection of traces in everyday events and cultural artifacts of the past and present that are harbingers of a better future. Bloch pursued these traces but became caught up in his own contradictions because of his eagerness to identify with the potential of revolutionary change that, he thought, the Soviet Union symbolized. During the exile years in Europe, 1934–1938, Bloch married Karola, and they both contributed to the popular front movement—Bloch as unorthodox critic and Karola as courier for the Communist Party. In 1935, they moved to Paris after stops in Switzerland and Austria, and Bloch participated in the International Congress for the Defense of Culture (June 21–25), where he gave a speech entitled “Literature and Socialist Objects,” in which he introduced his notion of Vor-Schein or “anticipatory illumination” and spoke out against the pessimism of many writers, who doubted that Marxism could combat the expansion of fascism. According to Bloch, “truth is not the reflection of facts but of processes; it is ultimately the indication of the tendency and latency of that which has not yet become and needs its activator.”7 Therefore, literature and art contain the anticipatory illumination of that which has not become, and the role of the writer and artist is similar to that of a midwife who enables the creative conception of the latent and potential materials to assume their own unique forms. At this point in his life, Bloch was committed both philosophically and aesthetically to Marxism as the only critique that could clarify what was missing in life, what obstacles had to be overcome before a classless society could come into its own, and what direction we had to take, for the realization of individual autonomy was only possible if the we came into its own as the collective agent of our own destiny. In Paris, Bloch began work on a book dealing with materialism, and he also wrote numerous philosophical and cultural essays while supporting the anti-fascist resistance. His stance toward the Soviet Union and

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the Communist Party was complex and contradictory. In fact, he became the chief opponent of orthodox Communist cultural politics by defending expressionism and debating his old friend Lukács about the artistic merits of expressionist art.8 Lukács’s thought takes for granted a closed and integrated reality that does indeed exclude the subjectivity of idealism, but not the seamless ‘totality’ which has always thrived best in idealist systems, including those of classical German philosophy. Whether such a totality in fact constitutes reality, is open to question. If it does, then Expressionist experiments with disruptive and interpolative techniques are but an empty jeu d’esprit, as are the more recent experiments with montage and other devices of discontinuity. But what if Lukács’s reality -- a coherent, infinitely mediated totality -- is not so objective after all? What if his conception of reality has failed to liberate itself completely from classical systems? What if authentic reality is also discontinuity? Since Lukács operates with a closed objectivistic conception of reality, when he comes to examine expressionism, he resolutely rejects any attempt on the part of artists to shatter any image of the world, even that of capitalism. Any art which strives to exploit the real fissures in surface inter-relations and to discover the new in their crevices appears in his eyes merely as a willful act of destruction. He thereby equates experiment in demolition with a condition of decadence.9

Bloch saw expressionism as an avant-garde anticipatory movement that made a real breakthrough to popular art by dispensing with formalism and developing innovative means to direct “attention to human beings and their substance, in their quest for the most authentic expression possible.”10 Here, he also differed from the positions assumed by various members of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Adorno was elitist in his aesthetical assessments and argued that only works of “high culture” could provide a genuine negation or critique of capitalist conditions, while Benjamin endeavored to elaborate a category of the dialectical image in which the new is intermingled with the old and presents intimations of a classless society. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events

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like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.11

However, Benjamin was skeptical that dialectical images could be recuperated to bring about the classless society, that is, to bring the Messiah into sight. Not Bloch. Throughout his life, Bloch valued the fragmentary, symbolic, unfinished, and aphoristic nature of art and literature that suggested life itself was an unfinished process revealing glimpses of the “messiah.” In essence, Bloch believed that the messianic mission could only be completed by humankind itself coming into its own, and this meant that political repression by the state had to be opposed, and that states must wither away or be constructively forced to give way to collective democratic forces. While Bloch knew that conditions in the Soviet Union had worsened since the late 1920s, and though he had never been a proponent of state socialism, he felt obliged to portray the Soviet Union in a positive manner in light of the fascist threat. For Bloch, the Soviet Union had gradually become a symbolical beacon during the 1920s pointing toward socialism and a classless society, and as long as that beacon retained some light to it, no matter how dim, it was the duty of committed socialists to keep it going in every possible way. Consequently, Bloch defended the Moscow Show Trials (1936/1937) and refused to separate the cause of socialism from Stalinism. This position was untenable, as Bloch was to learn through bitter experiences. Nevertheless, his deep hatred for fascism, which he saw as an extension of capitalist development, blinded him tragically to the non-synchronous contradictions and temporal inequalities in the Soviet Union that were as dangerous as those in Western capitalist countries. Given his attacks on the cultural politics of the Soviet Union during the 1930s and his general unorthodox Marxist position, Bloch’s defense of Stalin and the Soviet Union was somewhat astonishing. Moreover, he had absolutely no desire, like other German intellectuals, to seek “refuge” in the Soviet Union. In 1937, after the Blochs moved to Prague because Karola was given a new assignment as courier for the German Communist Party, they kept hearing gruesome stories from friends who escaped persecution in the Soviet Union. Bloch was relieved when the Trials came to an end in 1937 and rationalized them as drastic measures

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to prevent the rise of fascism in the East. However, he was realistic enough to perceive that the Soviet Union would not harbor an unorthodox Marxist of his kind, and when it came time to think of leaving Prague—Karola gave birth to their son Jan in 1937 and the fascists were about to invade Czechoslovakia—the Blochs chose the United States as a place of refuge. As a result, they spent eleven years in the United States, 1938–1949, the first three in New York and New Hampshire, and the last eight in Boston, where Bloch worked diligently in Harvard’s Widener Library on various parts of The Principle of Hope and Subjekt-Objekt. It was practically impossible for Bloch himself to earn money. He was shunned by members of the Frankfurt School, particularly by Max Horkheimer and his old friend, Theodor Adorno, because of his defense of the Soviet Union, and many former friends refused to help him obtain teaching or publishing jobs. Karola became the breadwinner of the family, working first as a domestic and then in a Boston architect’s office. Meanwhile Bloch wrote political articles for the anti-fascist journal Freies Deutschland and became a member of the National Committee for a Free Germany. His major preoccupation, however, still centered on the further elaboration of his primary categories of the not-yet-conscious and not-yet-become in relation to hope, utopia, and wishful thinking. Since Bloch’s English was very limited and remained limited during his exile in America, and since there was virtually no audience for his works, Bloch felt isolated most of the time he was in the States and longed to find a situation in which his philosophical teachings might have some effect. By the war’s end in 1945, both Karola and Bloch had already obtained American citizenship. However, many of their close friends were under surveillance by the FBI and were called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Indeed. Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Alfred Kantorowicz, to name but just a few, left due to the hostile political climate in the United States and returned to the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. In 1948 Bloch, who was sixty-three years old and who had never lectured at a university, received an offer to assume the chair of professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig in East Germany. Knowing that there might be objections on the part of the orthodox Communists with regard to his work, Bloch insisted on absolute freedom to teach what he wanted to teach. He received a guarantee from Professor Werner Krauss, one of the leading Marxist literary scholars in

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French literature and Bloch’s chief supporter in Leipzig. This guarantee plus the Communist witch hunt in America contributed to Bloch’s decision to go to Leipzig in 1949. For the first time in his life, Bloch was able to have a direct impact on students and to play an important role in the development of a university, which at that time boasted some of the finest Marxist scholars in Europe. Aside from Werner Krauss, Hans Mayer began teaching German literature and Fritz Behrens economics, while Georg Meyer was rector of the university. From the outset, Bloch was perceived by the students as playing an oppositional role to the official politics of the state and the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland), the new Communist Party of the German Democratic Republic. His lectures and works contained innuendos critical of Stalinism insofar as Stalinism represented a mechanical base–superstructure position and disregarded the vital role that culture played in the formation of social relations. Moreover, Bloch always stressed the dialectics of individual and social freedom and placed great emphasis on creative experimentation and the unfinished nature of the socialist project. On the other hand, Bloch continued to defend the Soviet Union and Stalinism as real existing socialist formations that set the material conditions for the qualitative development of communism. Without carefully studying the political history of either the United States or the Soviet Union, Bloch continued to make “hard-line” materialist pronouncements about both countries. In various articles published in East Germany up through 1953, Bloch associated the United States with fascism and imperialism and a danger to world freedom, whereas the Soviet Union was portrayed as that state which acted as the guarantor of genuine freedom throughout the world. He rationalized the police measures and restrictions on freedom in the Soviet Union and also in East Germany just as he had justified the Moscow Show Trials. However, he believed if the Soviet Union were not threatened by the imperialist tactics of Western capitalism, it would be able to get on with the socialist experiment and allow for greater civil liberties. Bloch was convinced that the American invention and use of the atomic bomb, the Communist witch hunts, the onset of the Cold War, and the Korean War indicated that the Western imperialist nations could completely sabotage the Communist cause. The maximization of profit and exploitation of the workers in the West depended on international conquest and control of markets. Therefore, despite the state bureaucracy and limitations on personal freedom in the Soviet Union and East

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Germany, Bloch publicly showed solidarity with the Communists in the hope that they would act as a counterforce to American imperialism and bring about the necessary changes for greater freedom within the Eastern Bloc. Yet, in intimate circles—and sometimes within the university—Bloch was much more outspoken in his criticism of Stalinism and pushed for reforms wherever he could. Aside from schooling numerous students in dialectical Marxism and utopian thinking, students who went on to assume important roles in the Communist Party and state leadership, Bloch helped found the journal Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie with the help of Lukács, and one of his prize pupils, Walter Harich, became the editor-in-chief. In addition, his major works began to be published—the first two volumes of The Principle of Hope in 1952 and 1954—so that his impact now extended beyond the university and made its way into West Germany as well. The publication of The Principle of Hope (the third volume appeared in 1959) established Bloch at that time as the foremost unorthodox Marxist philosopher writing and teaching in perhaps the most Stalinist of the orthodox Eastern Bloc countries. It is an enormous work consisting of 55 chapters in which Bloch endeavored to map out the formations of the not-yet-conscious as they take shape in daydreams, wish-landscapes, and religious, scientific, political, and artistic events of signification. The signification can be traced in the anticipatory illumination and is determined by the manner in which it gives rise to hope within the cultural heritage. The centrality of art and literature in Bloch’s chiliastic Marxism, that is, the emphasis he placed on the possibility of the transformation of the material base through superstructural developments, is apparent throughout the three volumes. The entire corpus of The Principle of Hope, which encompasses a reading of Marxism and the world in direct opposition to the Marxist– Leninism professed by the East German state, contains crude criticisms of “fascist America” and bombastic statements about the proletariat, communism, and the Soviet Union. Yet, the overall thrust of the utopian project was and is subversive in view of developments in both the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite all its inconsistencies and ramblings, The Principle of Hope recalls concrete moments in history and illuminates their human creative features as indelible marks that point the way toward actual transformation of our material world. The luminous aesthetic quality of these concrete moments, even if they are fragmentary, allows them to be utilized and reutilized for realizing what has not

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yet become but can become, namely the classless society. Insofar as the aesthetic formations illuminate what is missing and might still come, they instill hope in viewers/readers and provide the impetus for individual and collective change. Bloch himself felt the need for greater change the more he came into contact with the contradictions in the realities of East German socialism. By 1955, he had received numerous awards from the government and felt more confident about openly criticizing the state in public, its rigid form of teaching the basics of dialectical materialism, and the limitations imposed on individual freedom and human rights. In 1956, after the 20th Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when Khrushchev criticized Stalinism, Bloch thought that the hour for major democratic reforms in the East had finally come. However, he did not believe that the mistakes that had been made in the Soviet Union and the mistakes that were being made in the German Democratic Republic were caused solely by a cult of personality. He saw the problems as stemming from the dogmatic tendencies of the Communist Party and the rigid bureaucratic system that hindered change and democracy. More and more, Bloch tried through discussions and articles to foster changes in the university and government. Yet, he overestimated the extent of Khrushchev’s break with Stalinism and did not perceive how the new Soviet policy would be used to legitimize the interests of the new oligarchies within the Soviet Union and to reinforce the power of Walter Ulbricht in East Germany. Thus, as Bloch began to speak out more openly for reforms, the German Democratic state and party leadership, which had always tolerated Bloch, as long as he had served their propagandistic purposes and had kept his voice of dissent low, came to view Bloch as an enemy, who had to be isolated. The SED seized its opportunity to isolate Bloch in 1956. Under the leadership of Walter Harich, a group of intellectuals in Berlin had actually begun planning a coup. Bloch had been informed about these plans but had refused to join the group. The government discovered the plot and arrested Harich and several other collaborators and sentenced them to prison terms. Since they were all closely connected to Bloch and his institute for philosophy in Leipzig, Bloch came under severe attacks in the newspapers and magazines. In January 1957, he was forcibly prevented from continuing a series of lectures at the university, and throughout the year, public conferences were held about the errors and faults of Bloch’s philosophy. Articles were published attacking his mistaken notions about

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Marxism, and finally, Bloch was forced to retire and was banned from holding public talks. All his present and former students were obliged to break with him or recant his teachings. Some fled to West Germany; some lost their jobs; one committed suicide; and some protected their careers by turning against him. Though Bloch endeavored to remain active by participating in meetings of the section of philosophy at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, he was for all intents and purposes silenced and isolated by 1958. Consequently, aside from privately trying to help some of his students, Bloch concentrated his energies on publishing and lecturing in West Germany, for he was allowed to travel and give talks outside of the German Democratic Republic. Though he could have remained in the West during this time, Bloch did not want to give up the struggle for civil rights and socialism in East Germany, nor did he want to abandon the friends, who sided with him. However, during the summer of 1961, while the Blochs were vacationing in Munich after Bloch had delivered several talks at Tübingen and Bayreuth, they learned about the building of the Berlin Wall on August 13, and they decided to remain in West Germany. This decision caused a great sensation in the German newspapers East and West. In the East, Bloch was attacked for being a renegade, traitor, and criminal, and in the West, he was mocked for having had “hope” in communism and scorned for his defense of Stalin and the Soviet Union, although some critics praised him for his courageous stance. Due to his outspoken critique of capitalist West Germany and its militaristic policies, Bloch was considered by many to be an unwelcome guest in the Federal Republic, and it was only with great difficulty that his supporters obtained a special position for him as professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. On November 17, 1961, Bloch held his first public lecture to a packed audience at the university and significantly entitled it “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” Bloch’s reply to his own rhetorical and politically provocative question: Even a well-founded hope can be disappointed, otherwise it would not be hope. In fact, hope never guarantees anything. It is characteristically daring and points openly to possibilities that in part depend on chance for their fulfillment. Thus, hope can be frustrated and thwarted, and out of the frustration and disappointment it can learn to estimate the tendencies

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of processes that it had possibly estimated incorrectly. Hope can learn and become smarter through damaging experiences, but it can never be driven off course. The substance of its goal is “real humanism”12 and since this goal is not present, one can neither speak about it out of experience nor formulate it completely. To do so would be pure invention, not definition. Still, it is possible to determine the direction toward real humanism. a direction that is invariable and unconditional; it is “indicated precisely in the oldest conscious dream (Wachtraum) of humankind: in the overthrow (instead of the hypocritical new installation) of all conditions in which the human individual is a humiliated, enslaved, forsaken, despised creature.”13

Bloch also stressed that “even when the contents of this ‘true being’ as one that is still in the form of latency are still not already manifest and articulated, they are still sufficient enough to determine what is not humanism and also to determine its exact opposite, namely Hitler or the later Stalin, in other words to determine altogether what the primordial phenomenon of Nero is.”14 In conclusion, Bloch maintained that “the world process has not yet been won anywhere, but also: it has not been thwarted anywhere, and human beings can be on earth the indicators of their decisive way toward salvation that has not yet come or toward damnation that has also not yet come. The world remains in its entirety the same highly laboring laboratory possiblis salutis. … Hercules says: ‘Whoever does not hope for the unhoped-for will not find it.’”15 From 1961 until his death in 1977 at the age of ninety-two, Bloch wrote, spoke, and fought pugnaciously and unceasingly in the name of hope that could be disappointed and could err but could never be eradicated as long human beings lived on this earth. Hope had always been for Bloch a religious, ontological, and political matter, and it continued to be such more than ever in West Germany, where he was to become a symbol of integrity for the protest movements which emerged during the 1960s. Aside from lecturing throughout Europe, Bloch became very involved in various political struggles. For example, he supported the rise of the Social Democratic Party in West Germany, attacked the right-wing Springer Press monopoly, criticized the introduction of professional proscription of civil servants in West Germany, and took a position against nuclear armament, German anti-Semitism, the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Prague, and the terrorism of the Baader–Meinhof Group. Though he was critical of Israeli militarism, he also defended the right of Israel to exist in a 1967 public statement and refused to have anything

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to do with the anti-zionist forces in West Germany. His political position became more discriminating and clearer, and the centrality of aesthetics in his political philosophy was often reiterated as in the following statement from a 1968 interview with Michael Landmann: Aesthetics should not be confused with contemplation or considered disinterested. Often, certainly, the true, the good or the beautiful, or rather what is proclaimed as such, has nothing to do with daily life and so serves the purpose of deception, as opium of the people. … Stage and story can be either a protective park or a laboratory; sometimes they console or appease, sometimes they incite; they can be a flight from or prefiguring of the future. Theater is not just illusion; it can also be an anticipation of what is to come, for in it the resistance of the empirical world is eliminated. Brecht made the theater a laboratory for new models. On the problem of whether a man can be sacrificed to the group, he first writes a ‘Yes-sayer’ then a ‘No-sayer’ and he could have added a ‘Maybe-sayer.’ Art retains its anticipatory function even after the revolution. The image of Greek man, the citizen, was first delineated in art. Likewise, architecture first creates real space against the obstacles with which the earth is full. Were the inflammatory elements of art eliminated in the classless society, it would be proof that reality had remained a petit-bourgeois society in which art becomes a palliative ideology instead of a clarion call. True art, including non-revolutionary art, is always a clarion call and a challenge.16

Although he was half blind during the last ten years of his life, Bloch continued to hold his seminar for students of philosophy and managed to finish the revisions for the 16-volume edition of his complete works. In one of his books of political essays titled Politische Messungen,17 he altered some of his former essays to make them more critical of Stalinism because he held the view that his works were part of a process of change and reflection and that his entire philosophical project would always remain unfinished in the same way that the human project on earth would remain unfinished. Bloch continually tried to learn from his errors and contradictions and reworked his former views if proven wrong by historical developments. In doing this, he clung to a personal ethics of the aufrechter Gang, the upright gait. According to Bloch, humankind had not yet learned to take full possession of its natural rights and to walk upright with dignity. Humans still had to learn to become like God and take destiny in their own hands, make their own destiny, that is, to make history for the first time. What is envisioned as home (Heimat)

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in childhood is in actuality the goal of the upright gait toward which human beings strive as they seek to overcome exploitation, humiliation, oppression, and disillusionment. The individual alone cannot attain such a goal, which is only possible as a collective enterprise. Yet, the measure of the individual’s ethical backbone can be determined by his or her struggle to stand and walk upright and contribute to the collective goal. The relative historical gains, revolutionary transformations and formations, what Bloch called “concrete utopias,” were stepping stones and indications of what the human individual and the world could become. In this regard, Bloch’s contradictions until his death in 1977 should be regarded as unique individual traces in a struggle to realize philosophy as part of a collective praxis. From the outset, Bloch saw his task as part of an ongoing endeavor to name the unnamable final destination, to construe the unconstruable question about the meaning of human existence. In his essay, “Poesie im Hohlraum” (1931), he phrased it most succinctly: The entire being of the world (Weltsein) is a questioning of its meaning and looks with a thousand eyes, in a thousand ways of predisposed mediation, at the speakers for more thorough information, at the searchers for the key to disclosure. Whereby it cannot easily have that interior so defined or have materials in the empty space of the present alienation, materials in which it could feel well or with which it could already come out of the twilight every place where the revolutionary struggle against alienation is concerned.18

Conscious that his task, which was intrinsically tied to that of the Weltsein, would remain unfulfilled during his lifetime, Bloch elaborated principles to explain why it must remain unfulfilled, and he cultivated a language commensurate with his unfulfillable task. The formation of this language was closely connected to the substance of his thought and his own personal development. Form implied human intention for Bloch. That is, embedded in form was human creative activity that sought to make its mark and stride toward a better world. The experience of World War I, the collapse of the Wilhelminian monarchy, and the October Revolution in Russia served to reinforce his belief that bourgeois philosophy, art, and literature were no longer capable of articulating and expressing the questions and problems necessary for endorsing the socialist experiments. By no means was the bourgeois heritage to be

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dismissed. Rather, it was to be reutilized (umfunktioniert) in a manner that would allow for its utopian latency and tendency to be realized. Only through reorientation, revitalization, and reutilization of language, and only through experimentation with what had already been designed to fill humankind’s deeply felt lack of meaning could the socioeconomic crisis of ossification, staleness, and degeneration be overcome. Bourgeois capitalism itself had created what Bloch called the Hohlraum, the empty space, the hollow gap, and it was imperative that progressive intellectuals, artists, and politicians fill the void with substantially new forms and contents. Bloch believed that relativistic thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century, as in the works of Eduard von Hartmann and Ernst Mach and the leading physicists of the times, helped provide some of the sparks for revolutionary political action and the radical advancement of technology and the natural sciences. It also generated a teleological possibility for concretizing the impulses of these momentous changes in the direction of a world free of oppression. In Heritage of Our Times, Bloch came to argue that the real fruit of ‘relativism’ is montage, not objectivity (Sachlichkeit), for it improvises with the context that has been exploded. Out of those (exploded) elements that have become pure and are made into rigid facades by objectivity, montage creates variable temptations and attempts in the empty space. This empty space originated precisely because of the collapse of bourgeois culture. Not only does the rationalization of a different society play in it, but one can see a new formation of figures arising out of the particles of the cultural heritage that have become chaotic.19

In effect, montage is what replaces the empty space: “The montage of the fragment out of the old existence is here the experiment of its reutilization (Umfunktionierung) into a new one. Mechanistic, dramaturgical, or even philosophical montage is certainly not completed by a more or less quick reutilization, that is, with the use of short and disposable models. … Montage in the late bourgeois period is the empty space of the bourgeois world, filled with sparks and overlaps of a ‘history of appearance,’ that is not the right one; yet in this instance it is a mixed place of the right one. Also it is a form to ascertain the old culture: viewed from the journey and perplexity, no longer from education.”20 Bloch’s own philosophical language combines the language of expressionism with his reformulation of traditional systematic European

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thought, primarily German idealism, one of the reasons why Jürgen Habermas called Bloch a “Marxist Schelling.”21 Moreover, he re-elaborated and expanded Marxist categories with notions of Messianism, Christian mysticism, and the Judaic commandment against creating a graven image of God. Consequently, Bloch employed images, comparisons, implications, connotations, provocations, aphorisms, fables, and anecdotes to form and reform philosophical categories. Like the expressionist artists and writers themselves, Bloch wanted to “shock” his readers to become aware of their inner needs so they might break out of themselves and break down those reified conditions that prevent communication and collective action. Bloch’s metaphorical use of montage techniques allowed for the juxtaposition of crude, daily expressions along with chiliastic images and euphoristic pronouncements of the coming of communism. Though he was at times astonishingly crass and naive, he purposely relied on such techniques to break with the instrumental use of traditional philosophy and Marxism as well. Bloch wanted to estrange himself and his readers: Distance had to be gained from the immediate experience of life and from those customary forms that locked life into blocks of classifications and categories. Like his thought processes, Bloch’s language never stood still. He constantly played with images and categories he created to refine them and to endow them with the very Vor-Schein or anticipatory illumination he endeavored to trace and analyze in works of art and everyday cultural phenomena. Though it may be immensely difficult to read Bloch, it is a challenging and tantalizing experience that can open up new horizons of thought. He forces his readers to rethink and re-conceive the purpose of philosophical language and thought with the intent to open up utopian possibilities. More than anything else, Bloch placed great faith in art and literature to raise the not-yet-conscious to a point where it could grasp what direction humankind would have to take to bring about the fulfillment of those needs, wants, and wishes scattered in dreams and daydreams. As already noted, Bloch never developed an aesthetic theory, nor did he intend to, for he was convinced that aesthetics along with ethics and politics should not be separated from fundamental philosophy but actually formed the inner core of philosophical thought. Therefore, at a time when aesthetic questions have been either treated in a more rigorous scientific manner or in a manner that eliminates the subject and intentionality from all consideration, Bloch’s writings on art and literature may appear quaint and outmoded. Yet, his anthrocentric

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approach to art and literature and emphasis on the utopian function of art and literature lead to a substantive questioning of “poststructural” and “post-modern” positions that tend to become bogged down in their own discourses and in a polytheism of values that contribute to the reinforcement of the status quo. As Gérard Raulet has pointed out, the self-stabilization of the system is certainly not the ideal of post modernism. However, it is satisfied with substantiating the impossibility of overcoming alternatives. … Through the historical and relativistic citing of all possible fragments from the past in postmodern architecture or through Lyotard’s ‘atomization of the social in the supple system of language games,’ the specific is not saved at all but surrendered to total reification despite all the ostensible richness of experience. The appropriate answer to this paradox is its reversal -- the saving of the specific requires that one takes into consideration its dependence and constraints in order to grasp it as something that has already always been mediated. Benjamin’s Denkbild (image of thought), Adorno’s Konstellation (constellation) and Bloch’s Auszugsgestalt (processual figure) all have this as their goal.22

Indeed, Bloch’s philosophical aesthetics is an antidote to that pessimism and helplessness felt by the intelligentsia in both the West and East, where the creator as the subject of art and literature apparently no longer count. Bloch returns our gaze to the tensions and mediations between the intender, tendency, and intention in the reception and use of artworks. Important here is that both author and receiver are intenders, who come together through the work of art as mediator to form the substance and novum of the cultural heritage. Bloch’s unorthodox Marxism consisted in his making the human being the center of all things, and he placed his hope in the potential human beings possessed to mold and shape themselves into “godlike” creatures. This entelechical development could only occur through a dialectical relationship with nature, whereby art and literature mediated the relationship of human beings to one another and to the material world around them. To grasp how Bloch conceived the function of art and literature impelling human beings to move forward and upright in the direction of utopia, it will be important to consider some of Bloch’s basic philosophical categories that are intended to startle often in a mysterious and mystical sense. Bloch liked to generate a sense of Staunen (startlement) in his readers. In German, Staunen implies not only startlement

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but astonishment, wonder, and staring, and the formation of his philosophical categories compels us to pause, reconsider what we think, where we are, and what we want to discover. Most of all Bloch’s own Staunen as conveyed in his philosophical discussions of art and literature convey a reverence for human creation and nature in all their aspects.

Notes









1. My remarks on Bloch’s life are based on my reading of several important works: Arno Münster’s edition of six interviews with Bloch, Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978); Karola Bloch’s autobiography, Aus meinem Leben (Pfullingen: Neske, 1981); Wayne Hudson’s critical study, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Peter Zudeick’s biography, Der Hintern des Teufels. Ernst Bloch—Leben und Werk (Moos and Baden-Baden: Elster, 1985); Vincent Geoghegan’s monograph, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996); and Arno Münster’s political biography, Ernst Bloch: Eine politische Biographie (Berlin: Philo, 2001). 2. This essay first appeared in the 1918 edition of Geist der Utopie, but was omitted in the edition of 1923. Instead it appeared in the 1923 edition of essays entitled Durch die Wüste. See Ernst Bloch, Durch die Wüste. Frühe kritische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964). 3. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie. Erste Fassung, in Gesamt Ausgabe, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 319. 4. Geist der Utopie. Unveränderter Nachdruck der bearbeiteten Neuauflage der zweiten Fassung von 1923 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 217. 5. “Non-Synchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 35–36. This essay was originally written in 1932 and published as part of Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935). I have slightly modified the translation that appeared in NGC. 6. The Volksfront, also called the popular front or front populaire was a coalition of left-wing parties fighting the fascists during the 1930s in Europe. For the most part, the Russian Communists took the lead in trying to unite the different factions to oppose Hitler and Nazism. In particular, the Communists endeavored to infiltrate governments throughout Europe to develop alliances and attack fascism. The front collapsed in 1939 when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed. 7.  “Dichtung und sozialistische Gegenstunde,” Literarische Aufsätze in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 141. 8. See Hans-Jürgen Schmitt, ed., Die Expressionismusdebatte. Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

24  J. ZIPES 1973) and Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: New Left Books, 1977). 9. “Discussing Expressionism,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 22. This essay is entitled “Diskussionen über Expressionismus” and originally appeared in Das Wort 3 (1938): 103–12. 10. Ibid., 23. 11. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 265. This quotation is from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” completed in the spring of 1940, shortly before he committed suicide. 12.  “Kann Hoffnung enttaüscht werden?” Literarische Aufsatze in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 389. 13. Ibid., 390. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 391. 16. “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968,” 184. 17. The book in question is Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). The second book, which appeared without Bloch’s changes and with an interesting afterword by Oskar Negt, was Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe. Politische Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1934– 1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). For a discussion of this incident, see Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, 296–99; Münster, Ernst Bloch, Eine politische Biographie, 377–81. 18.  Literarische Aufsätze, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 119. 19. Erbschaft dieser Zeit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 214–15. 20. Ibid., 228. Bloch uses the word Bildung for education implying that traditional or institutionalized education will no longer suffice or help determine the contours of the genuine, socialist cultural heritage. 21.  See “Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling,” in Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 61–78. 22. “Schweigen mit Hintergründen. Blochs Spur in Frankreich,” Spuren (July 1985): 64.

CHAPTER 2

Toward the Realization of Anticipatory Illumination

Given his disturbing contradictions, it has always been difficult to write about Ernst Bloch, the pugnacious philosopher of Marxist humanism and revolutionary utopianism. Bloch assumed many roles and positions during his long life: militant pacifist, messianic anarchist, unorthodox Marxist, humanitarian Stalinist, and Marxist heretic. He was consistently unconventional, unpredictable, and provocative. His curiosity and thirst for knowledge were insatiable, and whenever he traveled, it was always as though he were looking for clues of a lost world that anticipated the future. He retained everything he read, heard, or observed. His reading ranged from such popular works as Karl May’s “German” Westerns, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the Arabian Nights, and the comic strips of the Boston Globe to the more sophisticated works of Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Keller, Kafka, and Brecht, not to mention every notable philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist in the world from the Greeks through Max Weber and the Frankfurt School. He could play and recite entire operas and hold discourses on physics, architecture, psychology, theater, sociology, and, of course, philosophy as though he were a trained professional in each field. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was a “perfect” product of the “Bildungsbürgertum,” the incarnation of all the great bourgeois liberal ideals of the nineteenth century, and he placed great stock in these ideals. However, at the same time, he sought to break out of this bourgeois tradition, to turn it inside out, reutilize it, and compel elements of anticipatory illumination live © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_2

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up to the promises made by those revolutionary movements that had established the rule of the middle classes. It was against the domination of the middle classes and the ossification of bourgeois idealism that Bloch rebelled, and he sought to ground his rebellious urges by postulating the “possibility” of a life without oppression and enslavement. At first, he sought to develop this “possibility” from his study of phenomenology and German idealism mixed with a blend of anarchistic, pacifist, and mystical notions. After World War I, it was Marxism that became the cutting edge of all his thoughts, and his disturbing contradictions cannot be understood unless one takes into consideration that Bloch sought to revitalize Marxism without totally abandoning his bourgeois heritage and that he obstinately clung to the necessity of establishing a real, grounded socialist society for bringing about the genuine meaning of democracy and humanitarianism. Unfortunately, Marxism, socialism, and communism were sometimes used in a crude manner by Bloch in opposition to fascism, capitalism, and imperialism, and he often made regretful mistakes and thoughtless assertions in his political analyses. Aware of his own shortcomings, though not terribly apologetic, Bloch kept dealing with his contradictions and those of his time by continuously trying to locate the basic needs of oppressed groups and elaborating a Marxist critique of alienation and exploitation. In the process, he maintained his optimistic belief in communism by exploring the potential of art to provide not only hope for a better future but also illumination toward realization of this goal. In an interview recorded in 1968, Bloch remarked: In every age two threads intertwine, first ‘the cultural heritage’ [Engels], i.e., religion, art and philosophy; and second, ideology. Ideology is just a coloration of the awareness that stands and falls with the ruling class power. ‘The dominant ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class’ [Marx]. The Bible is made an excuse for its cheap imports; preservation of the purity of Communism is a pretext for the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Nothing has changed. The slogans and alibis circulating in the Soviet Union today are pure ideology and the best that can come from them is the warning: this is not the way to act. What has cultural value expresses more than the goal of one age or one class: it speaks for the future. Any significant philosophical or artistic work contributes to future maturity. Therefore, great achievements in the superstructure no longer belong completely to their age. The Parthenon cannot be written off just because it was built by a slaveholding society. Its social mission at the time

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is no longer the important thing. What interests us now is its meaning for later generations living under a changed general situation. Only progress and the progression of time therefore bring out the full value of the past heritage and that never completely. … The 18th century had no eye for Gothic art; we understand it because the parallax is greater from where we stand. But in the future we will see yet more. The receptive subject of culture grows with socialism; his entire richness will flourish only in socialist society.1

Bloch’s own growth as a “receptive subject of culture” came through his intense concern with questions of aesthetics and the cultural heritage and against the grain of institutionalized bourgeois aesthetics and ideology in practically every phase of his life. Consequently, it is important to place Bloch historically, to consider how he developed his disturbing political and personal contradictions because his notions about the utopian function of art and literature were in part an endeavor to resolve them. Aesthetics was a way of life for Bloch which meant that he had no interest in becoming a disinterested spectator of culture. In fact, Bloch intervened in almost all the crucial philosophical and aesthetic debates of his time, and his interventions left scars that need tracing if we are to realize their value for a critique of contemporary cultural developments. Bloch wrote, spoke, and fought unceasingly in the name of hope that could be disappointed and could err but could never be eradicated as long human beings lived on this earth. Hope had always been for Bloch a religious, ontological, and political matter, and it continued to be such more than ever in West Germany, where he was to become a symbol of integrity for the protest movements which emerged during the 1960s. Much likes Herbert Marcuse in America. Bloch’s foremost goals were to lecture at the university, to provide guidance and supervision for those students of philosophy who wanted to study with him, and to complete and revise his collected works. In addition, Bloch lectured throughout Europe and became involved in the political struggles of his times. He supported the rise of the Social Democratic Party in West Germany, attacked the right-wing Springer Press monopoly, criticized the introduction of professional proscription of civil servants in West Germany, and took a position against nuclear armament, German anti-Semitism, the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Prague, and the terrorism of the Baader–Meinhof Group. Though he was critical of Israeli militarism, he had also defended the right of Israel to exist in a 1967 public statement

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and never joined the anti-zionist forces in West Germany. His political position became more discriminating and clearer. As he stated in the 1968 interview with Michael Landmann: formerly, in the cold war period, I sometimes lectured on the unity of our time and believed that technocracy could harmonize many of the differences between East and West. Today in the period of appeasement, I no longer have much faith in this rapprochement because even appeasement is obviously a caricature. Capitalism stems from Adam Smith, the Soviet System from Lenin. In 1940 we (the leftist emigrants) in the USA all thought that fascism was the inevitable last stage of capitalism and that Russia would never become fascist. This prognosis turned out to be false. The “citoyen” of the French Revolution became the “bourgeois” of capitalism. Who knows what the Soviet “comrade” will become? 2

It was also in this interview that Bloch reiterated the centrality of aesthetics in his political philosophy: Aesthetics should not be confused with contemplation or considered disinterested. Often, certainly, the true, the good or the beautiful, or rather what is proclaimed as such, has nothing to do with daily life and so serves the purpose of deception, as an opium of the people. … Stage and story can be either a protective park or a laboratory; sometimes they console or appease, sometimes they incite; they can be a flight from or prefiguring of the future. The stage is not just illusion; it can also be an anticipation of what is to come, for in it the resistance of the empirical world is eliminated. Brecht made the stage a laboratory for new models. On the problem of whether a man can be sacrificed to the group, he first writes a ‘Yes-sayer’ then a ‘No-sayer’ and he could have added a ‘Maybe-sayer.’ Art retains its anticipatory function even after the revolution. The image of Greek man, the citizen, was first delineated in art. Likewise, architecture first creates real space against the obstacles with which the earth is full. Were the inflammatory elements of art eliminated in the classless society, that would be proof that reality had remained a petit bourgeois society in which art becomes a palliative ideology instead of a clarion call. True art, including non-revolutionary art, is always a clarion call and a challenge.3

Bloch continually tried to learn from his errors and contradictions and reworked his former views if proven wrong by historical developments. In doing this, he clung to a personal ethics of the aufrechter Gang, the upright gait. According to Bloch, humankind had not yet learned to

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take full possession of its natural rights and to walk upright. Humans still had to learn to become like gods and take destiny in their own hands, make their own destiny, that is, make history for the first time. What is envisioned as home (Heimat) in childhood is in actuality the goal of the upright gait toward which human beings strive as they seek to overcome exploitation, humiliation, oppression, and disillusionment. The individual alone cannot attain such a goal, which is only possible as a collective enterprise. Yet, the measure of the individual’s ethical backbone can be determined by his or her struggle to stand and walk upright and contribute to the collective goal. The relative historical gains, revolutionary transformations and formations, what Bloch called “concrete utopias,” were stepping stones and indications of what the human individual and the world could become. It was the function of art and literature to illuminate the potential and latency of humans and the world, and as philosopher of combat, Bloch saw his role as a revolutionary “agent.” On the morning of August 4, 1977, however, Bloch’s heart gave out, but his heritage remains and still points to the possibility of realization.  Bloch’s own philosophical language combines the language of expressionism with his reformulation of traditional systematic European thought, primarily German idealism, one of the reasons why Jürgen Habermas called Bloch a “Marxist Schelling.”4 Moreover, he elaborated and expanded Marxist categories with notions of Messianism, Christian mysticism, and the Judaic commandment against creating a graven image of God. Consequently, Bloch employed images, comparisons, implications, connotations, provocations, aphorisms, fables, and anecdotes to form and reform philosophical categories. Like the expressionist artists and writers themselves, Bloch wanted to “shock” his readers to become aware of their inner needs so they might break out of themselves and break down those reified conditions that prevent communication and collective action. Bloch’s metaphorical use of montage techniques allowed for the juxtaposition of crude, daily expressions along with chiliastic images and euphoristic pronouncements of the coming of communism. Though he was at times astonishingly crass and naive, he purposely relied on such techniques to break with the instrumental use of traditional philosophy and Marxism as well. Bloch wanted to estrange himself and his readers: Distance had to be gained from the immediate experience of life and from those customary forms that locked life into blocks of classifications and categories. Like his thought processes, Bloch’s language never stood still. He constantly played with images and

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categories he created to refine them and to endow them with the very Vor-Schein or anticipatory illumination he endeavored to trace and analyze in works of art and everyday cultural phenomena. Under the heading “Intention,” Bloch’s first book Geist der Utopie begins this way: I am. We are. That is enough. Now it is up to us to begin. Life is placed into our hands. It has long since become empty already. It sways back and forth, but we stand firm, and thus we want to give it its first and last goals.5

Writing in 1918, just at the end of World War I, Bloch signaled that the time had come for human beings to take life into their hands and shape their destiny, but it would not be easy, as he wrote in the very next section of the book “The Self-Encounter”: Too Near I am on top of me. That I walk, speak, is not there. Only directly afterward can I hold it out in front of me. While we live, we do not see ourselves in it; we flow onward. So what happened in the process, what we actually were in it, will not coincide with what we can experience. It is not that what one is and certainly not what one means.6

Despite our intention and despite the fact that we exist, we cannot realize who we are and what we mean until we penetrate the “darkness of the immediately experienced moment.” To clear up this darkness, to illuminate it, Bloch introduced the philosophical category of the notyet-conscious as a supplement to Freud’s notion of the unconscious. In an early essay, he noted: Since we, however, have never yet seen ourselves, we can also not recall things about us. What was never conscious can also not become unconscious. Neither our ‘wanting’ as ‘such’ nor the entire remaining darkness of the immediately experienced moment is a given. We live ourselves, but we do not experience ourselves, and it is thus clear that we neither possess ourselves on top of ourselves in the ostensible present nor above all in any section of the memory.7

If this is the case, Bloch argued that humans have a type of consciousness that he labeled the not-yet-conscious formed by the impulse of hope in which inklings of what humans could become manifest themselves. On

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an individual scale, the not-yet-conscious is the psychical representation of what has not-yet-become in our time and its world. Signs of the notyet-conscious are found primarily in daydreams where individuals have presentiments of what they lack, what they need, what they want, and what they hope to find. Unlike dreams, which house repressed and forgotten desires and experiences, daydreams can be more productive for the formation of individuals and the world since they occur in a semiconscious-state and point to real objective possibilities for fulfillment of our desires. It is by moving away from the darkness of the immediately experienced moment and toward the intimations of a better world sighted in the not-yet-conscious that the darkness will become clarified, and we shall know what we experience. Important here is notion of Ahnung or presentiment that arises in the not-yet-conscious. This presentiment is also in its usual appearance the meaning for that which paves the way ahead. If the presentiment is productive it will connect itself with the imagination, particularly with the imagination of that which is objectively possible. The presentiment that is capable of working is intellectual productivity, now regarded as “workforming” (werkbildend). Productivity sets itself into what is next to it as triple extension triply growing into that which has not come: as incubation, as so-called inspiration, as explication. All three belong to the capacity to go beyond the former borders of consciousness and to move forward.8

It is at this point that art and literature assume their significant utopian function, for they are the means through which human beings form themselves, conceive their questions about themselves, and portray their possibilities to attain or not attain their desired objectives. Daydreams by themselves remain unproductive. They can only provide the impetus to move out of oneself to come into oneself by being shaped into images that deny ideology’s hold over humankind. In this regard, all art and literature that have anything to say to humankind are “utopian.” As Gert Ueding, one of Bloch’s foremost interpreters in Germany, has maintained: Literature is utopia in the very wide sense of course that it is not identical with the reality that faces us as nature and society. It is utopia in the very precise sense that its connection to this reality is like that of fulfillment to lack…. Literature as utopia is generally encroachment of the power of the imagination on new realities of experience. It means discovering with lots of plans and rich imagination and activating the productive capacity

32  J. ZIPES of the human individual in the aesthetic image and critical rejection of an inhibiting reality. In addition its temporal point of reference is the future. However, it does not withdraw from the reality principle merely to place an ethereal and empty realm of freedom in place of the oppressive realm of necessity. Rather it does this intentionally to test human possibilities, to conserve human demands for happiness and playfully to anticipate what in reality has not at all been produced but what dreams and religious or profane wish-images of humans are full of. In this definition literary activity then becomes a special form of dream work.9

Obviously not all of literature and art is utopian. The utopian quality of an artwork is determined by its Vor-Schein, or anticipatory illumination. The anticipatory illumination of a work of art is an image, a constellation, a configuration which is closely tied to the concrete utopias in reality that are lit up on the frontal margins of reality illuminating the possibilities for rearranging social and political relations so they engender Heimat, Bloch’s symbolic term for the home that we have all sensed but none have ever experienced or known. It is Heimat as utopia—and here Bloch specifically appropriated a Nazi term in order to reutilize it— that determines the truth content of a work of art, and it is through the anticipatory illumination of a work of art that we are able to gain a sense of truth in reality. Bloch argued that the question as to the truth of art becomes philosophically the question as to the possibly available depict-ability of beautiful illusion, as to its degree of reality in the by no means single layered reality of the world, as to the location of its object-correlate. Utopia as object-determination, with the degree of existence of the real possible, thus encounters in the shimmering phenomenon of art a particularly fruitful problem of probation. And the answer to the aesthetic question of truth is: artistic illusion is not only mere illusion, but a meaning, cloaked in images and which can only be described in images, of material that has been driven further, wherever the exaggeration and narrative structuring depict a significant anticipatory illumination, circulating in turbulent existence itself, of what is real anticipatory illumination can specifically be depicted in aesthetically immanent terms. What habitual or unblunted sense can hardly still see is illuminated here, in individual processes as well as social and natural ones. This anticipatory illumination becomes attainable precisely because art drives its material to an end, in characters, situations, plots, landscapes, and brings them to a stated resolution in suffering, happiness and meaning.

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Anticipatory illumination is this attainable thing itself because the metier of driving to the end occurs in dialectically open space, in which any object can be aesthetically depicted. Aesthetically depicted, this means: immanently more achieved, more thoroughly formed, more essential than in the immediate-sensory or immediate-historical occurrence of this object. This thorough formation remains illusion even as anticipatory illumination, but it does not remain illusive. Instead, everything that appears in the artistic image is sharpened or condensed to a decisiveness which the reality of experience in fact only seldom shows, but which is most definitely inherent in the subjects.10

Another way of defining the anticipatory illumination can be found in Ueding’s introduction to the original German collection of essays about the aesthetics of Vor-Schein: “The not-yet-become of the object manifests itself in the artwork as one that searches for itself, shines ahead of itself in its meaning. Here anticipatory illumination is not simply objective in contrast to subjective illusion. Rather, anticipatory illumination is the way of being, which in its turn wakes utopian consciousness and indicates to it the not- yet-become in the scale of its possibilities.”11 Here, it is important to clarify even further what Bloch meant by anticipatory illumination by distinguishing it from Schein (illusion) and Erscheinung (appearance). As he did with Freud, whose notions of the unconscious and subconscious Bloch supplemented with his category of the not-yet-conscious, he also sought to expand ideas taken from traditional philosophical idealism and reutilize them according to Marxist tenets and his principle of hope. In this case, Bloch basically converted epistemological concepts that had been primarily developed by Kant and Hegel. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant made an important distinction between appearance and illusion: Only appearance formed the object of knowledge because it was constituted in part of our forms of space and time. On the other hand, illusion emanates from our reason’s endeavor to go beyond the given bounds of our experience. Illusion is self-deceiving; however, it has its other side since it can function as transcendental illusion that operates as a moral postulate to regulate experience. Thus, for Kant, illusion could deceive through its intangible nature, and yet, in its transcendental metaphysical condition, it could serve as a corrective on reality and point to a way in which one could extend the bounds of experience.

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It was the double side of illusion that appealed to Hegel, who endeavored to elaborate the dialectics between illusion and appearance. In his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, he demonstrated that the essence of a thing must appear. It does this through scheinen or shining, and the shining determines how being assumes its form as existence. Thus, when the shining of being is fully developed, its essence appears and can be known in its phenomenological form. In other words, there is a dialectics between illusion and appearance: The essence of a being is not only illusory as it appears but is also illuminated through shining (scheinen) that allows the essence of being to appear. It is through the dialectics of illusion and appearance that we can achieve knowledge of a thing, but this dialectics is historical, respective to a given moment, and bound by the totalizing concept that arises out of the dialectics. For Bloch’s concept of Vor-Schein, Kant provided the basis for an ethical and political ideal in the illusion which could act as a corrective in regard to reality while Hegel demonstrated that illusion as a process of shining was actually a historical objectification of the subject as appearance. Burghardt Schmidt summarizes succinctly how Bloch combined the Kantian and Hegelian notions of illusion and appearance in an innovative manner: Anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein) mediates through the working, realizing subject that which is still only illusion about him with that which could become appearance. To be sure this is no longer appearance in the Kantian transcendental sense but in the materialist sense of a qualitative reality that has been requalified. Illusion is moved through anticipatory illumination to a realizable future that is reachable no matter how far away. However, it remains problematic as a more than this future. Anticipatory illumination is not the process of systematization according to the idea as a ‘subjective maxim,’ but rather it is subjective anticipation of something that is objectively realizable that provides the measure for the anticipation to experience its real criticism. Otherwise, anticipation would be mistaken for planification. It is only as anticipation, however, that anticipatory illumination is the fundamental category of utopian philosophizing.12

Here, it is important to clarify why the English term “anticipatory illumination” is being used to translate Vor-Schein.13 First of all, it is clear from the discussion of Kant and Hegel that Bloch did not associate Schein with appearance, or vor with the prefix “pre” that connotes something coming before its time. The Blochian notion of Schein in the Vor-Schein

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must be distinguished from both appearance and illusion as a real artistic configuration that sheds light ideally on what we might anticipate to be the goal of all humankind. It has an element of enlightenment in it. In this regard, the word illumination that contains a sense of shining and enlightenment as a real manifestation of human anticipation is, to my mind, preferable to the term appearance. Moreover, anticipatory is clearly what Bloch had in mind when he chose the prefix vor to qualify the nature of Schein. In general, Bloch’s category of anticipatory illumination compels us to focus on artworks in relation to human productive activity that is bound up with the way we define ourselves and the world. It also demands that we become detecting critics in our appreciation and evaluation of artworks. It is up to us to determine what the anticipatory illumination of a work is, and by doing this, we make a contribution to our cultural heritage. That is, the quality of our cultural heritage and its meaning is determined by our ability to estimate what is valuable and utopian in works of art from all periods which will further the world experiment and move it forward toward the realization of a world without class struggle and oppression. According to Bloch, it is decisive for a work of art to have an Überschuss or surplus for it to be truly utopian. Literally translated, Überschuss means overshot. For Bloch, the meaningful artist tries to shoot or go beyond him or herself in projecting subjective wishes and needs, and thus, the creation contains not only what the artist means but more—the surplus that continues to hold meaning for us today because of its Vor-Schein character. Historically, the surplus of a work of art enables us to grasp the conditions and tendencies of the times during which the artist created, for it critically formulates what was lacking and needed during its period of conception and realization. This surplus is also the objectification of shared human values and possibilities that provide us with hope that we can realize what we sense what we are missing in life. By cultivating different forms of human creation, we constitute our cultural heritage, and in this constitution, we also redefine and reformulate what we hold to be the truth content of reality and ideologies. The formation and shape of an artwork, according to Bloch, depends on specific techniques and means used by artists to bring about a self-encounter and an encounter with the world, whereby certain truths might be gleaned through the anticipatory illumination of the work. The reader/viewer as critic is to trace the formation of genres and the

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innovative manner that different artists and writers employ as part of his/her own journey toward self-discovery and self-realization. Criticism is essay, the “endeavor” to locate one’s place in a historical development that must be pushed forward in light of the anticipatory illumination in the works of art. The critical reader learns through the anticipatory illumination not to accept passively what has been culturally served up to us as classical and standard, as necessity. The reception of artworks is a selective and active renewal of the cultural heritage. Personal choice and taste have sociopolitical ramifications. We read, view, and listen with hope for new impulses, whether the work originated in the past or has recently been produced, whether the work is given high marks by elitist or so-called qualified critics or is considered mere entertainment of the colportage kind. Bloch was fond of using the term colportage, which referred to the cheap materials sold by the colporteur or traveling bookdealer of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The colporteur carried bibles, chapbooks, cookbooks, primers, medical books, calendars, manuals, prayer books, romances, fairy tales, and adventure books. By the nineteenth century, most of the materials of the colporteur catered to the dreams and wishes of the lower-class readers, who wanted something startling and excitingly different from their ordinary routines. Though the works were of dubious ideological character, often sexist, militaristic, and sadistic,14 Bloch refused to dismiss them as vapid and reactionary because they addressed the hunger of the imagination of people whose wants are to be respected. The drive and quest for the new are obviously conditioned by fashion and market demands, but they also represent the hope for something more than the market can offer, something that exceeds society’s limits. Bloch used the term Novum in various ways to demarcate the line of horizon drawn by the work that would open up genuinely new possibilities to move onwards in the world experiment. The Novum as the startling and unpredictable new is always at the front of human experience and indicates the qualitative reutilization of the cultural heritage. It is through the Novum that we orient ourselves and reshape the inconstruable question about the nature of human existence in concrete ways so we can see more clearly in the direction of utopia. Genres of art and literature resulted from the different inventive means and methods used by artists to break out and away from convention to form anew what they sensed they could not answer or find. Bloch revered all genres and forms of art and literature and refused to establish

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ideological and elitist hierarchies and canons, though he did make qualitative distinctions among them. Anticipatory illumination could be found in fairy tales, the circus, adventure novels, detective novels, opera, classical music, cartoons, and so on. In particular, Bloch constantly referred to the fairy tale as the common denominator of all utopian art, and often, his remarks about the fairy tale reveal how he made distinctions about the utopian or dystopian role that genres played in fostering anticipatory illumination. For instance, in his essay “Das Riesenspielzeug als Sage” (The Gigantic Toy as Legend), Bloch commented: “Fairy tale and legend are so close and smooth next to each other as though they did not depict a totally different time. As though they did not draw a totally different world: the fairy tale, illuminating the way into colportage, designates revolt; the legend, stemming from myth, designating tolerated fate. In the fairy tale there is rebellion of the small person, and it means breaking and clearing up the magic spell, before there was one, while the legend reports calmly about the irrevocable.”15 Key here is whether a genre and work of art is enlightening in the sense of illuminating. “The fairy tale is just as much the first enlightenment as it, in its proximity to humankind, in its proximity to happiness, forms the model of the last enlightenment. It is for all times a childlike story of war about cunning and light against mythical forces. It ends like a fairy tale about human happiness, like reflected being as happiness.”16 Bloch’s philosophical views of the detective story, the novel of the artist, the stage as paradigmatic institution, the horror novel, and colportage all bear the same concern about the subjective unravelling of the question concerning the meaning of human existence as an objectified formation oriented toward exposing false illusion (often referred to as Kitsch) and toward illuminating the way toward Heimat. For example, the detective novel’s peculiar form is one of tracing clues, exposing crimes, revealing false signs, all with the purpose of bringing the truth to light. Yet, it is not the truth that is the major theme of detective novels, rather the process by which one endeavors to get at the truth: In all other narrative forms both deeds and misdeeds develop before the omnipresent reader. Here, on the contrary, the reader is absent when the misdeed occurs, a misdeed which, though brought home in a neat package, shuns the light of day and lingers in the background of the story. It must be brought to light, and this process itself is the sole theme. The

38  J. ZIPES dark occurrence is not even portrayed in a prelude, for it is as yet portrayable, except through a process of reconstruction from investigation and evidence.17

As the philosopher of the utopian function of literature, Bloch was attracted to genres and forms that question and dissolve conventions and rigid notions of life. If the detective novel is concerned with exposing evidence of the past that can be productive for the future, then the novel of the artist, a genre like the detective novel that also emerges with the rise of the bourgeoisie, distinguishes itself by its concern with questions of genuine art and by exposing what is new on the horizon. Implicit in all novels concerned with the development of the artist is that the artist’s growth cannot occur within bourgeois society. The figure of the artist wants to rewrite and break prescriptions that confine the artistic imagination. Consequently, wishful thinking and hope constitute the productive imagination of the artist. It follows naturally that wish-images and wish-landscapes are formations conceived by artists to measure the distance we have yet to go to achieve human happiness. The wish-landscapes seem to transcend reality yet, in fact, leave indelible marks in our consciousness and in cultural artefacts: They are the indelible traces of utopia that constitute the cultural heritage, and the continual production and reutilization of wish-landscapes point to the ultimate realization of a promised land that has yet to find its appropriate form. Bloch remarked that the great painter Franz Marc once said: pictures are our own surfacing in another place, and here, in the placenessness in which interior and perspective mutually merge and permeate themselves with a dissolved other world, a whole existence surfaces in the other place; here there is nothing more than the wish-landscape of this everywhere, of this pemeatedness with home. A limit of art is also reached here of course, if not ventured beyond; for religious art is none at all in so far as it is always on the point of doing away with the appearance which exists for all the senses, without whose appearance nothing can be portrayed aesthetically. Wish-landscapes of beauty, of sublimity as a whole remain in aesthetic anticipatory illusion and as such the attempt to contemplate the world without it perishing. Such virtual perfection, the object of every iconoclasm and itself perforated in religious art: this rises, suo genere geographically, in the wish-landscapes, placed far ahead from painting, opera, and literature. They are often mythologically cloaked and disguised, but never remain settled and sealed in this; for they intend human happiness, a

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sense of its space having been well placed and having turned out well, from the idyllic to the still mystical space. Anticipatory illumination provides this aesthetic significance of happiness at a distance, concentrated into a frame.18

Bloch maintained that it will be up to socialist art and, by implication, a socialist society to see to it that “the auroral feature” of the wish-landscape takes hold in reality. Indeed, he talked about the “reddening dawn” that must be cultivated in the cultural heritage, playing upon the “red” of the dawn.19 It is too easy here to dismiss Bloch’s attitude as naively idealistic or crassly communist. The ultimate guarantee for the realization of wish-landscapes that have yet to ripen fully will not depend upon a state but on the struggle of human individuals acting together to bring about what is necessary to live without a state. Of course, this meant for Bloch, communism, but like Marx before him, he refused to paint a picture of the Communist society. He preferred to elaborate philosophical categories that would further the world experiment with its latency and tendency pointing to the possibility of communism. As Ernst Fischer, one of Bloch’s “comrade-in-arms,” always stressed, “art is necessary so that humankind can recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.”20 That is, both Fischer and Bloch believed that the magical wish-landscapes that resulted from humankind’s hoping for and creatively projecting a better world were means and models for improving and correcting social relations and the natural circumstances of the world. Without art and hope, humankind would not be able to develop and reach the humane fulfillment that people sense is out there, on the borders of utopia. To write, to compose, to paint. To read, to listen, to view. These are human acts of hope. Their forms are multifarious. Bloch cherished these acts, no matter how small and common, and sought to trace the seeds of their origins with a look to the future. To a certain extent, his views prefigure those of Jacques Derrida in that he ignored the distinction between philosophy and literature and art. He did not ignore it by treating literature and art as actual philosophy but by treating philosophy as a kind of “work” motivated by the same principle as artistic creation. Unlike Derrida, however, his philosophical emphasis on fragmentation, the unfinished character of all intellectual work, did not involve an endless displacement of meaning. For Bloch, writing leads to self-authentication that is ultimately dependent on the transformation of the material

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conditions of society. These material conditions and experience cannot be totalized or reduced by writing or philosophical conceptualization. Yet, Bloch maintained that, as humans made their marks on the world, they left behind specific traces and formations of intended meaning that served as signposts toward ultimate truth. The reading of the signposts that must take into consideration the tendency of human intention must approach writing, nature, and human experience in much the same way the writer does in a collaborative effort to form tentative meanings measured by what Bloch called the invariable direction toward a society without oppression. Interpreting and understanding meaning was part of Bloch’s conceptualization of a new relation between theory and practice. He refuted theoretical programs of negativity both on the left and the right that could be used to justify abstinence from action, and he also deplored dogmatic Marxist theory that rationalized the vested interests of ruling groups through categories of closure. For Bloch, interpreting and understanding meaning formed part of the uncontrollable relation between political struggle and the deep impulses and wishes embedded in and generated by works of art and intellectual projects such as Marxism. Reading and interpreting were political acts of detection, unravelling mystery, clearing up the past, pointing toward resolution while demonstrating how this resolution is related to the ultimate mystery that was still in need of illumination. The hermeneutic of Bloch’s philosophical views was grounded in a historical assessment and appreciation of each work of art, but it was essentially—and one could perhaps add, crucially— informed by his search for the anticipatory illumination that would propel us home. As Fredric Jameson has remarked, “the world is (for Bloch) an immense storehouse of figures, and the task of philosopher or critic becomes a hermeneutic one to the degree that he is called upon to pierce this ‘incognito of every lived instant,’ and to decipher the dimly vibrating meaning beneath the fables and the works, the experiences and the objects, which surrounding us seem to solicit our attention in some peculiarly personal fashion.”21 The discovery of the “incognito of every lived instant” involved for Bloch the aesthetic formation of the home to come within his own philosophical works, and in this respect, his philosophical categories were shaped and took the form over the course of a turbulent century of a trajectory that moves toward and urges us toward the realization of the anticipatory illumination.

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Notes















1. Michael Landmann, “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968,” Telos 25 (Fall 1975): 183–84. 2. Ibid., 166. 3. Ibid., 184. 4.  See “Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling,” in Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 61–78. 5.  Geist der Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 11. 6. Ibid., 17. 7. “Über das noch nicht bewusste Wissen,” Die weissen Blätter 6 (1919): 355. 8. Ibid. 9. “Literatur ist Utopie,” in Literatur ist Utopie, ed. Gert Ueding (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 7, 10. 10. Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 247–48. This translation is based on the one in The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, vol. I (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 214–15. I have changed some of the terminology in the translation. 11. “Bloch’s Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins,” in Ernst Bloch, Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins, ed. Gert Ueding, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 21. 12.  Ernst Bloch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 126–27. 13.  The translators of The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) use pre-appearance as does Wayne Hudson in The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Fredric Jameson employs the curious term “ontological anticipation” for Vor-Schein, in Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 150, instead of “pre-appearance,” the way some translators have done. 14. See Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1970). 15.  Erbschaft dieser Zeit in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 182. 16. Ibid., 184. 17. “Philosophische Ansichten des Detektivromans,” Literarische Aufsätze in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 247. 18.  Prinzip Hoffnung in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 980–81. 19. Ibid., 981. 20.  The Necessity of Art (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), 14. 21.  “Ernst Bloch and the Future,” in Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 145.

CHAPTER 3

Ernst Bloch and the Dialectics of Obscenity and Inequality

In the spring of 1985, a colloquium titled “Reification et Utopie: Ernst Bloch et György Lukács” was held in Paris to mark the centennial celebration of the births of Bloch and Lukács.1 During this threeday conference in honor of the two controversial philosophers—and there were others held in Europe during that year—hardly a word was mentioned about the relationship of their philosophies to Stalinism. It was as though their support of the Soviet Union was totally incidental to their philosophical works. Yet, when Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung finally made its appearance in English translation in 1986, thirty years after its publication in German, the journalist Leon Wieseltier commented, “Bloch’s reputation as an unorthodox Marxist appears to have escaped the fact that he was also an orthodox Communist. He was never a member of the party, but membership would have been redundant. The Principle of Hope is the most monumental apology for the Soviet Union I have ever read. … How can a man consecrate himself completely to the idea of human perfection and collaborate in the justification of millions of human deaths? The answer, of course, is: that’s how. In its time, our time, Bloch’s hope is obscene.”2 Though I believe that Wieseltier is somewhat glib, ignorant, and righteous in his condemnation of Bloch, he raises an issue that must be addressed and had actually been addressed in Germany many times before Wieseltier’s “shocking” discovery.3 It is almost the same question that has been posed about Heidegger’s philosophy and its relationship to Nazism.4 Here, we have the reverse side of the coin: Is there something © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_3

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inherent in Bloch’s character and Marxist utopianism that lends itself to Stalinism? Given what we know about both philosophers’ political convictions, should we take Bloch’s or Heidegger’s philosophy seriously? Are their philosophies contaminated by their politics? Ironically, the “Stalinist” tendencies in Bloch’s own works can most clearly be demonstrated in his 1950 essay about the nihilism and irrationalism of the “Nazi” philosopher Heidegger. In the introductory part of Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Philosophie (About the Present State of Philosophy), Bloch asserted: Before he became the Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger was the professor for anxiety and care, and ever since the glory days of the Third Reich have ended, he has become this professor again in a brooding and devastating way. But whatever it is that anxiety arouses and contains, it is not capitalism in its last inhumane phrase, but it is without question the alleged eternal nothingness in a non-historical being. To be sure, the mist of boredom is gradually arising around so-called existentialism that fluctuates in all things according to Heidegger’s thought. Nevertheless, it remains just as much the mist of illusionary problems and of hopeless subjectivism (Innensein), whereby Heideggererianism discourages and prevents its petit-bourgeois followers from gaining any perspective.5

The difficulty with Bloch’s treatment of Heidegger is that it is not really a critical discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy but rather a blunt dismissal.6 The tone and style of the above passage reveal what is perhaps most disconcerting about Bloch’s critique: Bloch simply labels other philosophical positions as bourgeois and irrational when they do not comply with the tendencies and direction his own thought takes. As his own son, Jan Bloch, indicates in his essay, “How Can We Understand the Bends in the Upright Gait?”7 his father had conceived the basic tenets of his philosophy very early in his career, as early as 1918, and he spent the rest of his life elaborating his philosophical concepts with insistence and persistence. Given Bloch’s certainty about his philosophical position, and given his firm belief in the messianic telos of his philosophy, he often summarily dismissed categories and concepts that did not agree with his “line” of thinking or with the general principles of Marxism. The “right” tendency, according to basic Marxist notions, always had to be there. Bloch was, indeed, pugnacious. Ultimately, Bloch’s remarks about Heidegger reveal how his philosophy ironically made him somewhat receptive to the deceptions

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of the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. Certainly, he never became a “Stalinist” professor when he began teaching at the University of Leipzig in 1949, but he did write seething attacks on bourgeois capitalism and imperialism in the late 1940s and early 1950s that might be taken as an apparent apology for Stalinism.8 In fact, his essay on Heidegger, written during his stay in the German Democratic Republic, obligatorily and obligingly dismissed the idealistic and non-historical components of Heidegger’s thinking according to the crude tenets of historical materialism that were being promulgated in East Germany. Moreover, as Arno Münster has demonstrated in his insightful essay on the relationship between Bloch and Heidegger, there was much more that the two thinkers shared than Bloch would admit. Bloch’s endeavor to surpass Heidegger’s starting points in a definitive way within the total context of a ‘Marxist philosophy of the future’ is not always as convincing as the bombast of his writing style suggests. In particular, as a consequence of the inner contradictions of his debate with the Heideggerian existentialist principles, Bloch is ultimately compelled to accept all the negative anticipatory affects that are introduced by Heidegger such as ‘anxiety, fear, horror, and despair’ – which are only supplemented and expanded into the positive categories of ‘hope, confidence, and daydream’ – into the discourse of his ‘phenomenology of the anticipatory consciousness’ and to develop his own designations of the anticipatory affects by permanently distinguishing them from Heidegger’s definitions.9

In contrast to Heidegger, Bloch’s concrete utopia was tied to what he called “active hope” and “active belief” in the “good new, which is before us in the existential process and which can be transmitted further and brought out through conscious human work on it. Realism without such hope and without the dominating mode of being of the good possibility is not realism. There is nothing real without a place for revolution and a better future.”10 Of course, all this sounds splendid, but how could Bloch conceive a “good new” without looking clearly at the ominous conditions of the present? Was Bloch’s attachment to the Soviet Union similar to Heidegger’s attachment to Nazi Germany? Did both long for an “authentic home” (Heimat) that led them to support Nazism and Stalinism? Why was it that Bloch placed so much emphasis on hope and

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the possibility of self-identification while other philosophers focused on disillusionment and self-deception? It would seem that, despite the early rigid conception of his philosophical project, no philosopher of the early twentieth century was less likely to become orthodox in his Communist politics than Bloch—and, in fact, he never was strictly speaking orthodox or committed to Stalinism. As Anson Rabinbach has demonstrated, Bloch, who was already strongly influenced by the apocalyptic aspects of Jewish Messianism, became even more radical during World War I. Bloch joined the ranks of the ‘Anti-Kaiser Germans’ in Switzerland a virtual ‘who’s who’ of the German exile intelligentsia in World War I. Bloch, along with Hugo Ball, the Dadaist-Anarchist, and Hermann Hesse, the mystical author of Siddhartha., wrote for numerous exile newspapers especially the Bern Freie Zeitung and René Schickele’s Die weissen Blätter. His political engagement in those years, when he was still an anarchist and pacifist, and under frequent police surveillance; when he as late as 1918 called Lenin a ‘Red Czar,’ remains one of the most interesting and unexplored dimensions of his entire career.11

Nor did Bloch totally abandon his radical politics when he returned to Germany in 1919. He soon broke with Lukács after his friend became more committed to the orthodox wing of the Communist party. Strongly influenced by the early apocalyptic years of the Russian Revolution, Jewish Messianism, expressionism, Hegel, and phenomenology, Bloch began to elaborate his own special brand of utopian Marxism, which appears to have prevented him from seeing some aspects of reality. What is important to consider here is that the Russian Revolution became a topos in his work equated with concrete utopia. It was a beacon of the future, and as such, the Soviet Union was endowed with great utopian potential as a symbol of freedom. It served as Novum on the front and was an unfinished image of what was to be completed by the people themselves (the collective “we” in his works) struggling for a better future. Despite (or because of) his commitment to the Russian Revolution, Bloch criticized the shortcomings of the Communist Party during the 1920s and early 1930s. Even after 1933, he participated in the expressionist debate against the Communist Party line and published Heritage of Our Time (1934), which is extremely critical of Communist Party

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strategy and rhetoric. However, as the Nazis became stronger, Bloch joined the Popular Front and became convinced that any public criticism of the Soviet Union would diminish international communism’s struggle against National Socialism. Bloch needed the Soviet Union both as symbol for his philosophical work and subjectively as hope against his own despair. Therefore, he defended the Soviet Union during the Moscow Show Trials at a time when many of his friends and comrades in arms were suffering under and opposing Stalinism. It was during the period between 1934 and 1938 that Bloch began to live and write partially in contradiction to the basic premises of his early philosophical concepts. Whether the seeds of his Communist inclinations were embedded in his philosophy from the beginning was a question that did not occur to him. In fact, Bloch never seriously (at least, in public) commented on whether his philosophy misled or deluded him. For instance, in a 1968 interview with Michael Landmann, he stated: In 1940 we (the leftist emigrants) in the USA all thought that fascism was the inevitable last stage of capitalism and that Russia would never become fascist. This prognosis turned out to be false. The citoyen of the French Revolution became the bourgeois of capitalism. Who knows what the Soviet comrade will become? … Russia does contribute a splendid human type with great credulity, but the foundations of Marxism, an English economy, the French Revolution, and German philosophy – all three are missing in Russia. It is like setting a roof on the ground. But that means: genuine socialism has not yet existed, it has not yet begun.12

Typically Bloch talked about “genuine socialism” like some imposing oracle or rabbi constantly preaching about the promised land and the coming of the Messiah. It is interesting to note that Bloch’s initial reception in the United States was mainly among theologians, who were concerned primarily with his notions of the Messiah.13 Did Bloch tend to make some kind of mystical religion out of Marxism? Do the expressionist tones and apocalyptic pronouncements in his writings conceal the inadequacy of his philosophical categories to come to terms with the actual political conditions of his times? With few exceptions, Bloch has not been taken seriously by American philosophers, and he certainly has not received the serious treatment accorded such other significant German-Jewish thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, and Walter

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Benjamin in the United States.14 Perhaps it is because his kind of hope is indeed obscene, and, to use one of his own categories, that he was a “nonsynchronous” or untimely philosopher out of step with his own times? Yet, some major European intellectuals like Gerard Raulet, Jürgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, Iring Fetscher, and Burghardt Schmidt still consider Bloch the most significant unorthodox Marxist thinker in the twentieth century and a philosopher with great integrity. Consequently, we must ask why Bloch has been so clearly excluded from the philosophical discourse in the United States and the UK while Heidegger ironically has been given so much attention. Perhaps it may have something to do with the fact that, yes, he was obscene and out of step with his own obscene times. But, perhaps he had a better sense of the inequalities in the world because he was obscene and out of step with his times. In fact, to work through Bloch’s philosophy and political thinking necessitates confronting the dialectical “obscenity” not only of his hope but of the hope of numerous other German intellectuals on the left and the right throughout the twentieth century. Since this is a huge task, I want to focus mainly on his major work, Heritage of Our Times, to explore the meaning of obscenity and then trace how the pugnacious philosopher Bloch consciously endeavored to be morally obscene in his response to the inequalities of his “perverse” times, which are not dissimilar from our present times. What does obscene really mean if the foundation for ethics has been warped? Is it possible to be decent when political leaders throughout the world tend to be indecent? If we begin with the Oxford Universal Dictionary’s definition of obscene, we can see that Bloch had a paradoxical relationship to this adjective and its meaning whose origins can be traced back to 1593. Actually, the dictionary proposes several possible definitions: “1. Offensive to modesty or decency; expressing or suggesting lewd thoughts; 2. Offensive to the senses or the mind; disgusting, filthy.”15 Since Bloch’s words were never disgusting or filthy (unless we are to believe the puritan Wieseltier and other critics like Terry Eagleton, who feel that they were lewd and have indicated that Bloch himself might have been this way), I want to pursue the notion that Bloch was generally considered offensive by people who controlled the laws and power in Germany, set the standards of decency, and always decided what was appropriate and correct. However, their criminal authority has never been fully challenged and judged, and due to the lapse in judgment, their unethical actions and behavior remain a part of the German

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heritage. In response, Bloch who opposed the imposition of a civilizing process on a people who were not its originators sought in all his critiques to be decently indecent, what the Germans call “anständig/ unanständig,” to survive and maintain his integrity. In short, he was consciously (bewusst) obscene, astutely aware of the inequalities of his times, and endeavored first and foremost to be true to his rebellious character and philosophy. Bloch was a rigorous thinker, provocative, decently indecent and pugnacious in all his political and philosophical writings. Most of all, he detested the hypocrisy and the “indecency” of the German civilizing process and its exploitative and inhuman tendencies. To his mind, the decorum of civility was perverse, and all his energy and thoughts were dedicated to exploring how and why the majority of the people in Germany managed to live after they had been devastated not only by two world wars, but also by a system of capitalist degradation that prevented common people from enjoying freedom and democracy. Bloch astutely perceived most of the European civilizing processes and socialization as mis-education that enabled the reification or the transformation of people into commodities who could be used for the benefit of ruling elites and oligarchies. All of the powerful groups that formed elite governments, whether in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or capitalist America, developed systems that exploited the majority of the people, and for Bloch the “governors” were all truly “obscene” and had to be resisted by offending “polite” society. First, however, people had to learn to come out of the “darkness of the lived moment” to grasp consciously and critically what was happening to them and how they might stand up to oppressive forces. Buried truths had to be exposed and reutilized (umfunktioniert) to form the basis of ethical education which could lead to enlightenment. Indeed, Bloch questioned whether young people could learn to think for themselves and to think critically when schools were more like prisons and stables.16 So, I would argue that Bloch was ethically obscene in his persistent questioning of immoral governments that used misleading propaganda, lies, and violent means to indoctrinate people into a one-dimensional way of thinking and living, and I want to focus now on Heritage of Our Times because it reveals the necessity to be “obscene” and out of step when standards and norms of a country are perverse and lead to the degradation of humanity. This awareness of the obscene norms of the German civilizing process emanated from Bloch’s experiences during

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World War I. It should be remembered that Bloch was a pacifist and political journalist throughout most of his life as well as a lecturer and theorist, and his articles and talks, which appeared in numerous left-wing newspapers and journals,17 provide evidence of an ethical stance that is stunning in its insistence on social equality for all people, no matter what creed, race, gender, or class they were. In this early phase during World War I and afterward in the Weimar Republic, 1914–1933, Bloch learned what it meant to be a pacifist and wrote numerous vitriolic articles against the war and German patriotism. Considered a traitor by the German government and press, he and his first wife, Else von Stritzky, moved to Switzerland for three years to avoid persecution. It was during this time that he fully realized how “uncivil” and undemocratic the German civilizing process was, and thus Germany did not need reforms but a revolution such as the 1917 communist revolution in Russia. Though Bloch had already adopted an “offensive” approach to philosophy while at Heidelberg, it was the Russian Revolution that inspired him to write his first two major books, Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918) and Thomas Münzer (1921). These books and his shorter articles and essays, written during the 1920s and early 1930s, are highly significant because they lead to two of his more groundbreaking political, sociological and philosophical analyses of culture and politics, Spuren (Traces, 1933) and Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of Our Times, 1935). Moreover, they are closely connected to our contemporary world-wide situation in which autocratic, if not fascist rulers in numerous countries have assumed power and are supported by millions of people who place their faith and destinies in their hands. Traces represents the most complete collection of his expressionist writing of the 1920s. Bloch was a fabulous storyteller, and he gathered significant observations of the daily lives of all kinds of people in the form of vignettes, jokes, outlandish incidents, philosophical comments, and reports. As Laura Boella has noted: In the end effect, traces are realities that present themselves to thinking in the form of trash, fragments, trivia, as events that are ambivalent and fragmented, but are existentially intensive in a utopian way because they are perceived in a pulsating and indecisive moment settled between the past and the future, between Not-more and Not-yet. To perceive reality in the form of traces, one must experience them – one must be emotionally touched by them and feel compelled to think about them and to reflect

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upon the meaning of things and existence. Consequently, it is necessary to practice a more intensified awareness that lies beyond customary habits and daily routines. To experience reality in such a way, one has to tell it and tell it continuously in a new way.18

It is not only the substance of the stories that Bloch tells in Traces that are significant and astounding but also his style. He admired the expressionist and surrealist artists of the 1920s and developed his own unique style during this period that stemmed from collage and montage. In many ways, his style was pithy, poetic, complex, ungrammatical, indecent, and offensive. Bloch challenged readers to be alert and think against the grain. “Out of incidents comes a ‘Mark!’ that would otherwise not be thus,” he wrote, “or a ‘Mark!’ that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples. They point out a ‘less’ or ‘more’ that will have to be thought in the telling, retold in the thinking; that isn’t right in these stories, because things aren’t right with us, or with anything. Some things can be grasped only in such stories, not in a more expansive, elevated style, or then not in the same way. How such things came to notice will be retold here, and tentatively marked; lovingly, marking in the retelling, by marking, intending the retelling. It’s little strokes and such from life that haven’t been forgotten; our trash is worth a lot these days. But an older impulse was also there; to hear stories, good ones, poor ones, stories in different tones, from different years, remarkable ones that, when they come to an end, only really come to an end in the stirring.”19 Later Bloch tied his theory of traces to utopianism and hope, for the traces and marks people leave, perceive, collect, and tell are often indications or signs pointing toward utopia. However, the traces became muddy in the early 1930s when the Nazis came to power, and Bloch barely escaped with his life by moving to Switzerland in 1933. It was there that he finished writing his stunning book, Heritage of Our Times, which has great implications for understanding the politics not only of the 1930s but also of the early twenty-first century and the “legal” and popular resurrection of fascism in our times. What can be more obscene in the world today than a country like America that is popularly called democratic and free by millions of its inhabitants? In my opinion, Bloch’s book is perhaps the most significant work he ever wrote, for it contains observations, critiques, methods, and aperçus that address the avalanche of modern technology and globalization that

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have literally disturbed and destroyed the lives of millions of people who have turned toward false messiahs or saviors—and also toward murderous and violent groups—to strike back blindly at the causes of their unaddressed complaints. In short, Bloch wanted to grasp why and how fascism originated and attracted people and which parties were at fault among the opposition to fascism. Little did he know that he was writing about contemporary politics and the structure of inequalities. As usual, Bloch’s book is a mélange of numerous articles published in various left-wing journals and newspapers and philosophical commentaries and fragments strewn throughout his work. Consequently, there is not one particular theme that runs through all the pages but many that form strands tied together by three overwhelming concerns Bloch had at that time in history: the inheritance (Erbschaft) of values and thinking of traditional societies; the temporal inequality or disequilibria (Ungleichzeitigkeit) that blocked access to social justice; and the inability of left-wing parties (communists, socialists, anarchists, etc.) to unite and prevent fascist propaganda to take root among the majority of people. Since there have been a number of superb studies of Heritage of Our Times,20 I shall not attempt an exhaustive study of this work. Instead, I want to explore the ethical concerns that Bloch expressed at this time and how he used words not weapons to support the cause of freedom and order to promote a sense of community and respect for equal human rights. Here, the two German words or concepts, Ungleichzeitigkeit and Erbschaft are necessary to “dissect” before I focus on Bloch’s political analysis and ethics in analyzing the rise of Nazism in Germany and also fascism in general in Europe. Up until the present, various critics, including myself, have used either non-synchronicity or non-contemporaneity to define Ungleichzeitigkeit. However, as I have previously indicated, I have come to believe that these terms are somewhat misleading because of the focus on time or human dislocation, that is, little people left behind by fast-moving times. However, these translations, while helpful, overlook the fact that Bloch sought to explain the inequalities of German times and how the times were unfair and unjust. The entire focus of the book is on the unequal (ungleich) inheritance of the benefits and advances made by capitalism in a precise period in Germany, namely 1924–1933. The end effect is disequilibria. In this regard, he demonstrated how the majority of the people from peasants and workers to the petit bourgeoisie, including some sectors of the middle classes, suffered from inequalities, dislocation, and neglect. As Bloch pointed out:

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Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with the others. They rather carry an earlier element with them; this interferes. Depending on where someone stands physically, and above all in terms of class, he has his times. Older times than the modern ones continue to have an effect in older strata; it is easy to make or dream one’s way back into older ones here. Of course, a merely awkward man who for this very reason falls short of the demands of his position or little position is simply backward in himself. But what if in addition, through the continuing effect of ancient peasant origin for instance, as a type from earlier times he does not fit into a very modern concern? Various years in general beat in the one which is just being counted and prevails. Nor do they flourish in obscurity as in the past but contradict the Now; very strangely, crookedly, from behind. The power of this untimely course has appeared, it promised precisely new life, however much it merely hauls up what is old. The masses also streamed towards it, because at least the intolerable Now seems different with Hitler, because he paints good old things for everyone. There is little more unexpected and nothing more dangerous than this power of being at once fiery and meager, contradictory and out of step with one’s times.21

For Bloch, the diachronic meaning of the term Ungleichzeitigkeit (the inequality of temporality or time changes leading to disequilibria) shows us that diverse times are present in and at the same time, and that the past is not past.22 Old social structures, mentalities, and emancipatory projects continue objectively to function or have an effect as unfinished (unfulfilled) and can be revitalized through the subjective factor. Bloch believed that traces or survivals of the past were both negative and positive. The negative customs and traditions could be either dismissed or reutilized to serve concrete utopian aspirations, while the unfulfilled desires and dreams could be recaptured to serve as building blocks. This means that we cannot reduce the antagonistic conflicts to a single dominating structural factor measured by equal access to time changes. Whatever is positive in the inheritance of the past is to be measured by its use value or benefits for the better future. Since there are many contradictions in Ungleichzeitigkeit that must be worked through, Bloch’s book explores the different aspects of inequality in the access to modern changes that led people to turn to Hitler and Nazism as saviors because their needs and voices were not being heard. Ironically, the

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Nazis attended to people’s anxieties and desires more than the socialist and communist parties. (Here we must remember that Bloch was writing during the Great Depression from 1929 to the early 1940s, and he, too, suffered from the unequal and unjust ways the little or common people had to endure). The second line of the development of a theory of Ungleichzeitigkeit does not concern the different spheres and or classes affected by inequality, but the internal difference in the subjects (that is, in people). Bloch talks about how the moment that has just been experienced has not yet been experienced. There is a hiatus in self-understanding and self-consciousness, and Bloch calls this the darkness of the lived moment that concerns the unknown potential in human relations. Finally, this leads to an ontology of the Noch-Nicht-Sein (Not-Yet-Being) that is determined by the original difference between living in the Now and potential existence, existence and utopian essence that are not in sync with one another. The third strand of exploration in Ungleichzeitigkeit concerns past and present politics and the unsuccessful revolutions in Germany. To be sure, this is particular German history, which is well known: Up through the twenty-first century Germans have never had a successful revolution that brought about democratic stability and equal living standards. There is thus a gap that German people experience in their lives because they have inherited a tradition of laws and customs without emancipatory practices and accomplishments. However, not everything is negative in what is passed on. According to Bloch, the past must be rediscovered and the inequalities must be confronted. As I have explained above, the past must be dug up through a critique of present conditions and through emancipatory actions based on what was fruitful but not realized in the past. By retrieving the productive fragments and relicts that were discarded in the past and formed the heritage of German society, one could reutilize utopian elements and re-construct a new more just and democratic heritage. Consequently, Bloch maintains, it is important to realize that one can and must transcend the inequality of the times through Übergleichzeitigkeit (transcendent equality) that admits and reutilizes the inequality in the past and present and moves forward through Vor-Schein or anticipatory illumination. What was not fulfilled is to be fulfilled as one transcends the inequality of temporal social and political changes. Bloch perceived an ugly gap remaining in his time which was the time of the Great Depression causing millions of people to yearn for

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change and equitable access to the fruits of their own labor. Bloch likens the Great Depression to the “darkness of the experienced moment,” which is not only pertinent because of the Great Depression itself, but it is a human condition caused by people themselves and the transformation of living conditions that transpire so rapidly that people cannot grasp what is actually happening and who they are and what potential they possess to counter the swift negative conditions that left most people were susceptible to manipulative politicians and “mythic” programs, and if anyone or anything was to blame for the disastrous conditions in Germany and the rest of Europe, it was the neo-liberal bourgeoisie which was complicit with the Nazis—and the socialists and communists, who were never able to form a solid common front against the Nazis. It is common knowledge that, in many ways, the socialists considered the communists their worst enemies, and vice versa. Their conflicts weakened the opposition to Nazism because they could not develop effective programs to address the chaos, confusions and fears of the majority of people. Moreover, it is also clear that there were more problems during the Weimar Republic that demand, as Beat Dietschy has argued, a multilayered dialectical diagnosis: “It distinguishes itself clearly from the doctrinaire philosophy of Soviet Marxism whose dialectical approach led to a doctrine of general laws of nature, society, and thinking. However, the world is not homogenous, nor is the social reality.”23 As Beat Dietschy demonstrates, Bloch was able to develop a multilayered dialectical approach to the rise of fascism in Heritage of Our Times that addressed: • Social class structures which cannot be reduced to a simple scheme of class struggle and the embedded social times; • The unequal speed of development in spatially designated spheres: in the city and country, in regions and nations, in the realms of different ways of production; • The heterogeneous temporal structures in the political, legal, and cultural superstructure; • The unevenness of mentality structures, types of rationality and states of political awareness, as well as layers in the psychological structure. In addition, Heritage of Our Times operates in diverse time horizons. Even though special attention is spent on the actual ideological and

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aesthetic practices that led to the production of a fascist public sphere, the book is also concerned with the social-cultural context and finally comes to deal with more ‘profound’ cultural groundwater such as older hate stereotypes, namely against Jews, or ancient dreams of emperorship. “These are relics from different ‘once upon times,’ which were included in the ideological melting pot of national socialist mythology and thus return and reappear there.”24 Bloch did not provide solutions to the problems he discussed in Heritage of Our Times, but he did provide critical “thinking tools” that might help various groups take action and resist fascism. Moreover, he began honing and expanding many of the concepts in Heritage of Our Times to make them more effective in his struggles against both fascism and capitalism. The irony of his obscene defense of Russia and Stalinism is that he endowed Russia in his mind with the potential to transcend inequalities, and he kept believing this until the late 1950s because he needed to have some inkling of hope, and it certainly was not going to be in America, where the McCarthy period of the 1940s and 1950s revealed the contradictions of democracy. But certainly, by 1956 at the latest, he broke with any hope that the Soviet Union would transform itself into a genuine socialist society and dedicated himself to elaborating an atheistic and utopian philosophy of hope that would sustain goodness and good people with the upright gait. As Jan Rehmann notes, “Even during his dissident period in East Germany he understood himself as an organic intellectual of a socialist workers’ movement that saw itself on the rise and the capitalist society in decline. Moreover, this enabled him, in the middle of the tragedies of the Weltbürgerkrieg (World-Wide Civil War) between fascism and socialism followed by the ‘Cold War,’ to develop an outrageous philosophy that took the catastrophes into consideration but maintained that they basically could be overcome.”25 Unfortunately, to this day, the catastrophic inequalities in most countries throughout the world have not abated or been overcome. Instead, they have grown. As a result, the dangers of fascism lurk everywhere. Falsehood, chaos and hysteria reign in numerous countries. While many philosophers and critics in Germany are hopeful that Bloch’s principled philosophy of hope will instill people with the sense and courage to resist the obscenity of inequalities, other contemporary thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman in the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Anderson

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in the United States, and Thomas Piketty in France are more skeptical as to whether we human beings can realize what must be done in dark times. They have made use of the heritage of Bloch’s thinking about Ungleichzeitigkeit in different ways. Bauman, a Polish-Jewish thinker, who wrote a series of critical studies which explore the liquidity of our lives that leave people desperate and insecure because nothing is stable, was very familiar with Bloch’s ideas. He, too, was disturbed by inequalities that privileged groups throughout the world created and exploited to retain immoral domination. While his scintillating critique of globalization demonstrated the lack of ethical responsibility of oligarchies, he did not abandon hope for change. In Liquid Life (2005), he wrote: As inevitably as the meeting of oxygen and hydrogen results in water, hope is conceived whenever the imagination and moral sense meet. As Ernst Bloch memorably put it, before being homo sapiens, a thinking creature, man is a hoping creature. It wouldn’t be too difficult to show that Emmanuel Levinas meant much the same when he insisted that ethics came before ontology. Just as the world out there must prove its innocence in the court of ethics and not the other way round, hope does not and need not recognize the jurisdiction of ‘what merely is.’ It is the reality that must explain why it failed to rise to the standard of decency set by hope.26

Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, is also concerned about human dignity, ethics, and equality. As she points out in her book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) (2017), she focuses on what Hegel would call the master/slave problematic, which has been part and parcel of the capitalist system ever since its origins in the nineteenth century. In a 2017 interview, she explained just how prevalent inequality infiltrates every aspect of our lives and how nineteenth-century thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln and John Adam did not envision the free market as a slave market. The swift shocking changes in our socioeconomic system that led to greater industrialization and effective markets overwhelmed most Americans toward the end of the nineteenth century. The great changes brought about suffering and misery for the lower classes and grave social injustice. This is why, Anderson states, that

58  J. ZIPES distributive justice is an important concern of egalitarians. Being humiliated, harassed, and abused by managers, subject to dangerous work conditions, being penalized for off-duty conduct that has nothing to do with on-the-job responsibilities, being pressured to support management’s political causes – such assaults on the dignity, safety, and autonomy of workers are of concern to egalitarians over and above issues of pay and benefits. Fundamentally, egalitarians care about eliminating oppressive social hierarchy, including relations of domination and subordination under which subordinates can be arbitrarily subject to humiliating and oppressive conditions, and arbitrary restraints on their freedom.27

Certainly, Thomas Piketty, the brilliant French economist would agree. However, his approach to the disequilibria of time, wealth, and justice is somewhat different than Anderson’s. In his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in French in 2013 and in English in 2014, his study of socioeconomic changes of capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries complements Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century work, Das Kapital, and it is highly significant because, like Bloch, Piketty fears the rise of oligarchies and fascism and calls for greater equality in all facets of the economy and social relations. As he states in the introduction to his book, “the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.”28 His examination of the inequality in all societies, but especially the United States, is disturbing because the factors that have brought about huge differences in the management of government and the economy are a clear threat to justice and democracy. According to Piketty, it is wealth, or the one percent of America who control capital and labor, that determines how people will relate to one another, structure their lives, and think. As he writes, “Make no mistake: The growth of a true ‘patrimonial (or propertied middle class’) was the principal structural transformation of wealth in the developed countries in the twentieth century.”29 Piketty demonstrates that, in order to understand the inequalities and injustices in contemporary capitalist societies, we must pay attention to two basic structural formations: the hyperpatrimonial society and the

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hypermeritocratic society. The first group or class is constituted by people who have obtained their wealth and power through inheritance; the second is constituted by people who are managers and stars and have acquired their wealth through merit. In either case, these groups form oligarchies that justify their power legally and illegally and create unequal distribution of a country’s wealth and unequal laws that justify their wealth. As Piketty remarks, the two types of inequality [rentiers and super managers] can coexist … and the fact that the concentration of wealth is currently much higher in the United States than in Europe suggests that this may well be the case in the United States today. … What primarily characterizes the United States at the moment is a record level of inequality in income from labor (probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large) together with a level of inequality of wealth less extreme than the levels observed in traditional societies or in Europe in the period 19001910. It is therefore essential to understand the conditions under which each of these two logics could develop while keeping in mind that they may complement each other in the century ahead and combine their effects. If this happens, the future could hold in store a new world of inequality more extreme than any that preceded it.30

It would be an exaggeration to conclude that some kind of neo-fascism might arise—or has arisen—in most countries throughout the world, more comprehensive and extreme than the fascism that preceded it. Certainly, most people, who cannot determine how they want to live, are already pawns who benefit kings, queens, and knights. They, the masses, are disposable, and they are also angry and looking for a change to climb out of their unequal situation. Bloch observed all this in the 1920s and the 1930s, and his moral concern in the welfare of the people in Germany is clearly what drove him to write Heritage of Our Times. It is, therefore, highly important to draw parallels between Bloch’s times with our perverse times. At one point, Bloch wrote: Every Now is already differently there tomorrow. It is even possible that misery subsides a little. Then a lot of ordinary people stop running with the pack. They return to that center which can be one for them anew. The mere shallow yesterday which they are and have intended begins again.

60  J. ZIPES But this calm, if it comes, hardly lasts for a long time. The recuperation is likely to be short, and certainly no longer as unquestionable as the earlier ones. A sting is left behind, both of insecurity and of former baiting and degeneration. What is now already clearly changing is also less the misery than the trust in Hitler. His enormous credit is slowly crumbling away, creditors and the credulous are grumbling, the payday has been missed too often. Perhaps ‘disillusioned’ SA proletarians and also younger sections of a proletarianized and utopianized petite bourgeoisie are becoming ripe for Communism. But the non-synchronous contents of this stratum, which have been indicated here, have thereby not yet become inoperative of themselves, of course. Against those the red remedy is only halfway effective, or mostly not at all as yet. Nazis speak deceitfully, but to people, the Communists quite truly, but only of things. The Communists often also flog slogans to death, but many from which the alcohol has long since disappeared and which are merely schematic. … Even an expectable turning towards Communism will long be a negative one, a mere disillusionment with Hitler; this alone does not yet secure the new loyalty. For will slogans which were too weak to penetrate the National Socialist front be sufficient to embrace the deserters?… In a time and a country where capitalism, with its poor rationalization, has also discredited the Ratio for ‘broad circles,’ the separate emotional values of Communism are hardly sufficiently stressed, and nobody points towards the genuine and full, the concrete Ratio; as the liberation from the economic system, as the means precisely towards the humanization and totalization of existence.31

Bloch’s words were then and now offensive and pugnacious and almost had to be, given the obscene and perverted times. Unfortunately, one could argue that the obscene times of the twenty-first century call up murky times that cry out for reason, clarity, and compassion. Bloch’s concern was never a concern with the fate of socialism in Russia. His hope was that we humans might learn to walk with an upright gait against obscene conditions, not stooped over like apes or oppressed slaves serving oligarchies in our times.

Notes

1. See Pierre Firlan, Michael Löwy, Arno Münster, and Nicolas Tertulian, eds., Réification et Utopie: Ernst Bloch et György Lukács un siècle après (Paris: Actes Sud, 1986); Michael Löwy, Arno Münster, and Nicolas Tertulian, eds., Verdinglichung und Utopie: Ernst Bloch und Georg Lukács zum 100. Geburtstag  (Frankfurt am Main: Sendler, 1987).

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2. Leon Wieseltier, “Under the Spell of Paradise,” The New York Times Book Review (November 23, 1986): 44. Wieseltier’s remarks were elaborated in a somewhat different way by J.P. Stern in his review, “Marxism on Stilts,” The New Republic (March 9, 1987): 38–42. 3.  It is obvious that Wieseltier does not know German or much about German culture very well because Bloch had been put on trial for his putative “Stalinism” numerous times since 1961 by German critics. There was really no need for him to be “surprised” by Bloch’s pro-Stalinist comments, but there was need for him to investigate why Bloch often defended Stalinist communism as I have briefly done in the introduction. Clearly, Bloch was naïve and wrong in his estimation of Stalinism, and he came to regret the position that he took, though he never apologized for his comments because his work spoke for itself. 4.  For a thorough discussion of this question, see the special section, “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism,” edited by Arnold I. Davidson, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 407–88. It contains stimulating essays by Hans Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas. 5. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10: Philosophische Aufsätze zur objektiven Phantasie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 293. 6. For an excellent discussion of Bloch’s dismissal of Heidegger, see Klaus Robra, “Zur Frage nach dem Sein – in lockerem Anschluss an Ernst Blochs Heidegger-Kritik in Erbschaft dieser Zeit,” in VorSchein Nr. 27/28, ed. Doris Zeilinger (Nuremberg: Antogo, 2006), 183–94. 7. Jan Bloch, “How Can We Understand the Bends in the Upright Gait?” New German Critique 45 (Fall 1988): 9–18. 8. See the two collections of Bloch’s political essays, Politische Messungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) and Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe: Politische Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1934–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). In addition, there is an interesting discussion about the publication of these collections in Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch – Leben und Werk (Moos and Baden-Baden: Elster, 1985), 295–304. 9. Arno Münster, “Das Totenschiff der Philosophie? Ernst Bloch und Martin Heidegger,” Verdinglichung und Utopie: Ernst Bloch und Georg Lukàcs zum 100. Geburtstag, eds. Michael Löwy, Arno Münster, and Nicolas Tertulian (Frankfurt am Main: Sendler, 1987), 173. 10. “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Philosophie,” 316. 11. Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 109–110. 12. Michael Landmann, “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula, 1968,” Telos 25 (Fall 1975): 166–67.

62  J. ZIPES 13. For instance, see Carl Braaten, “Toward a Theology of Hope,” Theology Today 24 (1967): 208–26; Kenneth Heinitz, “The Theology of Hope According to Ernst Bloch,” Dialogue 7 (1968): 34–41; and Paul Schilling, “Ernst Bloch: Philosopher of the Not-Yet,” The Christian Century 84 (1967): 1455–58. 14. One of the major exceptions is Frederick Jameson, who wrote an extensive piece on Bloch titled “Ernst Bloch and the Future,” in Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 116–59. For further remarks on Bloch’s reception in the United States, see Dick Howard, “Bloch in den USA” in Burghart Schmidt, ed., Ernst Bloch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 168–60. In addition, for a more balanced analysis of the significance of Bloch’s The Principle of Hope than Wieseltier’s review, see David Gross, “Bloch’s Philosophy of Hope,” Telos 75 (Spring 1988): 188–98. 15.  C.T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). 16. See Ernst Bloch, “Erziehen und Erzieher,” in Pädagogika (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 7–12. 17. See Jochen Vogt, “Nicht Nur Erinnerung: ‘Hitlers Gewalt.’ Ernst Blochs Beitrag zur Faschismustheorie,” in Ernst Bloch: Sonderband, ed. Heinz Arnold (Munich: Text+Kritik, 1985), 99–100. Bloch wrote for such leftwing newspapers and journals as Die Weltbühne, Tage-Buch, Wort, and Internationale Literatur. 18. “Spuren,” in Bloch-Wörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Blochs, eds. Beat Dietschy, Doris Zeilinger, and Rainer Zimmermann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 511. 19. Traces, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6. 20. In particular, see Oskar Negt, “The Non-synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 9 (1976): 46–70; Tony Phelan, “Ernst Bloch’s ‘Golden Twenties’: Erbschaft dieser Zeit and the Problem of Cultural History,” in Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic, ed. Keith Bullivant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 94–121; Wolfgang Emmerich, “‘Massenfaschismus’ und die Rolle des Ästhetischen. Faschismus Theorie bei Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht,” in Antifaschistische Literatur, vol. 1, ed. Lutz Winckler (Kronberg/Ts: Scriptor, 1977), 223–90; Anson Rabinbach, “UnclaimedHeritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique 11 (1977): 5–21; and Beat Dietschy, “Im Mischdunkel nationaler Berauschung. Ernst Blochs Erbschaft dieser Zeit, in Zeiten des Rechtspopulismus gelesen,” Das Argument 1 (2018): 31–44. In 2006, the Bloch Assoziation published the following talks in its yearbook,

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Vorschein: Jahrbuch, ed. Doris Zeilinger (Nuremberg: Antogo, 2016), 101–194, that were held in Tübingen in 2005: Beat Dietschy, “Ohne Ungleichzeitigkeit keine Zukunft,” 101–12; Jan Robert Bloch, “Das Inventar der deutschen Stube – Ungleichzeitigkeit revisited,” 113–16; Martin Blumentritt, “Zeit Gleichzeitigkeit/Ungleichzeitigkeit Utopi: Warum der Angelus Novus ruckwärts fliegt,” 117–32; Eberhard Braun, “Ungleichzeitigkeit und Gleichzeitigkeit in der Eschatologie der Zeit,” 133–42; Doris Zeilinger, “Die Topoi ‘Ungleichzeitigkeit’ und Übergleichzeitigkeit in der Geschichtsphilosophie Ernst Blochs,” 143– 56; Ulrich Enderwitz, “Kommunikation und Konsum,” 157–68; Michael Jäger, “Kapitalismus als Religion. Zur Ungleichzeitigkeit des unendlichen Erstrebens,” 169–82; and Klaus Robra, “Zur Frage nach dem Sein – in lockerem Anschluss an Ernst Blochs Heidegger-Kritik in Erbschaft dieser Zeit,” 183–94. By far the most exhaustive analysis of Bloch’s notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit is in Beat Dietschy, Gebrochene Gegenwart: Ernst Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit und das Geschichtsbildder Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1988). 21. Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 97. 22.  The following remarks are based on Beat Dietschy’s superb analysis, “Ungleichzeitigkeit, Gleichzeitigkeit, Übergleichzeitigkeit,” in BlochWörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Blochs, eds. Beat Dietschy, Doris Zeilinger, and Rainer Zimmermann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 589–633. He has also published a more recent essay dealing with the actuality of Bloch’s philosophy for political practice. See Beat Dietschy, “Im Mischdunkel nationaler Berauschung,” Das Argument 1 (2018): 31–44. 23. Dietschy, “Ungleichzeitigkeit, Gleichzeitigkeit, Übergleichzeitigkeit,” 612. 24. Ibid., 612–13. 25. Jan Rehmann, “Ernst Bloch als Philosoph der Praxis,” Das Argument 1 (2018): 23. 26. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 151. 27. Chase Burghgrave, “Where Despots Rule: An Interview with Elisabeth S. Anderson,” https://jacobinmag.com/2017/06/private-government-interview-elizabeth-anderson, accessed January 10, 2016. 28. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 27–28. 29. Ibid., 341. 30. Ibid., 332. 31.  Heritage of Our Times, 138–39.

CHAPTER 4

The Pugnacity and Speculation of Hope, or Why We Want a Better World

In 1961, right before the Berlin Wall was built, Ernst Bloch and his wife, Karola, were in West Germany. They had not planned to stay there. Bloch had already delivered a few talks when he and Karola learned about the building of a wall which would prevent them and all East Germans from traveling freely in Europe. West Berlin had been the access to the “free world,” and now the open door was, so to speak, slammed shut. Up until this time in the German Democratic Republic, from 1949 until 1961, Bloch had enjoyed a privileged life as professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. That is, his position was not so privileged that he could speak about political topics openly. He was constantly surveilled and censored. By 1956, it was clear that he was too sympathetic to the anti-Stalinist movements in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, not to mention East Germany, and had strongly influenced a number of students and colleagues to question the oppressive policies of the state. Consequently, he was vilified, and many notable professors such as Wolfgang Harich in East Berlin along with friends and students were arrested, persecuted, and imprisoned. Bloch’s teaching was curtailed, and there did not seem to be much hope for change in the Eastern Bloc.1 Of course, his reception in the Federal Republic of Germany, where he was granted a position as professor of philosophy by the University of Tübingen at the tender age of seventy-six, was mixed. Considered one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century, his departure from East Germany cast shame on the so-called socialist state which was © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_4

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mocked by social media in the West. On the other hand, Bloch, too, was mocked, for here was a venerable Marxist philosopher, who chose to leave America and to live in a hypocritical “socialist” state instead of the “democratic” West. Didn’t he deserve what he got? Wasn’t he aware that Stalinism dominated the Eastern Bloc in Europe? In fact, numerous newspapers, journals, and TV journalists raised the question, ridiculing Bloch, and asking whether his hope for a utopian socialist state was a pipe dream. More seriously, many critics thought his entire philosophy was untenable if not laughable.2 However, despite the notoriety and “scandal,” Bloch did not lose hope or faith in his philosophy. (It is important to note that he was always like a ferocious bulldog when it came to protecting and developing his philosophy.) Bloch was absolutely pugnacious and fought for every word and concept he ever wrote. His inaugural Tübingen address in 1961 was titled: “Kann Hoffnung enttäuscht werden?” (Can Hope Be Disappointed?), and he surprised his audience by stating that hope could indeed be disappointed but not eliminated. We all need a certain amount of hope that is to be distinguished from wishful thinking. When disappointed, grounded personal hope will not disappear. Bloch maintained that concrete hope does not surrender when setbacks occur. With a renegade spirit (once again abstract) concrete hope sets its sight on total negation. Genuine disappointment also becomes much wiser also in its immanent way. Wiser not through mere crude facts. On the contrary. What counts for genuine disappointment is the grounded hope that’s always there. All the worse for the obstructing facts. In contrast, the grounded hope becomes wise through the faithful attention to the tendency (Tendenz) in which the so-called facts do not stand up, rather they run and disperse. Hope often becomes abhorrent when observed this way; however, it is always rectified in accordance with each tendency regarded individually. This is also valid with respect to the entire matter since grounded hope (fundierte Hoffnung) will not at all become wiser through harm. Rather, it contains the essence of the matter in such a way that a harmful reality will not rectify itself but become rectified from the latency (Latenz) inherent in the tendency. The harmful reality that gets through deceptively to the latency of the essential goal in order to criminally betray it will be most thoroughly rectified. It is, however, this latent essential goal, even the actual distortion of the latent essential goal, which is actually immanent and directed centrally by the grounded utopia. And even if it is

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a Not-Yet-In-Existence par excellence, and even if it cannot be experienced at the moment and cannot be fully determinable, then it is in view of this essential goal as that of real humanism, which determines the direction. To be sure just as invariable as vital and indispensable as can be.3

Bloch’s talk was not an apology to his critics or to a general audience of people in West Germany. If anything, it was a sincere explanation by an embattled philosopher who had endeavored to follow a deep belief in the capability of human beings to walk with an upright gait and with integrity and to change the world for the better, to set the stage for utopian forms of living. Hope could certainly he disappointed and damaged, but real grounded hope would always rectify itself. Hope is latent in all of us, and it tends toward enlightenment. That is, our dreams of a better life propel us forward, and these dreams and desires may at times become distorted and harmed by agencies beyond our control. However, even in the worst of times, hope cannot be eradicated if it is a deeply embedded hope, grounded in real possibilities that we endeavor to fulfill. In many ways, Bloch himself embodied hope.4 From the moment he began studying philosophy and sociology at German universities in the early part of the twentieth century, he sensed a mission that became more and more clear once he became a pacifist during World War I, once the Russian Revolution occurred that signified symbolically what hope might mean. After he wrote his first major book, The Spirit of Utopia (1918, revised 1923), hope initiated his deep interest in Marxism. Perhaps I should also mention his friendship with Georg Lukács and the influence that Lukács’s superb study, History and Class Consciousness (1924) had on him. It was Lukács, who first brilliantly demonstrated how relations between humans were reified through capitalist systems so that people became little more than objects and/or commodities. If, indeed, this was the case, Bloch asked himself what hope was there for humans to discover their latent talents. What hope was there for humanity? This question became the central question of his philosophy. Why not abandon hope altogether if it appeared, as the Frankfurt School argued, that we are all living in totally instrumentalized societies? This notion that we cannot determine our own destinies was a thought that Bloch could not tolerate, and it brought out the pugnacity of his hope. This combativeness can be seen right at the beginning of The Spirit of Utopia, written during and after World War I:

68  J. ZIPES I am. We are. 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 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 inimical to the spirit, but the despicable ones were saved, and now they sit there in their comfortable drawing rooms. 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.5

What is significant about the beginning of The Spirit of Utopia is not only the combative tone but also the assertion of human volition. We are in charge of our lives despite the fact that many innocent people and their dreams were killed to benefit profiteers. This is, of course and unfortunately, a situation that prevails today. Later in his book, Bloch explains his concern for the future of humanity: And then we ourselves simply do not occur merely as something remembered. Precisely: we live [leben] ourselves, but we do not “experience” [erleben] ourselves; what meanwhile never became conscious can also not become unconscious. Insofar as we have never and nowhere become present through ourselves neither within the just lived moment nor immediately afterward, we cannot appear as “such” in any area of any memory. Matters stand differently, nevertheless, with the hoping that turns what was experienced forward, above all with the hope that lives in us as the “quietest,” “deepest” longing that accompanies us as the “waking dream” of some demystification, some nameless, uniquely right fulfillment.6

Clearly, everything that Bloch wrote and sensed in The Spirit of Utopia, stamped all his writings and especially his monumental three-volume work, The Principle of Hope, written ironically in capitalist America from 1939 to 1949 and then finished and published in autocratic East Germany. His thinking and work did not change much after the 1930s. Instead, he developed more insights and new concepts. Moreover, he honed such notions as utopia, hope, darkness of the moment, trace, Not-Yet, colportage, anticipatory illumination, and more. He was dedicated to these concepts and sought to help people understand the momentous changes of the twentieth century. He

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was not dedicated to an individual country or political movement. It was not so much the Russian Revolution, socialism, or Communism that mattered for Bloch, it was more his critical theoretical elaboration of a humane philosophy that might contribute to an awakening among people who were being misled and miseducated. Bloch knew he was immersed in a battle of the minds and for the minds of masses of people, and he fought for his philosophy with bare fists. If we return to his 1961 opening address in Tübingen and then study his ongoing work there that gave rise later to his final book Experimentum Mundi (1977), we can almost feel the insistence and persistence of his pugnacity which is part of his hoping. What is important to note, however, is that Bloch’s fight is mainly against injustice and inequality not against a particular government or nation-state. His major goal is to open people’s eyes and minds to themselves, to their capacity for hoping and experimenting, no matter where they live. Appropriately, at the end of his 1961 talk, he states. Nothing is more humane than exceeding (überschreiten) what is. Of course, it is well-known that not all dreams can come true. The tested hope knows this better than anyone. Even here, one cannot have full confidence in it. Above all, hope knows, by its own definition so to speak, where danger and also salvation are, but also where danger and salvation grow. Hope knows that frustration, as the function of Nothingness in the world, circulates and also that wasted efforts are latent in the objective-real possibility that carry well-being and disaster unreconciled within it. The world process has not been won yet anywhere. However, it has not been totally frustrated anywhere, and people on this earth can still restore the moving forces to well-being – and also bring them to disaster. The world remains in its entirety the same highly working laboratory possibilis salutis. This is why we can say: ‘A day is and also remains ahead of us with powerful signals that cause the vultures and those who kneel before Baal to dread their Promethean immortality’ However, Heraclitus says: ‘Whoever does not hope for the unhoped will not find it.’ This should be enough to sound the challenge to being human in a transcendental sense called exceeding. The challenge is consistent with human dignity and opens the way to that sea of objective-real possibility, which positivism cannot dry out, and where speculation is not to be allowed to navigate without regulation. In conclusion: the hope of the future demands a study that does not forget need and the exodus for sure. Exceeding has many forms which philosophy collects and considers – nil humani alienum [nothing human is alien].7

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One might have thought that a famous if not notorious philosopher might have sat on his laurels at the age of seventy-six. Yet, Bloch became even more politically active than before once he settled in Tübingen in 1961. Vincent Geoghegan points out that “Bloch’s political passion had not left him; he expressed himself loudly and clearly in print and on platform, for example, denouncing both the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Czechoslovakia. Other struggles he backed included those against anti-Semitism, the right-wing press, nuclear weapons and the political control of civil service appointments (Berufsverbot). Nor had he lost his zest for life.”8 One of the first works he published after he began teaching at the University of Tübingen was Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Subject-Object; Comments on Hegel) in 1962, a little more than ten years after its first publication in East Germany. What is unusual about the second edition is that he made no major changes in the body of the book, but he did add a brief note about the significance of Hegel’s philosophy which had not been fully appreciated, neither in East Germany nor in West Germany. There is a good reason why Bloch did not change a word in the second edition. In fact, both books were intended to shake readers, especially the young in two different countries at two different times. In both instances, Bloch saw his work as a contribution to a political process that might lead to a socialist state. Aside from introducing Hegel’s philosophy and reflecting on how Marx continued Hegelian thought in his own way, Bloch wanted to encourage readers to think for themselves and to recognize the value of hope. In an introductory passage, “Selbstdenken” (Thinking for Yourself), he wrote: Whoever depends only on the usual train of thought will not get very far. After a short time, the thought will come to sit in a general group of empty talk that is just as hackneyed as it is rigid. The cat always falls on its paws, but the person who hasn’t learned to think, who doesn’t emerge from the short usual connections made in pondering, falls into eternal empty conversations. He repeats what others have repeated. He carries on in the goosestep of the phrase. In contrast to the agreed upon course of expressing thoughts, thinking begins immediately as thinking for yourself. Thinking is moved like the individual behind it who carries it on. Thinking learns how to know where we find ourselves. It gathers knowledge in order to set up one’s behavior afterward. Schooled individual thinking does not take anything as all ready and set in stone, neither spruced up facts nor deadly generalizations or even

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headlines full of poisonous odors. Thinking sees itself and everything that’s thought in flux. It finds itself like a pioneer on borders that are constantly advancing. Learning must be struck actively by its material, because all knowledge must consider itself good and efficient so that it will live in becoming (Werden) and penetrates the crispy crust of everything.9

Bloch’s intention was clear in both countries at different times, in 1951 and 1962: He wanted to shake the boat with his usual pugnacity. Hope and hoping are essential notions in this book. In the last section, “Dialectics and Hope,” he emphasizes that hope seeks the truth of history and wants to bring out the good through dialectical thinking. Since the world is constantly in flux and constantly changing, the dialectical approach must reveal the possibilities for the latent values of humanism to forge ahead out of darkness. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch clarifies in great detail what constitutes Hope and what practices have to be developed to ground hope through praxis, that is, through the theoretical and practical actions of humans. As Francesca Wild points out: The individual human is understood here as a hoping creature who anticipates the genuine future when his or her hope concerns objective tendencies. To be sure, the contents of hope differ according to the times, individual or social situations, not the intention which is always directed toward the highest good, the summum bonum. Therefore, hope always retains the wish for completion or perfection, even when it is never fulfilled. Even when there are ruptures and cavities along the way, the direction continues to exist and persist. That is, there is a tendency to the latency of fulfillment. The constancy of the direction is proof that hope is a principle. That’s why hope must go beyond mere affect and become a cognitive act. In the process the openness of people to the future is connected with the openness to the world. Of course, this openness is constantly determined by the context of the conditions and thus connected to the process of the mediations of history. The world is disposed toward human beings.10

Most important here is the disposition of humans toward the earth and its environment. Hope does not just occur. It springs intentionally from the pursuit of a better world in which there is genuine freedom. People must learn to hope from the tendencies and latencies in the world and to cultivate them so that everyone can participate in the culture

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of the world. Humans are not born into a world of their own making. Consequently, people must constantly re-create the conditions for the fulfillment of hope for a better world. Re-creation is neverending. For Bloch, this re-creation involves “pugnacity,” which is the human tendency to fight for a better world and to survive unequal conditions. But we do not fight just to survive, but to fulfill the hope that awakens us with wonder so that we can recognize the gaps and cavities that prevent us from gaining the objects necessary for self-fulfillment. Satisfied with our lives, we seek genuine pleasure. Dissatisfied and frustrated, we struggle to obtain and preserve what is good and necessary in life. In the third volume of The Principle of Hope, Bloch explains the dilemma that all human beings on earth confront: no matter where they live and experience the world—the re-creation of self and home. From early on we want to get to ourselves. But we do not know who we are. All that seems clear is that nobody is what he or she would like to be or could be. Hence the common envy, namely of those who seem to have, in fact to be, what we are entitled to. But hence the desire to start something new which begins with ourselves. Attempts have always been made to live commensurately with ourselves. We have in us what we could become. This announces itself in the unrest at not being sufficiently defined. … We also wish to bring what is ours, what we obscurely are and intend, out into the open and to possess it. This business is attempted alone or in couples or in a group, what we want is always a life which is not driven away from our inclinations and strengths.11

Grounded hope springs from dissatisfaction and learns that, from birth, it must struggle against reification, from being transformed into an object and from being sold as a commodity. Hope exposes the hypocrisy of a seemingly just and legislated world. Laws, standards, and government, created to protect oligarchies, are not just, decent, or pure. According to Bloch, decency is really indecency because the civilizing process is a reifying process. The decent person is a functionary upholding a system of inequalities without realizing that he is doing that. Bloch explains how it came to be this way in his inimitable style: The boy is going to be someone, to be made into something. The young have to be educated, raw meat is not palatable. So it is minced or cooked, turned into the items you see on the menu. A decent man, a respectable fellow, all right, there is nothing to be said against that, a lot to be said for it. …

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Nobody is born to this, everyone is first made into it in stables. Essentially there are many and bold things going on in young people, still without a clear direction. But they are standardized at home and at school; nobody starts curving early, because nobody wants to be a little hook. However, trainers at home and at school aim actually to achieve the improbable; to make people put up with what will later be done to them. The will is pleasantly diverted or broken strictly until it passes into smiling and nodding. The mind is drilled so that it never breaks out of the pre-arranged questioning and answering of the life that awaits the employee. Usually only servants are intended in bourgeois society and not of course what would be so natural for the oppressed: avengers. In general, the pupil is meant to be reduced to the denominator of the time into which he is born, in particular to the denominator of the class to which he belongs through his parents.12

Bloch’s pugnacious resistance to the class-based arbitrary socialization that all people undergo, different and yet the same in different societies, is largely found in his writings and in his own courageous endeavors to walk with an upright gait. Clearly, he changed somewhat as he encountered non-synchronous conditions throughout his long life. However, his inclination toward a socialist utopia which had yet to define itself remained a constant in his writing and behavior, especially in his late years when the student movements throughout the world fostered hope. In particular, he was enthused by the experiments undertaken by people in different countries who created “concrete utopias,” which, even when they failed, displayed elements that might be recouped for future experiments. It is not by chance that Bloch’s next to last book was called the World Experiment (Experimentum Mundi). This book is highly significant and not given much attention by Bloch scholars. Significant because it demonstrates how Bloch used several important categories of hope based on the necessity to embrace nature and the environment and share the responsibility for their future. In the final years of his life when he had become half blind, he opened his eyes more and more to a materialist view of nature and the relationship of human beings to nature. Bloch believed that we are all involved in a world experiment as experimenters, not in the usual sense of the term. That is, we do not just observe the experiment that we undertake, we are part of it. We seek to fulfill the tendency of the experienced moment, and in the process, there

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are certain categories of hope that we form and transform. It is our hope that brings these categories together in an open process that is neverending. Influenced very much by the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who wrote a significant study, Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) dealing with the unconscious, Bloch placed great emphasis on volition or wanting as a driving “theopische” force of existence. In Hartmann’s System der Philosophie im Grundriß (The Outline of the System of Philosophy, 1908), he conceived some important notions of Tätigkeit (activity), Streben (striving), and Wollen (wanting) that clearly had an impact on Bloch’s thinking, writings, and actions. For instance, Hartmann wrote: To be sure we are familiar with feelings that are present in us and indicate striving and longing without us being able to know exactly what their goal and contents are. However, we cannot conclude from this that striving is really unconscious activity without contents. We can only conclude that we have not yet been able to make its contents clear to our consciousness. If an opportunity arises in our activity, then we learn later from our instinctive action that the striving certainly had a definite adequate content, otherwise it could not have been realized. Furthermore, we are familiar with conscious ideas (Vorstellungen) that appear to be relatively separated from wanting, that is, they do not push their way toward outward realization. However, these ideas are not completely free from moments of intentionality, and this is because they are attached with a sensuous intense feeling that can only be explained by a condition of wanting (willen).13

In my opinion, the parallels between Hartmann’s philosophy and Bloch’s thinking are worth further exploration, but this is not the time and place to do this. What is significant is that Bloch’s ideas are the fruit of his engagement with Hartmann, and the fruition can certainly be seen in Experimentum Mundi, which is a political continuation of Hartmann’s work that shifts the emphasis to Bloch’s concern with the world process. What Bloch sought in Experimentum Mundi was not a conclusion of sorts to his philosophy, but an opening to nature and the world that involved a praxis of hope. Bloch visualized theory and praxis as motivated by an intense wanting or volition to realize the realizing. In this process, humans become aware of the latent tendencies toward making nature and the world a better place. At the end of this complex study of human and social processes, Bloch remarks:

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Realizing means setting the potentiality of subjective capacity (Vermögen) in operation to fulfill the objectively-real possible and to produce even new possibilities; it indicates the intervening (eingreifen) and breaking into (einbrechen) of the subjective factor into the still impartial limbo of the existing conditions so that these conditions as objective factors release their potentiality in the actuality of their effects. To be sure, the active factor of revolutionary spontaneity is not at all limited to this realizing force. Rather, it also includes the contents of that which is to be realized in subjective anticipation, which is connected to the objective imagination in the Daß-Factor.14

Bloch goes on to explain that the Daß-Factor (that-factor) is related to what he calls the dynamic “thelisch” drive within people to satisfy the hunger of existence. In our will to realize what we want or strive for, we recognize what we lack. Consequently, all our hope and striving and longing are preset to realize and fulfill what we lack. To emerge from the darkness of the moment, we must follow the light of enlightenment about ourselves and the condition of the world. In our endeavors to define who we are, we transform the world as we transform ourselves and are also transformed by the world in an open process. For Bloch, this means a naturalization of human beings and a humanization of nature. We have the potential to change ourselves, and this power emanates from hope. But it is only a political revolutionary praxis that, Bloch asserts, will enable us to emerge from the darkness of the moment and stride upright toward unfinished enlightenment.15 Throughout Experimentum Mundi Bloch uses such “pugnacious” predicates as treiben (drive), eingreifen (intervene), streben (strive), einbrechen (break into), wirken (affect), realisieren (realize), and so on as well as related nouns. They are all bound up with his insistent pugnacious philosophy of hope that he himself endeavored to live up to until his death. Experimentum Mundi was not really his last book. Rather, the final words, which were not final, can be found in the supplementary volume 16, Tendenz—Latenz-Utopie, of the complete edition of his works. The editors of this volume, Burghardt Schmidt and Beat Dietschy, explain that, in the last year of his life, the half-blind Bloch desired to gather together many of his unpublished essays, interviews, lectures, aphorisms, and talks and publish them as a kind of testimony while he was still alive.16 The idea behind this project was to publish these short works, written from 1917 to 1977, not chronologically but according to themes such as cognition, art, theory, praxis, hope, materialism, and

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philosophical models. Bloch never did get to see the published book, but he did manage to examine the final proofs. Among the numerous interviews and essays that clarify Bloch’s concept of hope and its pugnacity, there is one in particular that stands out—“Theorie-Praxis auf längere Sicht” (Theory and Praxis in the Long Term), written in Paris, 1935, and dedicated to his assistant Gert Ueding 1978 in Tübingen. This short essay of four pages—and there are many others which are not simple supplementary articles—was written when Bloch was fleeing the Nazis and was not certain where or whether Karola and he would find a safe place to live and work. Home had become treacherous, and the times were dangerous. This newly edited essay was specifically dedicated to the young Ueding during the 1970s, a period of political upheaval in West Germany. To a certain extent, it was a warning and is supposed to be a warning even today to young people not to rush into action but to consider theoretically the long-term consequences of their actions. (Wägen vor dem wagen, or weigh things before daring something.) By no means did Bloch want to impede the political activities of young people. On the contrary, he wanted them to be more effective by considering the latent tendencies of their praxis and by keeping alive the revolutionary flare of previous struggles. Certainly, ‘praxis in the long term’ is compatible with our everyday political struggles that, according to the words of the young Lukács, still keep alive the apocalyptical essence of the striking miners of his times. It was in the everyday political struggle of the strike that the practical steps were taken necessary for a radical renovation of the relationship between people and between people and nature. Praxis in the long term has nothing in common with a retreat to contemplative aesthetics and theory that will put off and delay the revolutionary praxis. Rather it keeps alive the sense of revolutionary praxis for those vital tasks that people can first tackle without ideological eggshells and with practical rigor as the classless society dawns. However, these tasks must not get lost on the way to the classless society. They should not be forgotten.17

What is striking, as usual, is the combative tone of Bloch’s language and, at the same time, his hope that younger people will continue the struggle for a socialist society and be aware of the small events and things that build toward a socialist society. Many critics of Bloch and other utopian thinkers have mocked them for being too unrealistic and idealistic. Certainly, the times, no matter where one lives in this world, do not seem to be suitable for hope for a better future. If anything, one could

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argue that whatever latent possibilities there were for developing a better world and whatever tendencies there were to realize the potential for improving the world have been turned against themselves and have been dissipated. But this is far from the truth. If we take a step back and consider what has been happening in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States, where I live, but also in almost every country in the world, the major conflicts are all about regaining and retaining hope. Even the rise of fascism can be regarded as a movement based on hope for the fulfillment of people’s needs and dreams. Everyone is hungry for hope, longs for hope, and strives for hope. Whether one is politically on the right or on the left, whether one admires or detests Donald Trump and other dictators in the world, everyone is moved by hope for a better world despite differences of visions. Writing in The New York Review of Books, David Cole remarked: In the two years since the 2016 election, Donald Trump has generated some of the most demagogic, xenophobic, and cruel policies and practices to come out of Washington in decades. At the same time we have also seen some of the most engaged social activism in decades. The Women’s March, the airport demonstrations against the Muslim ban, the overflowing town halls in defense of the Affordable Care Act, the protests against the separation of immigrant families and Trump’s threats to deport undocumented minors who were granted legal status by the Obama Administration, the #MeToo moment-turned movement, the student-led March for Our lives in support of stricter gun control, and the widespread protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court are just the most public manifestations of citizens’ determination to stand up against Trump’s assaults on civil rights, civil liberties, and constitutional norms.18

It seems to me that the questions we must ask about Bloch’s pugnacious and grounded hope are whether hope can lead to a democratizing of democracy throughout the world that will prepare the way for a socialist, if not classless society. We might even ask whether “true” democracy has ever really existed and whether all the conflicts about freedom and order in our world are nothing but indices of what we lack and examples of the anticipatory illumination of democracy. The social activism that Cole cites in his essay could also be called “traces” of “concrete utopias,” and depending on the longevity of the movements, they certainly are essential human experiments that lead to a better world. But who is to determine what is better for the world and

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better for nature? What is the better world? Utopia? The classless society? Where do truth and ethics play a role in hope? Given control of modern technology by oligarchies, swindlers of hope, can we ever know what truth is, and whether social justice can ever be firmly established? In 1936, while in Prague, Bloch wrote a short essay called, “Wahrheit als eingreifende Abbildung von Tendenzen – Latenzen” (Truth as Intervening Reflection of Tendencies-Latencies), in which he explained that we can only know truth if we recognize that it is a dialectical process. Since most things are not fixed and stable in the world, since all forms are fluid, we must understand that truth is reflected through dialectical images. Bloch argued that: Dialectical truth is reflection (Abbildung), and to be sure it is not one which needs a “little picture” or a “species” to represent something. Rather, dialectical reflection is in the thinking as well as in the imagined tendency-object one of the “images,” which originates with this – in-forming – reflection of the excess, of the possibilities in the world, and on which the world works on in advance, collaborates. Without a doubt concrete praxis first forms the realization of this in-formation, from the latency of the possible and its general objects (Überhaupt).19

This is all rather complex, and so, perhaps the best way to explain Bloch’s notion of dialectical truth would be to retell a pertinent tale about falsehood and truth, written by the great French scholar of jurisprudence, Édouard Laboulaye, who was one of the major proponents of the Statue of Liberty in France during the 1890s. Falsehood and Truth In olden times, Falsehood and Truth resolved to live together like a pair of friends. Truth was a good person, simple, timid, and confident. Falsehood was a smooth talker, elegant, and daring. One commanded and the other always obeyed. Everything went well in such a friendly partnership. One day Falsehood suggested to Truth that it would be well to plant a tree that would give them blossoms and flowers in spring, shade in summer, and fruit in autumn. Truth was pleased with the plan, and the tree was planted right away. As soon as it began to grow, Falsehood said to Truth: “Sister, let us each choose a part of the tree. A community that is too close together breeds strife. Good accounts make for good friends. For example, there are the roots of the tree. They support and nourish it. They are sheltered from

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wind and weather. Why don’t you take them? To oblige you, I will content myself, for my part, with the branches, that grow in the open air, at the mercy of birds, beasts, and men, wind, heat, and frost. There’s nothing that we would not do for those we love!” Truth, confused by such goodness, thanked her comrade and burrowed underground, to the great joy of Falsehood, who found himself alone among people and was able to reign at his ease. The tree grew fast, and its large branches spread shade and coolness far and wide, and it soon produced blossoms more radiant than the rose. Men and women hastened from all sides to admire the marvel. Perched upon the topmost branch, Falsehood called them and soon charmed them with his sweet words. He taught them that society is nothing but falsehood, and that men would be ready to tear each other to pieces if they always spoke the truth. “There are three ways to succeed here below,” he added, “by simple falsehood, as when the vassal says to his lord, ‘I respect and love you,’ by double falsehood, as when he exclaims, ‘May lightning strike me if I am not your most faithful servant,’ and by triple falsehood, as when he repeats, ‘My wealth, my arm, and my life all belong to my lord,’ and then deserts his master at the moment of danger.” The good apostle gave these lessons in a cheerful manner and supported them with such fine examples that everyone who heard him was intoxicated by his words. They pointed to those who did not applaud and even began to suspect each other. For a hundred miles around, nobody talked about anything except Falsehood and his wisdom. Some thought he should be king. As to good Truth, who lay crouching in her den, no one gave her a thought. She might be dead and forgotten. Abandoned as she was by everyone, she was forced to live on whatever she could find beneath the ground, while Falsehood was enthroned among green pastures and flowers. One day the poor mole gnawed the bitter roots of the tree that Truth had planted, and it gnawed them so deep that one day, when Falsehood, more eloquent than usual, was addressing a myriad crowd of people, the wind rose slightly, and suddenly blew down the tree which no longer had any roots to support it. The branches in their fall crushed all who were beneath them. Falsehood escaped with an injured eye and broken leg, which left him lame and squinting. Once again he was able to pull himself out of trouble lightly. Now Truth was suddenly restored to light and rose from the ground with disheveled hair and a stern countenance and began harshly to rebuke

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80  J. ZIPES the people around her for their weakness and credulity. No sooner did Falsehood hear her voice than Falsehood cried, “Look! There is the instigator of all our ills – the one who has nearly destroyed us! Death to her! Death to her!” As soon as the people heard this, they armed themselves with sticks and stones and pursued the unfortunate woman. Once they caught her, they pushed her again into the hole, more dead than alive. After doing this, they quickly sealed it with a large stone so that Truth might never more arise from her tomb. However, she had still a few friends, for during the night an unknown hand carved the following epitaph upon the stone:

Or,

“Aqui yaze la Verdad, A quein el mundo cruel Mato sin enfermedad Porque no reinase en el Sino Mentira y Maldad.” “Here lies Truth, slain not by disease but by the cruel world so that nothing might reign in it but Falsehood and Disloyalty.”

It is Falsehood’s smallest fault not to suffer contradiction. So the people searched for Truth’s friend, and as soon as he was found, he was hung. It is only the dead who don’t complain. To be more certain of his victory, Falsehood built himself a palace over the tomb of Truth. But it is said that sometimes she turns in her grave. When this happens, the palace crumbles like a house of cards and buries all the inhabitants beneath its ruins, both innocent and guilty. But the people have other things to do than mourn their dead. They continue to fulfill their inheritance. Those eternal dupes rebuild the palace each time more beautiful than the old ones, and Falsehood, lame and squinting, continues to reign there to this very day.20

What is fascinating about Laboulaye’s tale is that it reveals how very much he was like Bloch in his politics with regard to freedom and democracy. One might say that he “prefigured” Bloch. Yet, it would seem at first reading that Laboulaye was somewhat pessimistic or even cynical about the survival of truth in the world. Yet, if we read the tale from Bloch’s point of view, it is a forthright narrative and reflection (Abbildung) about the lack of truth in the world that implies that truth is not entirely dead, for, even while dead, truth keeps stirring to provoke

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and disturb people. Truth cannot be denied. It is infuriated by falsehood and deceit. It acts very much like truth in another nineteenth-century tale that the Brothers Grimm collected which is called “The Bright Sun Will Bring It to Light,” about a journeyman tailor who beats a Jew to death and steals his money.21 Just before the Jew dies, he utters, “The bright sun will bring it to light.” Eventually, after the journeyman settles down, marries, and has a family, the sun shines on a wall, and he confesses to his wife that he had murdered the Jew. Once the truth is out, he is brought before the court and convicted. Truth always wants to be outed! Sometimes it will out itself. It knocks on our doors. It is the tendency of hope. Whether the truth can “pugnaciously” continue to exist today under conditions that suppress its utopian course of hope is a fundamental question that has a great bearing on the fate of democracy and social justice in our contemporary world of Ungleichzeitigkeit. Recently, Sophia Rosenfeld published a critical study, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, which is indicative of the preoccupation of many scholars, politicians, and philosophers concerned about the perversion of hope and truth in the world process.22 Like Bloch, Rosenfeld first looks backward in history to move forward toward a better future. What this glance backward reveals, first and foremost, she writes, is that truth under the conditions of modern democracy has always been fragile. Truth – meaning doubly the opposite of lies (in moral terms) and the opposite of mistaken beliefs and erroneous information (in terms of epistemology) – has been touted as a key democratic value from the get-go. Republics and later, modern democracies have long prided themselves on both building on and generating truths in ways that constitute a striking departure from absolutist rule, whether in the mold of King Louis XIV or in the style of the modern dictator. That’s why the seemingly brazen flourishing of misinformation and falsehoods in public life can strike us as so shocking. And yet, democratic truth has never had any precise contours or content.23

Rosenfeld explains that since truth is not absolute and has multiple constituencies in an inegalitarian world that seek to gain a monopoly on truth, it is always in danger of being distorted and exploited to serve the purposes of particular “tribes” and social groups. However, if truth is the process of bringing everything to light, exposing falsehoods, there is a possibility that it can serve diverse groups to close some of

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the inegalitarian gaps that separate us. As Rosenfeld states, “It is precisely because democracy is always an unfinished project, rooted in protection for plural doxai, that strategies for tackling the shaky status of truth today are going to require more than newspapers, websites, broadcasts, podcasts, and ‘feeds’ all devoted to the facts – especially when facts themselves have become suspect.”24 There are two tendencies underlying truth’s exposure of falsehood: speculative hope and educated hope. It is through the imaginative will of people and through their willingness to recognize the different effects of non-synchronicity and to bring about greater social justice that truth is forged. As Rosenfeld rightly concludes: “Democracy depends not on having universal knowledge or the ability to name and explain everything that reality encompasses but, rather, on the idea that all this debate and deliberation will ultimately lead to larger, if still collaborative and contingent, truths that will, in turn, benefit humankind as a whole. Truth is a necessary horizon for political life right along with liberty and equality and happiness. It may even be more fundamental.”25 Truth is undeniably the pursuit of liberty, something Bloch pugnaciously defended, for it is only by grounding liberty that one can hope and endeavor to realize one’s dreams of a better life.

Notes





1. For a thorough history of Bloch’s difficulties in the GDR, see Volker Caysa, Petra Caysa, Klaus-Dieter Eichler, and Elke Uhl, eds., “Hoffnung kann enttäuscht werden.” Ernst Bloch in Leipzig (Frankfurt am Main: Hain, 1992). 2.  See Vincent Geoghegan’s excellent monograph, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996), 25. “From 1961 until his death in 1977, Bloch was based at Tübingen. At first Bloch seemed to have merely added to his public notoriety. In the East he was denounced as a ‘deserter, renegade, traitor, conman [and] dangerous criminal,’ while the West German press made pointed references to his Stalinist past, and expressed scepticism what it interpreted as his current ‘conversion’ to Western values (the absurdity of a ‘communist Saul’ suddenly becoming a ‘humanist Paul,’ as one paper put it.” 3. Ernst Bloch, Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, ed. Hans Heinz Holz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1967), 179–80. 4. See Oskar Negt’s remark in “The Non-Synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda,” New German Critique (Autumn 1976): 46.

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“Congratulating Ernst Bloch on his ninetieth birthday suggests taking a look at the concrete utopia of a human life that has taken shape in him, a life which had an almost unique opportunity, not only to experience more than six decades of non-synchronous, even catastrophic developments, but also to give them expression – in a continuity of conceptual analysis whose exertion cannot better be documented than through the fact that the ruptures are missing in his thought, that a renunciation of convictions and insights was never necessary.” 5. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1. 6. Ibid., 191. 7. Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, 181. 8. Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, 26. 9. Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 17–18. 10.  Francesca Vidal, “Hoffnung,” in Bloch-Wörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Bochs, eds. Beat Dietschy, Doris Zeilinger, and Rainer Zimmermann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 204. 11. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. III, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 927. 12. Ibid., 928. 13. Eduard von Hartmann, System der Philosophie im Grundriß. Vol. 4: Grundriß der Metaphysik (Bad Sachsa im Harz: Hermann Haacke, 1908), 16. 14. Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi: Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 255. 15. Ibid., 263–64. 16. See Ernst Bloch, Ergänzungsband zur Gesamtausgabe: Tendenz—Latenz— Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 419–22. 17. Ibid., 147–48. 18. David Cole, “The Path of Greatest Resistance,” The New York Review of Books (February 7, 2019): 21. 19. Ergänzungsband, 260. 20. Édouard Laboulaye, “Le Mensonge et la Vérité,” Dernier Contes Bleus (Paris: Anicenne Librairie Furne, 1883), 55–63 (my translation). 21. See Brothers Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. and ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam, 2003), 511–13. 22. See Sophia Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 23. Ibid., 2. 24. Ibid., 164. 25. Ibid., 174.

CHAPTER 5

The Messianic Power of Fantasy in the Bible

The Bible is the seminal work of all fantasy literature.1 While seemingly providing a world order through a narrative about the origins of the universe and the events that lead, in the Old and New Testament, to the foundation of a Judeo-Christian morality, it subverts this order with promises of other worlds/other spaces. The Bible transports us back in time to a legendary past to encourage us to look forward (out of dissatisfaction with the present) to another and better world. The Bible undermines reality and will not let us rest content with conditions as they are. And like all great works of fantasy, it provides us with the hope that the other, or what Bloch calls, “the utterly different,” is possible. Alterity is key to fantasy, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the explosiveness of the miraculous, that enables us to set our sights realistically on a promised land, otherwise we are left with false promises. The Bible does not leave us with false promises. Institutions do. Professions and professionals do. Canons do. Religions do. The Bible must be taken out of context. Returned to and into fantasy. It is not by chance that Bloch devoted the latter part of his major work The Principle of Hope to the Bible. Bloch was always trying to read the Bible as a detective reading a mystery for clues, not about the solution to a crime, but about the nature of the miraculous. In this sense, the Bible is authentic mystery, which gives secular fantasy its meaning, and we as readers must be detectives. As Bloch explains:

© The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_5

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86  J. ZIPES The purpose of detective reading would have to involve revelation of the most positive things that would come from the discovering and dismantling of Ezra’s editing of the Bible and from the preservation of the submerged “plebeian” elements in the Bible. Of course, they are only submerged to a certain extent. Otherwise the Bible would have the same effect as any other book of religion of the upper class and of idolized despotism instead of representing the most revolutionary book of religion ever, itself irrepressible, thanks to the power of its antithesis that continually creates space: the son of man -- Egypt land. Textual criticism that refers to this antithesis cannot in any way be neutral like, for example, Homer criticism. Rather, this antithesis (nemo audit nisi spiritu liberatits intus docente) gives philology a goal.2

Bloch insists that all reading is intentional, but the reading that is most intentionally suited to the Bible is one that opens it up as a mystery. Therefore, the Bible calls for detective reading, informed by revolutionary hope, for the Bible is intentional in its anticipatory illumination of the promised land, its exodus from oppression in Egypt, from Moses to Jesus, from the desert to building a paradise on earth. The intent is determined by human aspiration, daydreams, and glowing forth. Traditional textual criticism has intentionally and unintentionally blurred the utopian landscape of the Bible, the traces that enable us to glimpse the potential we have of humanizing nature and making ourselves more natural. The Bible projects light from ourselves back upon ourselves. This is what the crowd learns in “The Gospel According to John,” when it says: “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of man?” Jesus said to them. “The light is with you a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of the light.”3

In The Principle of Hope and other writings, Bloch seeks to recuperate the messianic power of fantasy in the Bible connected to the light of anticipatory illumination. A suggestive reading of Bloch reading the Bible offers possibilities to comprehend the key role the Bible plays in the development of fantasy literature—and also to determine criteria for fantasy. After all, much of what we call fantasy is hallucinatory. Certainly

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not good for the head. But also not good for the stomach. Good fantasy gives you something to chew on. There is no fantasy without materiality. Bloch seeks to ground the Bible in humanity and materiality in The Principle of Hope paradoxically so that it will inspire us to fly. In his reading of the Bible, he focuses time and again on Moses and Jesus as symbolical figures representing humankind’s exodus—the rebellion against despotism, the moving out to experiment and explore in search of the promised land, which is both a penetration into God and voyage toward realizing the divine in humanity. All religions have their own utopian symbolism, but Bloch places greatest emphasis on the JudeoChristian images in the Bible because their intentionality is connected to an enlightened view of the world that seeks to clarify the ontological situation of humankind. Judaism already posits the religion of exodus; Christianity with an anthropological critique of religion, as it were, represents the son of man at the dawn of the kingdom without father idols, with the genesis not as beginning, rather as apocalyptical end. All religions have a kind of invariable final symbol at bottom, different as well as contrary in imagination and appearance because they are socially determined, and therefore, ideological. However, they also contribute to utopian formation. But the explicitness of the intention of the symbol itself does not change due to this. It is only directed toward the essence of the symbol that is still to come, and it is only for its sake that the intention of the symbol rises and senses what is to come.4

For Bloch, religion is an evolutionary process of human self-awareness that leads down from the heavens into the materiality of human nature and nature. The formation of the Jewish religion was a departure from what he termed pagan and “astral” religions and myths—astral because the gods were above, beyond the reach of human beings. With Judaism, according to Bloch, humans brought God to earth, and under the instigation of Moses, began a quest for the Messiah and promised land. The result from human imagination and social determination was the conception of Jesus Christ as the Messiah and Menschensohn (son of man). Literally, Bloch’s term Menschensohn means “son of human beings” or “son of humankind.” Wherever possible I shall use humankind or humans instead of the more traditional and male-biased “man.” Jesus is traditionally referred to as the “son of man,” and this

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term is used by some of the scholars I quote. I have not changed their terms, but I have tried to offer alternate concepts and categories that, for me, make more sense today pointing the way toward salvation and paradise. In this respect, there is no closure in the Bible; the end is the beginning. The Bible is a book of signs that leaves distinct utopian traces (Spuren) which readers still have to follow and make more concrete. Reading is the perception and recognition of messianic and apocalyptic signs: It was not without reason that the apocalyptic character made the Bible precisely into the instigator of revolutions. This can be seen most clearly in the German Peasants’ War. It was not only the pathos of the Bible that serves this purpose as intended Glad Tidings for those who labor and are heavy laden but just as much its perspective of death and the life to come, the realization and completion of the characters, especially their dramatic actions, occurs in art, and its allegories intend in anticipatory illumination a transformation of the world without it ending.5

As can be seen thus far, Bloch sought to make religion and the Bible the cornerstones of his revision of Marxism, while employing Marxist categories to read the Bible as mystery, but a mystery that is the foundation and instigation of all “good” fantasy. Such an unusual endeavor was crucial for the development of his aesthetics of anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein). In his critical study of Bloch’s philosophy, Wayne Hudson comments: Bloch’s originality is to interpret the counter factual excess of religion as secretly wise, and as potentially constitutive for theory and praxis. Religion, Bloch argues, is full of utopianism and where there is hope, there is religion. What was intended by the great religions was absolute or total hope. Consistent with this view, Bloch argues that Marxism needs a new praxis-oriented approach to religion which actively inherits the symbolic preappearance (Vor-Schein, also translated as anticipatory illumination).6 found in religious history of mankind. Such an inheritance requires a Marxist critique of the ideology and illusion present in religions projections which relates such projections to the development of classes and to particular modes of production. But it also requires a hermeneutic of the ‘act content’ such projections contain, which cannot be appropriated in any simplistic ideology free form. Instead, for Bloch, there is a translation

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of the genuine intentionality which the religious imagination of mankind has uncovered into a revolutionary socialist ideology which aims at theory praxis in the long run.7

Implicit if not explicit in Bloch’s philosophy is that, if one seeks and learns to read the signs of anticipatory illumination in the Bible and genuine Biblical signs in fantasy literature, the reader will simultaneously be formed as a potential revolutionary in the process. True fantasy literature then is explosive and revolutionary. But here it is necessary to clarify Bloch’s notions of anticipatory illumination, heritage, and messianism before we can grasp the relationship between the Bible and “true” fantasy literature. Throughout Bloch’s writings, there is an underlying argument that there cannot be a “genuine” culture until society becomes classless. That is, Bloch’s concept of cultural heritage (Kulturerbe) signifies that heritage is a process, the act of inheriting (erben) and that the qualitative act of inheriting as an unfinished process is what constitutes the value of culture that is on its way to becoming genuine. Since the framework for acting, for choosing what is to be inherited, has always been set by hegemonic groups in hierarchical societies, it stands to reason that established culture has been exclusive, and yet, at the same time its exclusivity and richness have relied on its “revolutionary” capacity to absorb and integrate whatever the subordinate classes have produced that is indelible (unausgegolten). Moreover, their demands for more access to the cultural goods (Kulturgut) and the surplus that they themselves produce have become part and parcel of capitalism over the centuries. Such a condition led Bloch to focus on the dialectical relationship between upper and lower, to analyze forms by which the upper sought to dominate and preserve its power and the forms by which the lower aimed to subvert the domination of the upper and to gain self-awareness. This political stance prompted Bloch to try to retrieve the neglected traces and submerged meanings of popular culture that lent substance to the development of high culture while also providing impetus for change. The telos of culture, the end toward which the cultural heritage would lead, as Bloch saw it, was the naturalization of human beings and the humanization of nature. Such a goal has not always been consciously viewed by the subordinate classes—or any class for that matter—and it will not be reached according to mechanical laws of history. Nor is culture the property of one particular class. Bloch constantly asserted that

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the qualitative advancement of genuine culture depended on the active desire of individuals to know themselves and to decide upon the designation of home (Heimat) for themselves. The order of the world was to be cultivated by autonomous subjects who were collectively to ascertain the beacons of light that anticipated the way to the classless society in which the Kitsch (junk, delusion) of capitalist production gives way to the concrete utopia in the amalgamation of high and low culture. The starting point for Bloch is the potential autonomous subject or the potential productive reader as detective or detector. As individuals, we must solve the mystery of our lives, detect those signs that illuminate the way to ourselves. Bloch explains: We are subjects without names, Kasper Hauser natures,8 who drive with unknown order and are still probing them open. Thus the human being is here understood and designated as something that is still basically and directly in the dark, not even in the present at all and precisely because of this has history. The human being finds itself still on a journey with his/ her entire world. The order has not been determined anywhere, however in the journey of self-discovery it is capable of possibly being illuminated, of first being represented in any way.9

The capacity of the individual to journey and to discover is a given for Bloch, but this does not mean that each individual will break out of the everyday routine to journey, or that each individual will really experience the chiliastic meaning of the journey, or that each individual will recognize the Vor-Schein, which indicates the way toward the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humans. In his “Ästhetik in der Alltagswelt” (Aesthetics in the Everyday World), Bloch remarked: “Unfortunately even the people (Volk) are not always so loyal and true. The longer time goes by, the more they understand Kitsch very well. They fall for it and are capable of being deceived by it and even increase on their side the petty bourgeois job for it.”10 In opposition to this, Bloch insists that the task for readers and consumers of culture is to remain open to the Not-Yet-Conscious (Noch-Nicht-Bewusste) that will enable them to realize the Not-Yet-Become (Noch-Nicht-Gewordene). The concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious enables the unconscious to be removed from the mere negation of consciousness and to differentiate in it clearly traces of memory and traces of hope, two completely distinct act-content-references which only later can disappear after a conceptual

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differentiation, in parts also in their limitation (compare romanticism, archetypes). But Not-Yet-Conscious with Novum11 only lies above, at the front of consciousness; a pre-conscious that does not remember but is auroratic (aurorisch) in which something new psychologically announces itself or anticipates itself.12

The obstacles preventing people from grasping the Not-YetConscious emanate from a class-dominated cultural production that diverts and confuses the minds of people so that their imaginings of a new and better world are blurred, blocked, or perverted. Bloch investigated the Schein, the false illusion, of magazine stories, true romances, marathon dance contests, white-collar pretense, glittering Hollywood films, the Nazification of Germanic legends, rituals, and symbols, and many other forms of Kitsch to demonstrate how the tendency toward the genuine new (Novum) was often sidetracked in the interests of capitalism to make the status quo and even the regressive social forces appear fulfilling and invigorating. The only way to counter false illusions that reinforce capitalist rationalization and state-bureaucratic control is to create and promote social movements that subvert and problematize the depictions of harmony and totality while conserving the cultural tendencies that awaken and sharpen the Not-Yet-Conscious. In the process, a profound appreciation of the Vor-Schein must be developed if people are to realize their own interests and come out of the darkness into light, enlightened but not in a rationally instrumental manner. Rather, enlightenment for Bloch is connected to the fantastic projections realized in the Bible but has not been fully transposed into cultural practice for and by the people. We are confronted everywhere with Vor-Schein, which challenges us to transpose it, to become at one with its light. As Gert Ueding has remarked, the category of Vor-Schein is related to the producer as well as to the artwork that is produced: “The Not-YetBecome of the object manifests itself in the artwork as that which seeks itself, illuminates itself in advance in its meaning. With this, anticipatory illumination is not simply objective in contrast to subjective illusion. Rather, anticipatory illumination is the way of being that wakens utopian consciousness on its part and indicates to consciousness the NotYet-Become in the scale of its possibilities.”13 Thus, what determines the quality of the anticipatory illumination (and its utopian function as well) of a given work will be the artistic impulse and sensitivity along with the social vision behind it. For Bloch, the “I” of the producer was

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inconceivable without the “We” of the producer’s humanitarian vision. He conceived of works with anticipatory illumination as classless and non-ideological. That is, they spoke to people of all classes and did not bind themselves to one ideological position. In addition, works with anticipatory illumination were to be found in oral as well as literate societies, in all sorts of artefacts as well as social attitudes and customs. Greek and Roman art, Mozart’s Fidelio, Goethe’s Faust, travel books of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Hoffmann’s “The Golden Flower Pot,” Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Karl May’s westerns, detective novels, romances, science fiction, adventure stories, the circus, country fairs, fashion, and architecture—these are just some of the products and phenomena which Bloch explored to locate anticipatory illumination in culture. Certain criteria appear time again in Bloch’s designation of what constituted Vor-Schein. For instance, in the fairy tale the anticipatory illumination is constituted by the manner in which the small hero uses cunning and courage to overcome obstacles and to defeat powerful oppressors. The protagonist’s triumph signals a revolutionary triumph, an example of the underdog’s potential to take charge of his or her life. The miraculous transformations in fairy tales reveal that life is a process of qualitative change in which the utopian element can emerge if people realize what their powers are. Such hopeful images can also be found in the country fair and circus where the anticipatory illumination is embedded in what Bloch terms Wunschland (the land of wishes). The dazzling side shows with exotic scenes and characters at the fair, and the magical performances of trapeze artists and tightrope walkers set the imagination free to envision change and sense the aroma of the earthly paradise. The routine of everyday life has no place at the fair and circus, nor does it have any place in westerns, adventure stories, and detective novels. An avid reader of Karl May, Kipling, Stevenson, Verne, and comic strips, Bloch argued that popular literature carried forth the anticipatory illumination of courtly romances and fairy tales. “The captivating fairy tale is therefore the adventure story; it continues to live today as colportage. … The dream of colportage is: never again everyday life; and in the end there is happiness, love, victory.”14 Throughout Bloch’s commentaries dealing with fantasy literature and popular culture, anticipatory illumination is both seductive and disruptive. The reader/viewer is to be carried away and to undergo a

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sensation of estrangement (Verfremdung) while reading detective stories, adventure novels, westerns, and fairy tales or while watching plays and films. This estrangement allows the reader/viewer to glean the Novum because customary time and place are broken down, allowing for a different sense of perception. Although the reader/viewer is productive in his or her own right, the anticipatory illumination must also be a product of an artistic or a social sensibility that seeks to anticipate the way toward the classless society. If the Vor-Schein anticipates the classless society, it also awakens a sense in the reader/viewer about how fragmentary and unfinished the world is in order to urge its completion. The aesthetic truth of the Vor-Schein depends on the manner in which the artistic composition draws upon concrete correlates in the world and projects the possible realization of utopia. Here, the idealistic and symbolic allure of the anticipatory illumination is substantiated by its critical material position vis-à-vis intransigent social conditions: Consequently the utopian function must essentially prove its worth along the same line against the ideal as it does against utopias themselves -- along the line of concrete mediation with material ideal-tendency in the world, as mentioned. In no way can the ideal be taught and rectified through mere facts. On the contrary, an essential part of the ideal is that it has a strained relationship to mere established fact. On the other hand, the idealistic, if it has any worth, has a connection to the process of the world, of which the so-called facts are reified-fixed abstractions. The idealistic has in its anticipations, if they are concrete, a correlate in the contents of hope of tendency-latency. This correlate makes possible ethical ideals as models, aesthetic ideals as anticipatory illumination, which point to the possibility of becoming real. Such ideals rectified and conveyed through the utopian function are altogether those of a humanly-adequate expounded content of the self and the world.15

Here, we can see the connection to Bloch’s concept of Messianism as ethical model and his notion of anticipatory illumination. In his reading of the Bible, Bloch refers to Moses and Jesus as Stifter (instigators) of religions who carry a message of hope as messianic figures, illuminating through their actions how people can uncover the divine light in themselves through their acts and behavior—their struggle toward an upright gait (aufrechter Gang). Significantly, Bloch chooses the German word Stifter in his discussion of Moses and Jesus as ethical models who carry with them anticipatory illumination. The word Stifter is generally

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translated into English as founder, but Bloch could have used the more traditional German word Gründer, if he had wished. Instead, he chose Stifter, I believe, to describe Moses and Jesus because the verb stiften has a double meaning: (a) to found or establish; (b) to cause or stir up. It is because of the double meaning that I am using the word instigator, for Bloch saw Moses and Jesus not only as founders of religions but causing trouble, stirring up people to move—move against and away from the despotic rulers who were deluding and exploiting them in the direction of a paradise on earth. Bloch did not believe that religion was to be grounded (gegründet) or fixed in any way. Religion was a part of a process of human hope that can only be kept alive through Messianism.16 This is why Bloch argued the following: messianism in religion is the utopia which enables the Utterly Different of religious content to be mediated in a form in which it contains no danger of lords’ anointment and theocracy: as Canaan in unexplored splendor, as the wonderful (miraculous). Judaism became rigid in the armour of the cult laws but messianic faith was kept alive through all codified epigonism; it was misery, it was above all the promise in Moses and in the prophets, irrefutable by any empiricism, which kept it alive. ‘Whoever denies messianism denies the whole Torah,’ says Maimonides; and it is the greatest Jewish teacher of the laws who says this, a rationalist and no mystic. The glad tidings of the Old Testament run against Pharoah and sharpen on this antithesis their lasting utopia of deliverance. That which is meant by Pharoah, Egypt and the kingdom of Edom is just as much the negative pole of Moses’ glad tidings as Canaan is its positive pole. Without Egypt there would be neither exodus nor such evidence of messianism; but if Egypt is engulfed in the sea, the path to the holy dwelling becomes clear -- there the Apocalypse, too, is latent in Moses.17

Bloch insists that the historical origins of Moses and Jesus are important because they point to a distinct time when humankind began to stand up and realize what course it had to take to create a paradise on earth. The scriptural records are intended to show something “utterly different” through the miraculous signs in the lives of Moses and Jesus that set them apart from all other saviors, leaders, founders, and gods. That is, the fantastic occurrences in their lives and the miracles that they performed constitute the anticipatory illumination as a messianic sign, and the messianic impulse within the anticipatory illumination, its

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religious and ethical nature, creates the criteria, in my opinion, for distinguishing between true fantasy and Kitsch. To understand the messianic nature of Moses and Jesus is to understand the revolutionary nature of their historical advent, and why they distinguished themselves, founders as instigators, from other founders of religions by celebrating the divine in humankind. A founder is of course everywhere, but he becomes very clearly manifest only where he sets his new god against traditional customs, against natural religion empty of men; above all where he and his followers cling fanatically to him. It was thus that Moses and Jesus first emerged, were believed to be saviors, not just as mythical teachers, not just as pointers towards salvation. Although the name of Orpheus, and also the names of natural-mythic orderer-founders, right up to the cosmomorphic Confucious, even Zoroaster, the messiah of astral light, are mentioned together with the gods, they nonetheless remain behind them, relate externally to them. The Dionysian founder turns to froth before his nature god, the astral-mythic founder fades before him, and even Buddha, the great self-redemption, sinks at the end into the acosmos of nirvana. Moses, on the other hand, forces his god to go with him, makes him into the exodus-light of his people; Jesus pervades the transcendent as a human tribune, utopianizes it into the kingdom.18

Ironically, the instigators of religion bring a light with them that will extinguish the traditional religious belief in a transcendent God or an other worldly God. The miracles and mysteries in the Bible are indicative of the divine potential of humans to realize God in themselves and in their communal life with one another. Moses and Jesus as instigators provide the miraculous clues and signs, crucial for true fantasy literature, that point to this ultimate revelation. Not only are Moses and Jesus representative of all that is utterly different, but all that they say and do are intended to astonish and enlighten us—provoke us to become children of the light, following in their light, which is the light of anticipatory illumination. In this regard, the qualitative dimension of fantasy literature can only be appreciated if we grasp the religious dimension of its messianic power in the anticipatory illumination that sheds light on the mystery and purpose of our existence. For Bloch, the telos of life is to be found in the miraculous (das Wunderbare), totally bound to the “utterly different” signs which appear in the Bible as a whole.

96  J. ZIPES And this remains decisive: the Utterly Different also holds good for the ultimate humane projections from religion. It is only the Utterly Different which to everything that has been longed for in the deification of man the appropriate dimension of depth. … The miraculous as the Utterly Different with regard to the objective religious world is here clearly the most characteristic mysterium of joy, triumphing in the religious hope-content of man, i.e. that which explodes itself into the Utterly Different.19

The fantastic projection of religious hope in the Bible lays the foundation, according to Bloch, for the formation of secular hope that demands a reverence for the utterly different as good and sets ethical and moral markers to lead us to our final destination of home. It is in this sense that the Bible is the seminal book of all true fantasy literature. It is crucial for determining the essential connection between wishful longings for communication with the divine and fantastic utopian projections of home that are rooted in humankind. Certainly the wishful image in all religions, and even more powerfully in those of the messianic invocation of homeland, is that of feeling at home in existence, but one which does not see existence as confined to its clearly surveyable and so to speak local patriotic ranks of purpose. So that religion, in its constant final relation to the last leap and the utopian Totum, amounts to more than ethicizing and blander rationalizations, amounts to more than morality and clear surveyability even in Confucious, its strongest ethicizer. The wishful content of religion remains that of feeling at home in the mystery of existence, a mystery mediated with man and well-disposed to his deepest wish, even to the repose of wishes. And the further the subject with his founders of religion penetrates into the object-mysterium of a God conceived as the supreme Outside or the supreme Above and overpowers it, the more powerfully man in his earth-heaven or heaven-earth is charged with reverence for depth and infinity. The growing humanization of religion is not paralleled by any reduction in its sense of awe, on the contrary: the Humanum now gains the mysterium of something divine, something defiable, gains it as the future creation of the kingdom, but of the right kingdom.20

When Bloch refers to the “right” “kingdom,” “good,” and “goodness,” he associates it with truth. However, “the truth of teleology never consists of purposes already existing in finished form, but rather of those which are only just forming in the active process, always arising anew

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within it and enriching themselves.”21 The importance of art is to reveal the process through which we materially try to attain truth and thus to estimate what is humanely and objectively appropriate to our wishes for home, also known as happiness, freedom, non-alienation, Golden Age, Land of Milk and Honey, the Eternally-Female, the trumpet signal in Fidelio and the Christlikeness of the Day of Resurrection which follows it: these are so many witnesses and images of such differing value, but all are set up around that which speaks for itself by remaining silent. The direction towards this materiality and not only logically enlightening entity must be invariant; this is discernible at every place where hope opens up its Absolute and attempts to read it. There is no doubt at all, and no doubt was left about it; an unilluminated, undirected hope can easily merely lead astray, for the true horizon does not extend beyond the knowledge of realities, but precisely this knowledge, when instead it is Marxist and not mechanistic, shows reality itself as one of -- the horizon and informed hope as one commensurate with this reality. The goal as a whole is and remains still concealed, the Absolute of the will and of hope still unfound, in the agent of existing the light of its Whatness, of its essence, of its intended fundamental content itself has not yet dawned, and yet the nunc stans of the driving moment, of the striving filled with content stands ahead, utopian and clear.22

By grounding the essence of truth in the relationship between mystery and Marxism, Bloch fulfills part of his project in The Principle of Hope of providing a religious basis to Marxism and uncovering atheism in Christianity.23 This dual and paradoxical purpose has great ramifications for both philosophy and theology that are still being debated in discussions of liberation theology. What is of significance here, however, is the religious aspect of his aesthetic category of anticipatory illumination in The Principle of Hope and its implications for fantasy literature. As we have seen, Bloch’s reading of the Bible, which cannot be separated from his critique of religion, depends on his interpreting the fantastic projections of the utterly different, the miraculous, as messianic signs that indicate the truth of what we are as humans and how we can arrive at the place (home/Heimat) that we wish for, a home objectively commensurate with reality and our potential. Since we have never reached home nor have become truly enlightened, that is, since we have never really become “children of the light,” we must still find our way out of the darkness that is life, and we need art (and philosophy, too) to help show

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us the way by means of Vor-Schein. The difficulty is that much of art is mere Schein, as much of fantasy literature is, and this Schein deludes us into thinking that we can gain the final destination by conforming to certain prescribed notions of what a human being is, by reaching a consensus that is determined in advance. In contrast, Bloch insists that we must conserve messianic and Biblical notions of the utterly different within us, if we are to determine the truth of the direction that reality has taken. Fantasy literature that pacifies us, brings us in tune with reality, and conceives utopias as a harmonious reconciliation with the status quo is pernicious and false. In fact, the truth of all fantasy literature can be judged by comparing its conceptualized motifs and vision with the Vor-Schein in the Bible. If fantasy does not instigate discontent and set us to thinking about how we can move beyond ourselves to realize traces and signs of hope that are connected to the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humankind, then it is banal. It is not fantasy in the true sense which is embodied in a religious sensibility, a reverence for the divine potential in humankind. There are, of course, many criticisms one could voice about Bloch’s reading of the Bible. It is too idealistic. It neglects the patriarchal nature of Messianism and the sexist—and in some cases, racist—signs in the Bible that feminist critics have analyzed in elucidating ways.24 It is an ideological reading of the Bible that comes close to making Marxism into a spiritual if not mystical philosophy. Finally, it does not take into account differences in voice and narrative strategies within the Bible.25 Nevertheless, Bloch’s reading of the Bible opens the text up to those approaches and questions he may seem to neglect. He does not deny them. After all, Bloch reads the Bible in the name of oppressed groups, for the other, with the intention to overcome racism, sexism, and indiscrimination. In the specific case of fantasy literature, a reading of Bloch reading the Bible forces us to confront important ideological questions and value judgments concerned with fantasy literature that are rarely discussed. Why do we have such a religious reverence for some works of fantasy and not for others? Why do some works of fantasy nurture our imagination and bring about self-awareness while much of commodified fantasy deludes us and reconciles us to the status quo? Why do certain ethical and moral impulses become indelible in the Bible and how are they transposed in secular fantasy as the anticipatory illumination that plays upon our deepest hopes for salvation? How does fantasy literature act to subvert hypostasized notions of reality by providing something

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utterly different from approved normative expectations? Paradoxically, Bloch’s secularization of the Bible demands that we pay tribute to the profound religious nature of fantasy literature, which, to be “good” and “true,” must be messianic and disruptive. What is also crucial for understanding Bloch’s reading of the Bible is his “pugnacious” insistence that we as readers ground our hope by becoming detectives. There is a mystery to be solved in the Bible. It is a mystery that cannot be solved. But if we learn to read the Bible according to Bloch’s detective reading of the messianic signs, we may be able to read all fantasy literature that has appeared since, and all that is to come, by becoming children of the light. Perhaps we will also demand the same apocalyptic light from fantasy that we have traditionally demanded primarily from the Bible.

Notes







1. Cf. Colin Manlove, “The Bible in Fantasy,” Semeia 60 (1992): 91–110; Maria E. Donaldson, “Prophetic and Apocalyptic Eschatology in Ursula Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore and Tehanu,” Semeia 60 (1992): 111–22. 2.  “Bibelkritik als detektorisch: Roter Faden und Enttheokratisierung im unterdrückten Text,” in Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 103–4. 3. The Holy Bible, new rev. standard ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110. 4. Ernst Bloch, “Symbolischer Vor-Schein in Metareligion ohne Aberglauben,” in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15 (Frankfur am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 207. 5. Ibid., 211. 6.  Although many critics have translated Vor-Schein as pre-appearance, I believe that this translation does not adequately address the notions of anticipation and enlightenment which are crucial for understanding what Bloch intended by creating this category. I have addressed this point in my introduction to Bloch’s The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), xxxiii. 7. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 184. 8. Kasper Hauser was born on September 29, 1812, in southern Germany. Taken from his mother about the age of three, he was placed in solitary confinement for unknown reasons until May 26, 1828, when he was found wandering about the streets of Nuremberg. He appeared to be a child of nature, a blank slate, and had to learn to speak and be “civilized”

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again. Five years later, he was killed by an unknown assailant. Nobody ever learned the “true” story of Hauser’s origins, nor had he been able to adapt to society once he returned to civilization. The case of Kasper Hauser is well-known in Germany and has captured the imagination of such German writers as Jacob Wassermann and Peter Handke and the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. 9. Ernst Bloch, Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins, ed. Gert Ueding (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 32. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. Bloch uses the term Novum to designate the startling and unpredictable new that is always at the forefront of human experience and indicates the qualitative reutilization of cultural heritage. The Novum in works of art never dies. It is indelible. It is through the Novum that we orient ourselves and reshape the inconstruable question about the nature of human existence in concrete ways, in the materiality of culture, so that we can see more clearly the direction of utopia linked to Messianism. 12. Ibid., vol. 2, 115. 13. Ibid., vol. 1, 21. 14. Ibid., 88. 15. Ibid., 296. 16. Cf. Bloch’s remarks in The Principle of Hope: “And if the maxim that where hope is, religion is, is true, then Christianity, with its powerful starting point and its rich history of heresy, operates as if an essential nature of religion had finally come forth here. Namely that of being ‘not static,’ apologetic myth, but humane-eschatological explosively posited Messianism. It is only here -- stripped of illusion, god-hypostases, taboo of the masters -- that the only inherited substratum capable of significance in religion lives: that of being hope in totality, explosive hope.” Vol. III, 1193. 17.  The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, vol. III (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 1241. 18. The Principle of Hope, vol. III, 1191. 19. Ibid., 1195. 20. Ibid., 1196. 21. Ibid., 1374. 22. Ibid., 1375. 23.  For an excellent analysis of Bloch’s notion of atheism, see Peter Thompson’s introduction, “Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope,” in Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J.T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009). On page xiv, he writes: “What Bloch seeks to achieve with this book is to break out of this circularity (of obedience) by seeking out the materialist

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worldly base of a metaphysical religion, to find things in religion which actually unbind rather than rebind us in orthodox Christianity).” 24. Cf. Mieke Bal, “The Bible as Literature: A Critical Escape,” Diacritics 16 (Winter 1986): 71–79 and “Dealing/with/Women: Daughters in the Book of Judges,” The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina Schwartz (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 16–39; Tina Pippin, “The Heroine and the Whore: Fantasy and the Female in the Apocalypse of John,” in Semeia. 25.  Cf. Robert Alter, “Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical Narrative,” The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina M. Schwartz (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 146–60, and The World of Biblical Literature (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

CHAPTER 6

Ernst Bloch’s Enlightened View of the Fairy Tale and Utopian Longing

Not long after Ernst Bloch escaped the dystopian realm of East Germany in 1961, he held a fascinating radio discussion with the astute critical theorist Theodor Adorno about the contradictions of utopian longing. Their conversation was intriguing because, at times, Adorno sounded more like a utopian thinker than Bloch. To be sure, Adorno questioned the concept of utopia in his usual incisive manner, but he seemed to share Bloch’s faith in utopia and to be very disillusioned about genuine possibilities for the realization of utopian longings, while Bloch continued to more hopeful about the future of utopia, despite the fact that his own hope had been disappointed by East Germany and the Soviet bloc.1 In his very opening statement Adorno, very much in keeping with his critique of the culture industry, asserted that utopian dreams had been fulfilled in a way that leads to deception and monotony: At one point, he remarked: the fulfillment of the wishes takes something away from the substance of the wishes, as in the fairy tale where the farmer is granted three wishes, and, I believe, he wishes his wife to have a sausage on her nose and then must use the second wish to have the sausage removed from her nose.2 In other words, I mean that one can watch television (fernsehen) today, look at the things that are far away, but instead of the wish-image providing access to the erotic utopia, one sees in the best of circumstances some kind of more or less pretty pop singer, who continues to deceive the spectator in regard to her prettiness insofar as she sings some kind of nonsense © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_6

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104  J. ZIPES instead of showing it, and this song generally consists in bringing together ‘roses’ with ‘moonlight’ in harmony. Above and beyond this one could perhaps say in general that the fulfillment of utopia consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same today.3

Bloch was not entirely in agreement with Adorno and maintained that the wish-images of utopia had not been entirely emptied or banalized. “There is still a much older level of utopias that we should not forget,” he responded, “that we least of all should not forget – the fairy tale. The fairy tale is not only filled with social utopia, in other words, with the utopia of a better life and justice, but it is also filled with technological utopia, most of all in the oriental fairy tales. In the fairy tale ‘The Magic Horse,’ from the Arabian Nights, there is a ‘helicopter.’ One can read the Arabian Nights in many places as a manual for inventions. Bacon addresses this and then sets himself off from the fairy tale by saying that what he means, the real magic, relates to the oldest wish-images of the fairy tale as the deeds of Alexander relate to the deeds of King Arthur’s Round Table. Thus, the content of the utopian images change according to the social situation.”4 Indeed, Bloch insisted that the content always changes over time, but the longing for a better life and justice would always remain and indicate what is missing in life. Utopian longing keeps generating wish-images that must be examined and judged critically and individually as to whether they allow for the possibility of realization. The formation of utopias that stem from longing not only offers a critique of reality, but it also opens up possible alternatives. It is because possibility challenges and subverts the status quo of society that it is treated poorly and neglected by ruling elites. Yet, possibility as a philosophical category must be regarded seriously, and both Bloch and Adorno agreed that the utopian wish-image, even when it is false, conveys a critique of what is present and points at the same time to what could and should be. At the end of their conversation, Bloch discussed the principle of hope and its relationship to perfection. “But what is valid is that each and every criticism of perfection, incompleteness, intolerance, and impatience already without a doubt presupposes the conception of, and longing for, a possible perfection.”5 This hope for perfection, however, does not provide confidence or security. “Hope is critical and can be disappointed. However, hope still nails a flag on the mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not accepted, even when this decline is still very

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strong. Hope is not confidence. Hope is surrounded by dangers, and it is the consciousness of danger and at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible.”6 Even though Adorno appeared to agree with Bloch by the end of the radio conversation, we cannot really consider him a “hopeful” philosopher, and he certainly did not embrace the hope of the student and anti-authoritarian movement at the end of the 1960s, when he unfortunately died from a heart attack in 1969. On the other hand, Bloch never abandoned the principle of hope throughout his life and sought traces of it everywhere—in high and low culture, mass movements of protest, in technology, music, art, and daily customs and habits. More than any genre, however, it was in the fairy tale that he most often found wishful-images of hope. He frequently used it to illustrate the utopian longing and creativity of human beings and the possibilities to change the world that it represented. This is undoubtedly why Adorno had brought up the topic of the fairy tale early in their conversation, and it is also why Bloch almost immediately referred to it as representative of utopia. But what was it exactly about the fairy tale that induced Bloch to use it constantly as a utopian example? After all, the fairy tale is often associated with escapist fantasies, irrelevant in philosophy and politics, and a genre of writing and telling primarily intended for children. In fact, the traditional fairy tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen are filled with tendencies that can be considered elitist, sexist, and racist. Did Bloch really understand what a fairy tale was? Did he have a misconception of this genre and place too much value on its utopian potential? Bloch wrote two complete essays dedicated to the fairy tale worthwhile examining for an understanding of why the fairy tale was so vital for his philosophy of hope: “The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time” (“Das Märchen geht selber in der Zeit”) and “Better Castles in the Sky, at the Fair and Circus, in Fairy Tales and Colportage” (“Bessere Luftschlösser in Jahrmarkt und Zirkus, in Märchen und Kolportage,” 1959, included in Prinzip Hoffnung). Moreover, he also published short essays in Literary Essays—“On The Tales of Hoffmann,” “The Magic Flute and Contemporary Symbols,” and “Afterword to Hebel’s Schatzkästlein”—that reveal the contributions of the fairy tale to music. In each case, Bloch was not concerned with the literary or literary historical meaning of the fairy tale, but its philosophical and social implications and relationship to his principle of hope.

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In “The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time,” he immediately points to the unique quality of the fairy tale. Though the wish-fulfillment of the fairy tale may appear to be obsolete and depict feudal kingdoms with kings and queens, it transcends time and place. “Not only does the fairy tale remain as fresh as longing and love, but the demonically evil, which is abundant in the fairy tale, is still seen at work here in the present, and the happiness of ‘once upon a time,’ which is even more abundant, still affects our visions of the future.”7 For Bloch, the fairy tale in all its forms, ancient and modern, oral and literary, remains vibrant and touches the dreams and wishes of common people who want to overcome the dreariness of their daily lives. The appeal of the fairy tale, no matter what its form may be, is boundless because its tendency or tendentiousness indicates the possibility for change and the fulfillment of dreams. Bloch discusses works by Jean Cocteau, Ferenc Molnár, and Jules Verne that are not exactly fairy tales but represent the modernization of fairy tales in Bloch’s own time, that is, the time of 1930, a year after the Great Depression, had erupted. What is significant about such kinds of ‘modern fairy tales’ is that it is reason itself that leads to the wish projections of the old fairy tales and serves them. Again what proves itself is a harmony with courage and cunning, as that earliest kind of enlightenment which already characterizes “Hansel and Gretel”: consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly. These are the genuine maxims of fairy tales, and fortunately for us they appear not only in the past but in the now. Unfortunately we must equally contend with the smoke of witches and the blows of ogres habitually faced by the fairy-tale hero in the now.8

About thirty years later, in 1959, Bloch picked up the theme of cunning and courage in his second essay and continued to write about it: “Despite the fantastic side of the fairy tale, it is always cunning in the way it overcomes difficulties. Moreover, courage and cunning in fairy tales succeed in an entirely different way than in life, and not only that: it is, as Lenin says, always the existing revolutionary elements that tie the given strings of the story together here.”9 Bloch uses many of the fairy tales collected and edited by the Brothers Grimm as examples in which we can find heroes such as peasants, tailors, soldiers, and simpletons, who become “enlightened” and knowingly overcome oppressive

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tyrants such as kings, ogres, and witches. Fairy-tale heroes perceive how to take advantage of all kinds of magical or wish instruments that benefit their struggles. In this essay, which is much longer than “The Fairy Tales Moves on in Its Own Time,” Bloch refers to a broad array of fairy tales written by Edgar Allen Poe, Wilhelm Hauff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Gottfried Keller, Selma Lagerlöf, and Rudyard Kipling to demonstrate how they open up wondrous views and send their protagonists on adventures that break down boundaries and reveal how possible the impossible can be. Rarely do the dreams of the adventurers go unfulfilled in these literary fairy tales that stem from a profound oral tradition based on how adults viewed the world. For Bloch, who always made unusual if not startling associations in his thinking, there is a connection between the wish-images of the fairy tales and the side shows at country fairs and the performances at the circus. The sensational images in the sideshow or the circus tent, like the miraculous events in the fairy tale, cannot be replicated. Yet they leave behind an indelible impression in the imagination of spectators. Though the scenes and tales may seem to be nonsense, there is a deep sense to our attraction to an unusual attraction that is too easily dismissed by people who putatively possess culture and consider the circus, sideshows at the country fair, and even fairy tales as vulgar and decadent. Bloch thinks differently: The age-old pleasure of people, in no way simple and no way decadent, is preserved in the fair, wanders within it and outside. There is a piece of frontier here, set at reduced admission, but with preserved meanings, with strange utopian meanings, conserved in a brutal show, in vulgar crypticness. It is a world that has not been sufficiently investigated for its specific wish areas. In particular, it is that ‘oddity,’ the kind that was last called such during the Baroque period that keeps itself above water here, above land.10

By bringing together the fairy tale with sideshows of the country fair and the performances in circus rings, Bloch intended to demonstrate how all popular culture has traces and remnants of utopian longing. This is why he concludes this essay by discussing colportage, the cheap adventure novels and stories, that became popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century and prepared the way for all kinds of “low-brow” romances, adventure stories, criminal novels, science fiction, fantasy, and

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so on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “The dream of colportage is: never again to be trapped by the routine of daily life. And at the end there is: happiness, love, victory. The splendor toward which the adventure story heads is not won through a rich marriage and the like as in the magazine story but rather through an active journey to the Orient of the dream.”11 Bloch draws comparisons between Schiller’s The Robbers and Beethoven’s Fidelio to demonstrate how they were liberating fairy-tale plays about rescue and liberation that formed a strong current in all kinds of colportage literature up to the present. Dark dungeons, pistols, signals, rescue – things in the more refined literature of the new kind never appear by themselves. These things produce one of the strongest possible tensions available: that between night and light. Accordingly, a re-evaluation of this genre is especially evident on the strength of its highly legitimate wish-image in its mirror. Here, missing meanings are fresh everywhere, and those that are not missing are waiting, as in the fairy tale. … The fairy-tale like colportage is a castle in the sky par excellence, but one in good air, and insofar as this can at all be true about plain wish work: the castle in the sky is right. In the final analysis, it derives from the Golden Age and would like to stand in such an age again, in happiness, which pushes forward from night to light.12

For Bloch, the fairy tale was not a genre of escape literature but rather one of enlightenment. It is interesting to note that his own writing was metaphorical, aphoristic, and elliptical often bordering on the mystical, and the process of reading Das Prinzip Hoffnung can be metaphysically compared to an abstract adventure and experiment that sheds light on human struggles for revelation. The writing and telling of fairy tales depend very much the same way on symbol, allegory, surrealism, and magic realism to dispel clouds of deception and reveal enlightening ways in which oppressed and disadvantaged protagonists might triumph against cruel foes. To be sure, from a literary or folkloristic viewpoint, Bloch had a somewhat naïve and indiscriminate understanding of the fairy tale and did not distinguish between oral and literary tales or grasp them in their sociohistorical contexts. Nor did he do careful readings of tales to study gender and racial stereotypes, or how they reinforced feudal notions of power. Not every swineherd who becomes a king will use his newly achieved power to benefit other disadvantaged people. Not

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every maiden who becomes a queen and begins bearing children will be autonomous and live happily ever after. Not every fairy tale possesses a utopian tendency. Bloch often simplifies how fairy tales are received by the reading and viewing public. For instance, many fairy tales divert audiences and “blind” them so that they do not become enlightened. One could argue that the manner in which Disney appropriated and adapted fairy tales for the cinema and also for book publishing, tales which stem from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, did not shed light on liberating possibilities for common people but perverted their utopian longings and channeled them so they have become better consumers. Louis Marin has written a scintillating and scathing study of how Disney manipulated fairy-tale elements and motifs to create a utopic degeneration,13 which exploits genuine utopian longings. There is no light in the Disneylands spread across the globe, only darkness and banality. Bloch, in contrast to Adorno, placed much too much faith in the fairy tale as a beacon of light that contained anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein) of utopia, just as he placed much too much faith in much of commodified art to offer a glow of possible change. Nevertheless, Bloch did have a profound insight about the genre of the fairy tale, which is one of the most unique forms of art that pervades almost all art forms today—including TV sitcoms, advertisements, toys, garments, fantasy literature, films, paintings, sculptures, poetry, Internet sites, iPhone screens, and so on. Whether a fairy tale is progressive— illuminates contradictions in a fictitious realm and tendentiously sides with the oppressed—or regressive—reinforces conservative notions of the status quo by furthering elitist ideas of hegemony even if disadvantaged people rise to the top—the genre continually brings out what is missing in most people’s lives. The constant repetition of the fairy tale maxims is not always and necessarily what Adorno asserted it to be, a banalization of utopia or homogenization of daily life, but rather represents a persistent refusal to accept life as it is and a demand that utopian longings be fulfilled. There is indeed something still missing, deeply missing even when people buy into deception. The emptiness of life is projected through the flaccid happy fulfillments of the fairy tale in all art forms, high and low, and these banal happy fulfillments show paradoxically that people deeply feel how much is still missing and that the temporary “plug of happiness” will not stop the longing.

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Both Bloch and Adorno agreed that something was missing in contemporary society—had always been missing—that engendered utopian longing. Adorno tried to elaborate a theory of negative dialectics to in his Aesthetic Theory toward the end of his life, and it is clear why he proposed to Bloch that “at any rate utopia is essentially in the determined negation, in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what should be.”14 Though Bloch felt that the world had become completely devoid of a utopian conscience and utopian presentiment, he believed that “utopia cannot be removed from the world in spite of everything, and even the technological, which must definitely emerge and will be in the great realm of the utopian, will form only small sectors.” In other words, utopia was not only in the determined negation but also in the anticipatory illumination. Glimmers of hope for this utopia were projected and are projected through the fairy tale, but the conditions for its realization must be adequate. Everything begins with oral storytelling followed by literary works with traces of utopian yearning. It would, of course, be misleading to argue that every story told is utopian or to assert that there is an “essential” utopian nature to storytelling. There is, however, a utopian tendency of telling that helps explain why it is we feel so compelled to create and disseminate tales and why we are enthralled by particular stories. The tales with this utopian tendency stem from the lack that we feel in our lives, a discernible discontentment, and a yearning for a better condition or world. Paradoxically, the happiness of the listeners and readers of utopian tales depends on the unhappiness of the tellers. Without discontent, there is no utopia. Without projections of utopia, our world would be a dismal place. Tomes have been written about utopia, and this is most curious because utopia is allegedly nowhere, a place that has never been seen or experienced. At least this is what Sir Thomas More described in his famous treatise Utopia, written first in Latin in 1516 and translated into English in 1551. Utopia is an imaginary island with a perfect social and political system in which everyone is treated fairly. Yet, since this perfect state of government and existence is imaginary, utopia has also come to mean an impossible idealistic projection. In fact, More’s notion of utopia fostered numerous speculative, philosophical and political books from the sixteenth century to the present, and it also promoted all kinds of utopias as well as thousands of stories and novels labeled utopian. But utopia’s vague and idealistic premises have led many critics to equate it

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with idealistic dreaming and unrealistic thinking. To be a utopian is frequently to be somebody out of touch with reality. Nevertheless, there is a more positive way of looking at utopia that links the conception of utopias to reality and hope. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch proposes that our real-life experiences are at the basis of our utopian longings and notions. In our daily lives that are not exactly what we want them to be, we experience glimpses or glimmerings of another world that urges us on and stimulates our creative drives to reach a more ideal state of being. To be more precise, it is our realization of what is missing in our lives that impels us to create works of art that not only reveal insights into our struggles but also that shed light on alternatives and possibilities to restructure our mode of living and social relations. All art, according to Bloch, contains images of hope illuminating ways to create a utopian society. Obviously, not every work that presumes to be art is artful. Nor do all artworks necessarily contain a utopian tendency. But inspiring and illuminating images of hope can be detected in low and high art, in a Beethoven symphony or in a rock and roll song, in a grand Shakespeare production or a state fair. The utopian tendency of art is what propels us to reshape and reform our personal and social lives. In fact, as Bloch has pointed out, the concrete utopias, or shortlived experiments give real expression to new social and political relations. These concrete utopias set the building blocks for the future, for once hope is tested and grounded, we cannot betray it for long. We can never fully deny what has been concretized. Among his examples are such major events in the world as the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as the Fourier experiments in France and the Brook Farm “commune” in America, all which have left traces of how we might shape the future. These revolutions and experiments—and there are many more that can be cited—did not entirely succeed because the proper socioeconomic conditions to maintain them did not exist. Yet, the very fact that they came into being for a short time reveals a great deal about the validity of our utopian longings that we continue to concretize in different ways. These longings are recorded in the spoken and written word. These longings are the source of ancient religions and rituals as well as new cults. The belief in a better and just world has always been with us, and this utopian belief assumes a myriad of forms. For instance, the belief in miracles and life after death articulated in religious legends and myths stems from utopian longings. Salvation is predicated on the notion of a

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just world in which the oppressed will be protected by a powerful divinity. Hundreds of thousands of tales in all religions have been spread with hope that we shall be redeemed after this life. But the more interesting utopian tales, in my opinion, focus on the present world. The utopian tendency of sacred stories is clear from the beginning. What is not so evident is how our profane and secular stories have a utopian bent to them and are perhaps more appealing and significant because they restore miraculous power to human beings. In other words, they suggest that ordinary people can take power into their own hands and create better worlds for themselves, if they know how to use their gifts. In his famous study, The Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladimir Propp demonstrated that the structure of most wonder tales was based on 33 functions and that if we know how these functions operate, we can grasp the fundamental aspects of any wonder tale and trace its connections to all kinds of variants. Propp maintained that the action of a wonder tale is predicated on the leave-taking of a member of a family from his or her home. This person can be a member of the older generation or some young person. Once the protagonist leaves the family, there is an interdiction. For instance, in the Grimms’ version of “Iron Hans,” the young boy is told not to touch the water of a pond. Of course, he does, and his hair turns to gold. Inevitably, in most wonder tales, the interdiction is violated, and the protagonist is confronted with a villain who will attempt to prevent the protagonist from compensating for the violation of the interdiction. From this point on, as Propp showed, the plot will depend on such other functions as the acquisition of gifts by the protagonist and the use of these gifts to overcome the villain, leading to an ascension of the throne and/or marriage at end of the tale. According to Propp, leave-taking generally assumes the form of a simple walk into the woods, going off on business, a voyage to visit friends and relatives, a hunting trip, a test between siblings, or a death in the family that causes the members to disperse. In many cases, this is true. Yet, Propp does not explore in depth the meaning of leave-taking, nor other causes that constitute the utopian tendency of wonder tales—and most wonder tales characteristically have happy endings representing a fulfillment of utopian longings or the anticipation of such fulfillment. That is, there is a sense that a new world opens up to the protagonist. In this respect, wonder tales are tendentious: They tend toward illuminating a path through darkness to a more enlightened world or life situation. For Propp, the plot always hinges on leave-taking and interdiction. Yet,

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how many wonder tales begin with the protagonist’s desire or longing to escape abuse, injustice, and horrible circumstances? How many tales tell us how the protagonist purposely seeks new surroundings to become king or queen of his or her destiny? Young people in the tales are often beaten, abandoned, cheated, or tested. Leaving home is a significant step because it is an indication that the protagonists are uneasy at home, not at home with themselves, and seek to create a new home. Bloch maintains that home is a futuristic concept because we never have truly experienced home. We have never been in control of history or our own personal destinies. Therefore, we constantly pursue a genuine home that is commensurate with our deep utopian longings. Stories help us. They help map out the terrain of utopia. They reiterate messages that we sometimes forget. In our most common stories, the utopian tendency is constituted by the actions of an ordinary, quite often naive character who manages to overcome obstacles or an adversary to achieve some kind of success. A good example is the cycle of Jack tales that has spread in the oral and written tradition in England, North America, and elsewhere. In his wonderful collection, The Jack Tales, Richard Chase remarks, “it is always through the ‘little feller’ Jack that we participate in the dreams, desires, ambitions, and experiences of a whole people. His fantastic adventures arise often enough among the commonplaces of existence, and he always returns to the everyday life of these farm people of whom he is one.”15 The most famous of the Jack tales is, of course, “Jack and the Bean Stalk,” which depicts a resourceful Jack, who literally grows and grows up through his encounter with the giant and manages to gain a treasure in the course of action. There is another tale, “Hardy Hardhead,” which is perhaps more interesting because it has many different variants in Europe and contains utopian implications. Here, Jack asks his mother to take leave so that he can free a king’s daughter who has been bewitched. If he is successful—and many men have died—he can marry the princess. When Jack enters the forest, he meets a “weezedly” old man, who gives him money and a ship that can sail on ground. On his way to meet the ship, he takes on board five men, Hardy Hardhead, Eatwell, Runwell, Harkwell, and Shootwell. These men have talents that will help Jack defeat the witch. He returns home and gives back the money to the old man. The narrator informs us that he does not know whether Jack married the girl, but at least she was no longer bewitched. As for the ship, the narrator confides in us that he knows for a fact that Jack kept it because Jack has taken him sailing on it several times.

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This is a delightful tall tale with many utopian motifs such as the collective action of the six men whose talents are used to liberate an oppressed girl. In the Grimms’ version, “How Six Made Their Way Through the World,” the hero is an ex-soldier, mistreated by a king. He and his five friends defeat the king’s daughter in a race and make off with the king’s treasures that they share together. In the Italian version, “A Boat for Land and Water,” retold by Italo Calvino, the hero is a youngest son. Here, too, he is helped by an old man in the forest, and after the young man completes his task, thanks also to five gifted friends, he builds a palace that houses his father, brothers, and companions, not to mention his bride. The theme of all three tales is liberation through collective action. The implication is that miserable conditions can be changed and evil can be overcome. There is hope for the oppressed, and this hope is carried by ordinary people like Jack, the soldier, and the youngest son. Naturally, they have some extraordinary help, but isn’t the miraculous in these tales symbolic of the powers that reside in us, latent potential that we have not learned how to mine? The magic help from the outside is actually an energy or potential within us that we need to recognize in order to transform ourselves and to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. The hero receives a call from the outside in the form of an announcement. This call is actually from the future and sends the ordinary protagonist on a mission that will change his life forever, turn his world upside down, and bring more justice to the world around him. The “miraculous transformation” is a fairy-tale motif that can be found in all types of stories from antiquity to the present and is pervasive in our mass-mediated commercials, where quick slick stories are told on computer, TV, and movie screens about beastly men turned into princes by the proper use of the right shampoo, or the scraggly woman who looks like a queen after she uses the right lotion. Drinks, running shoes, beverages, and cars are all magic gifts that can change our lives. Here, of course, we see the perversion of the utopian quality of storytelling. Utopia cannot be attained simply on the basis of individual transformation and enrichment. Commodities are not magical. What is needed, as Thomas More long ago pointed out, is social and political change, and there are unusual cycles of tales that address the conception of a paradise on earth such as Atlantis, the Golden Age, Shangri-La, and Cuccagna (also known in different languages as Cockaigne, Lubberland, Luilekkerland and Schlaraffenland—all connoting the land of milk and honey). Zedlers Grosses Universal-Lexikon, a German encyclopedia of 1742, defines Schlaraffenland as a utopia which means nowhere. It is not a

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real, but rather a fictional and moral place. It has been created out of all sorts of intentions. Some Schlaraffenland tales envision a perfect government which does not exist because of the corrupt nature of people in the world and also cannot exist. The storytellers’ intention in portraying such a government is to show more clearly and more freely the incomplete nature and foibles of monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies. Others seek to represent the misery and struggles of human life. According to the encyclopedia, this is why storytellers and writers create such countries or islands on which one can have everything without work. For instance, there are images of seas full of wine, streams of beer, forests with fried chicken, and fish hanging from the branches. One need only picture Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting of The World Turned Upside Down (1559), also known as Netherlandish Proverbs, to imagine what is meant by the Schlaraffenland or Cuccagna as the land of milk and honey. Indeed, Bruegel was so intrigued by the stories of “Luilekkerland” that he also painted the Land of Cockaigne in 1567. The excess behavior of the characters in the Cuccagna stories is somewhat disturbing. People eat, sleep, drink, carouse, exchange roles, and turn the world upside down. Chaos seems to be the ruling principle of Schlaraffenland. Yet, there are some historical factors that must be considered if we are to understand why the characters in these tales seem so voracious, boisterous, crude, and lustful. Most of the tales in the Cuccagna, Cockaigne, and Schlaraffenland cycles arose during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and they are connected to the Carnival, Mardi Gras, and folk traditions when people were permitted on the day before lent to become “kings for a day.” That is, people were allowed to let their hair down and assume the roles of their rulers and oppressors, to dress up and do as they pleased without fear of being punished. In addition, given the great famines during this period, feasting became a major part of the celebration, and to eat to one’s content became part of the celebrations. To break all the rules of decorum and to live for pleasure was also a political act, for it was during this time that the daily life and work were becoming more regulated and rationalized. Leisure time was becoming more and more a luxury, and peasants were compelled to treat time more like money. With the rise of the middle classes and mercantilism, the socioeconomic system demanded more work and accountability and less time for pleasure. Perhaps one of the more interesting documents about the “milk and honey” tales is actually a sixteenth-century Italian folk song entitled “A

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Chapter That Tells about the Existence of a New World found in the Sea Oceano,” which was based on different folk tales. Probably sung and told by sailors, the narrator begins by reciting how seafarers found a beautiful land in the sea Oceano where nobody ever dies. There is one mountain made out of cheese, and on the top is a kettle a mile wide. In this kettle, macaroni is cooked. When the macaroni is ready, it spurts out of the kettle and rolls down the cheese mountain to a house with forks where people can eat as much as they like and drink wine out of the springs. All the trees are filled with cake and cookies, and a river of milk flows through the land. Everything grows there without difficulty: grapes and figs, melons and other fruit. The woods are filled with fried chicken and other game. The weather is so wonderful that clothes are not needed, and all the boys and girls run around naked. For them our decorum is foolish and crazy. Everyone is young and lives for a thousand years. Then they die in their sleep. There are no sicknesses, pain, and suffering. Each person lives cheerfully and enjoys each second of the day. Everyone has what he or she wants, and if someone were to think about working, the others would hang the person and heaven would not save him. Everything grows by itself, and the donkeys are tied with sausages. Nobody has anything on his or her mind other than dancing, singing, and making music. The king’s name is Bugalosso because he is the fattest lazy person there. In fact, he is so fat that he never moves and never wants to exert himself. Money streams from his rear, and when he spits, he spits out marzipan, and instead of lice, he has fish in his hair. There are no peasants there because everyone is rich. When one wants to sleep, one only has to find a bush equipped with sheets and pillows made out of down. It is not necessary to worry about having too many children to feed, because when it rains, it rains ravioli. The houses are made out of the finest gold, and all the fields are shared and free. What a wonderful land, sings the teller. The sun and moon never set. The people never quarrel or fight. The song ends with the singer commenting something like: “Oh what a beautiful place, Oh what a glorious land! How stupid it is to stay here any longer. I would like to head for this island and live near the beautiful mountain. Whoever wants to go there, I’ll tell them the way. He only has to take a ship in Mameluke Harbor and then sail over the sea of lies. And whoever arrives there will be king of those fools.” Despite the wonderful irony of the song, it has a powerful appeal because it articulates the real needs of the common people and illustrates

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their wishes and desires. Typically, the contours of this utopia are depicted in the extreme so that there is a burlesque and grotesque quality to the narrative. This radical manner of introducing the motif of utopia, also to be found in tall tales and trickster tales, is intended to burst the seams of the status quo and provoke listeners to move ahead in their lives with laughter and optimism. The utopian tendency in storytelling does not accept things as they are and seeks to expose human foibles, hypocrisy, and injustices. There are many types of utopian tales, and the utopian tendency of ancient tales about paradise has led to the science fiction tales of the present. But the tendency, as the tales reveal, is not simply in the narratives themselves. As Bloch has demonstrated, the tales are articulations of the utopian tendencies within us that we cultivate from childhood to death in our endeavor to seek immortality. One need only watch children at a playground to see how early the utopian tendency in storytelling develops. Left alone to play, children will begin talking to themselves and will invent a magic kingdom and narrative to express their wishes and desires. Or, they will join with other children to act out a story or play a game that has a story line to it. A playground filled with laughing and somewhat “wild” children is not unlike Bruegel’s The World Turned Upside Down or a land of milk and honey. As they talk and run about, the children seek to grab hold of their lives and map out their destinies, not knowing where they are going, but knowing that there is a land or home out there that will suit them. As Oscar Wilde once said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even looking at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopia.”16 And one might add, the tendency toward utopia is kept alive through storytelling.

Notes



1.  For two important studies of this encounter, see Noerr Schmid, “Bloch und Adorno. Bildhafte und bilderlose Utopie?” Zeitschrift für Kritische Theorie 13 (2001): 25–55; Ivan Boldyrev, Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 167–77. 2. Actually, Adorno is mistaken about the incidents in this tale. He is referring to Charles Perrault’s “The Foolish Wishes” (“Les souhaits ridicules,” 1694), in which a poor woodcutter is given three wishes by Jupiter.

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He stupidly wastes the first one by wishing for a sausage. After his wife berates him, he wishes for a sausage on her nose. Finally, as his third wish, he asks that the sausage be removed from his wife’s nose. 3. “Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1–2. See “Etwas fehlt… Über die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht. Ein Gespräch mit Theodor W. Adorno” in Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch, eds. Rainer Traub and Harald Wieser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 58–59. 4. Ibid., 5. 5. Ibid., 16. 6. Ibid., 16–17. 7. Ibid., 163. “Das Märchen geht selber in der Zeit” in Ernst Bloch, Die Kunst, Schiller zu sprechen und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 11. 8. Ibid., 165–66. 9.  Ibid., 168–69. “Bessere Luftschlösser in Jahrmarkt und Zirkus, in Märchen und Kolportage” in Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), 411. 10. Ibid., 182. 11. Ibid., 183. 12. Ibid., 184. 13. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984). See especially, “Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland,” 239–58. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. Richard Chase, ed. The Jack Tales: Folk Tales from the Southern Appalachians (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), xi–xii. 16. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, ed. Robert Ross (London: Humphreys, 1912), 45.

CHAPTER 7

The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J. R. R. Tolkien the Catholic

It might seem somewhat incongruous if not risky to couple the names of Ernst Bloch and J. R. R. Tolkien. It is almost like taking two names in vain at the same time. But in the name of the fairy tale anything goes. And, as we know from the fairy tale, risks are more often rewarded than not. So what about these names? Bloch, hardly known in the Western world except to erudite scholars and theologians, endeavored to unravel the resilient latent qualities of humankind manifested in the struggle for a better world. He viewed these qualities as constituting a principle of hope and illuminating the possibility for human beings to change and become makers of their own history. He himself was an example of what he termed the upright gait (der aufrechte Gang)—a concept he used to describe the position human beings must assume if they are to stand straight and stride forward making their own history with the integrity, courage, and compassion needed to resist forces of divisiveness and oppression. The essence of his philosophy is stated succinctly in this passage from The Principle of Hope: Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_7

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His essential biographical details from the first chapter of this book can be summarized briefly. Born in 1885 in Ludwigshafen, Bloch began very early to seize his own radical roots.2 His study of philosophy was pursued against his father’s will, and this opposition to patriarchy marked the path which his life would take and defined his political-philosophical project. When World War I erupted, Bloch as a socialist pacifist went into exile in Switzerland where he wrote Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia). When he returned to Germany, he became more committed to socialism and began formulating his views in the Marxist Hegelian tradition which was enjoying a renascence at that time. Though the period of the 1920s was one of great personal turmoil for Bloch—he lost his first wife, remarried, got divorced, and had severe doubts about the effectiveness of his political philosophy—he continued to be productive and wrote numerous essays and books that were all part of his messianic project of hope. In 1933, he was forced to leave Berlin due to his strong anti-fascist position, and after stops in Switzerland, France, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and the publication of Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of Our Times), one of the most astute analyses of the rise of fascism and the inability of the Left to respond to Nazism, he landed in Boston where he spent approximately a decade in the seclusion of Harvard’s Widener Library elaborating his major philosophical and political premises. In 1948, he was hired by the University of Leipzig in East Germany as professor of philosophy, his first academic job at the tender age of 63. However, after witnessing and opposing the ossification of the socialist experiment in the German Democratic Republic, Bloch left that country to accept a post in 1961 as professor at the University of Tübingen in West Germany. There, too, he remained active in his protest against political repression and supported oppositional groups until his death in 1977. To the very end, he spoke out in the name of the spirit of hope that projected the possibilities for revolutionary social change. Bloch’s active political life was in stark contrast to his English contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, who preferred the pedestrian, conservative way. Ironically, Tolkien, who spent most of his life in Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature and tended to shun publicity and politics, achieved world fame in the 1950s as the author of The Lord of

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the Rings. His great passions were words, Catholicism and tradition, and his official biographer Humphrey Carpenter has presented an insightful picture of just how his conservatism expressed itself. Tolkien was, in modern jargon, “right wing” in that he honored his monarch and his country and did not believe in the rule of the people; but he opposed democracy simply because he believed that in the end his fellow-men would not benefit from it. He once wrote: “I am not a ‘democrat,’ if only because humility and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power – and then we get and are getting slavery!’3

Though conservative, Tolkien saw himself as a defender of the “masses” surrounded on all sides by corruption and forces of progress that prevented them from seeking salvation in true religion. Strangely enough, his religion and conservatism provided the radical cutting edge of his romantic anti-capitalist position which still stamps his works today and constitutes part of their appeal. Born in South Africa in 1892, Tolkien was raised in England after his father’s death in 1896.4 His early schooling and religious training were greatly influenced by his mother who encouraged his interest in literature and supervised his conversion to Roman Catholicism that she underwent at the same time. Since most of the relatives of Mrs. Tolkien opposed this conversion, she was deprived of both emotional and economic support while trying to make ends meet in the environs of Birmingham. Actually, such tribulations doubled her fortitude, and Tolkien and his younger brother learned the virtues of discipline, hard work, devotion, and commitment from her. After his mother’s death in 1904, Tolkien developed stronger ties to Catholicism and diligently pursued his studies eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford. As a young man, he displayed a unique interest in ancient languages and particularly sought the companionship of men in literary circles to share his insights and discoveries. Aside from a brief stint in World War I which struck horror in him, he spent the rest of his years in the groves of academe and executed his duties loyally as professor, husband, and father. There was very little excitement in Tolkien’s pedestrian university world except for debates with Oxford colleagues and family tensions. He remained rooted in upper-class English tradition and

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his own mythological fantastic projections. His major social complaint was lodged against the desecration of the “natural” world by technology. Otherwise, he affirmed the class hierarchy as good and ordained by God. A pious man, a pious life. He died in 1973, ironically celebrated more for his pagan fairy tales than for his “catholic” view of the world. Obviously, Tolkien had very little in common with his contemporary Ernst Bloch. But the obvious here is misleading. Both Tolkien and Bloch employed the fairy tale to articulate deeply felt philosophies and to project utopian visions of better worlds which human beings are capable of realizing with their own powers. Certainly, it could be argued that Tolkien’s other world, his utopia, appears to be a romantic regression into a legendary past, an escape from the brutalities of modern-day conditions. Yet, Bloch, if he had ever written about Tolkien, might have been the first to point out that the return to the past is also part of the way to the future, that Tolkien unearths buried and repressed “non-synchronic” elements of unfulfilled wishes and dreams which cannot be left unfulfilled if the potential of human beings to bring about a millennium on earth is to be achieved. Tolkien’s search for a solid “home” is what Bloch might have designated as that which has not-yet-become but which we can sense in the anticipatory illusion (Vor-Schein) of certain works of art that employ fantasy to offset instrumental rationalization and call forth our authentic utopian impulses. Both Bloch and Tolkien wrote key essays about the utopian function of the fairy tale and fantasy, and it will be worth our while to examine them in detail, for they might help us understand why the recent commodification of fantasy, that is, the fashionable trend to worship and consume the fantastic as art and commodity, contains a subversive element of revolutionary hope. Neither Bloch nor Tolkien were concerned with elaborating historically founded theories of the folk and fairy tale, and there are certain inconsistencies in their essays with which we must deal. Their primary interest lay in defending imagination and fantastical projections, and there are striking similarities in their quests since their battle was essentially against the same “dragon of dehumanization”.

I Bloch’s voluminous writings are filled with references to folk and fairy tales. In fact, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that his towering philosophical works rest on the foundation of the fairy tale.

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Consequently, any analysis of his longer detailed essays about fairy tales will involve an explanation of his basic notions of revolutionary aesthetics and philosophy. Significant here are two short studies: “Das Märchen geht selber in Zeit” (“The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time”) and “Bessere Luftschlösser in Jahrmarkt und Zirkus, in Märchen and Colportage” (“Better Castles in the Sky, at the Fair and Circus, in the Fairy Tale and Colportage”), to which I have already alluded in the previous chapters. The first essay is important because it lays the general groundwork for his appreciation of the fairy tale: The atavistic and simultaneously feudal-transcendental world from which the fairy tale stems and to which it seems to be tied has most certainly vanished. However, the mirror of the fairy tale has not become opaque, and the manner of wish-fulfilment which peers forth from it is not entirely without a home. It all adds up to this: the fairy tale narrates a wish-fulfilment which is not bound by its own time and the apparel of its contents. In contrast to the legend which is always tied to a particular locale, the fairy tale remains unbound. Not only does the fairy tale remain as fresh as longing and love, but the demonically evil, which is abundant in the fairy tale, is still seen at work here in the present, and the happiness of “once upon a time,” which is even more abundant, still affects our visions of the future.5

Despite some unusually profound insights contained in this essay and in Bloch’s other work “Better Castles in the Sky,”6 there are misleading notions about the folk and fairy tale, and these must be clarified before we can evaluate his ideas about the utopian function of the fairy tale and fantasy. As I have already pointed out, Bloch makes no distinctions between the oral folk tale and the literary fairy tale in an effort to find some kind of common denominator. Therefore, distinctions collapse so that the historical specificity of the folk tale and fairy tale becomes lost in socialist postulations and speculations about the power of the fairy tale. The alleged paradigmatic fairy tale, as Bloch envisions it, does not exist neither in history nor in present-day reality. In fact, Bloch often confuses myth and other fantasy literature with the fairy tale so that the latter category assumes a deceptive character of universality. Ultimately, the tendency to universalize and idealize the fairy tale leads Bloch to gloss over the contradictions and historical essence of both folk and fairy tales. For instance, if we examine in depth the folk tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm, we learn that folk-tale maxims are not as emancipatory as

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Bloch leads us to believe. Such tales as “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “King Thrushbeard,” and “Rapunzel” are decidedly biased against females who must either be put in their places or have their identity defined by males. The outcome is determined by the constraints of a conservative feudal ideology, and what Bloch continually glorifies as the striving for “home” or “a golden age” is actually, if we place the folk tale in a historical context, a reconstitution of society with the underdog merely replacing his or her former oppressor. In both his essays on the fairy tale, Bloch praises the cunning and courage of the narrative itself and the hero of the narrative for demonstrating how reason and talents can be used to overcome difficulties in the cause of true enlightenment. The power and strength of the poor and underprivileged become magnified with the result that the hope for a better future for small people is safeguarded. In certain instances, this may be true, but again folk tales, for instance, must first be understood as historically marked cultural expressions of different peoples. Thus, they exhibit not only the positive yearnings and wishes of the narrators and their audiences but also their contradictory drives. In the folk and fairy tales gathered by the Grimms, the male underdog is indeed cunning and courageous, but he is often only too willing to sacrifice autonomy or to compromise fantasy, cunning, and courage just to succeed in society. In such works as “The Brave Little Tailor,” “The White Snake,” “Faithful John,” and “Puss in Boots,” the goal of the protagonist concerns social status and recognition. The change in the tale does not involve a change in social conditions and relations. The protagonist simply improves his position in regard to material wealth and power. He seizes his opportunity to succeed, as do the princesses and fair young maidens of the peasant class. But it is not only the Grimms’ tales which Bloch dehistoricizes and consequently misinterprets. The literary fairy tale, too, is subjected to vague generalities. The treatment of Cocteau, Molnár, and Verne in “The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own” disregards the particular relationship of the individual authors to their societies and art and also neglects the conditions of reception. This is also true in “Pipe Dreams” when Bloch discusses Wilhelm Hauff, Hans Christian Andersen, Gottfried Keller, Gustav Meyrink, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Certainly, there are fantastic elements resembling the colorful worlds of the fair and circus in the fairy tales of these authors, but these elements are divested of their particular historical sense when universalized by Bloch. For example, Hauff’s protagonists are tied to a Swabian landscape and are caught in a

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conflict between pietistic beliefs and materialist striving for a better life. The fantastic projection of a better life in Andersen is often representative of a contradictory urge to be accepted in the high society of Denmark and to expose the shallowness of this very same upper-class society. These are just two examples of how one would have to distinguish similar but different elements in fairy tales if one could accept the generalizations made by Bloch. Where does this leave us? Perhaps it would be best simply to dismiss Bloch’s ideas about folk and fairy tales as erroneous and suitable only for understanding his philosophy. However true this may be, we would be making a mistake, for Bloch sheds light on the utopian function of folk and fairy tales in a manner unsurpassed by contemporary commentators. His notions of folk and fairy tales become valid when we recognize their limitations and put them to use more discreetly than he actually does. That is, Bloch’s ideas hold true for certain folk tales and certain fairy tales. This results from the fact that Bloch was not concerned with constructing a historical theory of the folk and fairy tales. At heart, it is a general aesthetic theory which can help us understand the utopian function of popular and high culture. This is why he purposely blends the folk and fairy tale. In a significant essay about Bloch’s aesthetics, Gert Ueding points out that in contrast to Hegel, art for Bloch is not the reflection (Widerschein) of a metaphysically determined truth. Consequently, it is not to be regarded as something of the past that has a high point of determination. Rather, it is an anticipatory-illusory (vor-scheinende) formation of an achievement that has yet to come, and thus it is a stimulant for revolutionary praxis. “Moreover, meaningful literature brings us an accelerated current of action, an elucidated daydream of the essential to the consciousness of the world. In addition, it wants to be changed. Among other things, the world correlate to the poetically suitable action is precisely the tendency; the world correlate to the poetically suitable daydream is precisely the latency of being. And it is very much in our day and age that the poetically exact dream does not die from truth, for truth is not the reflection of facts, but of processes. In the final analysis, it is the portrayal of tendency and latency of that which has not yet become and needs an activator!” (Bloch) In that art as illusion and anticipatory illusion also reflects the process, just as it can anticipate the totality of its goal in outline form, in that art as signifier with its codes and symbols continually points beyond itself, its effect upon the social reality is activating.7

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In his discussions about art, Bloch constantly returns to the folk tale in particular because he seeks to place his finger on the driving utopian force which is constitutive in the best of both folk and fairy tales, of both low and high art. As perhaps the oldest of all literary forms, the folk tale retains the immediacy of the common people’s perspective which has always sought and indicated the possibilities for a better world. Thus, the distinction between folk and fairy tales becomes negligible in Bloch’s writings since he is primarily concerned with tracing the manner in which the utopian impulse of every human being has been transmitted through imagination, transformed and translated through fantastic projections up to the present. In this regard, we can accept his universal category of the fairy tale if we recognize that he is addressing himself to the best of the folk and fairy tales that have carried forth in manifold ways the utopian sensibility. As Bloch perceptively asserts, the fairy tale narrates a wish fulfillment which is not bound only by its own time and the apparel of its contents. What makes the old folk tales and the new fairy tales vital is their capacity to harbor unfulfilled wishes in figurative form and project the possibility for their fulfillment. Bloch did not believe that fairy tales were substitutes for action but indicators. As we know, he developed a special category of Vor-Schein (anticipatory illusion) to explain how the fairy tale can mirror processes through fantastic formations of the imagination, processes which depend on humankind’s use of reason to carry through the wishes of fantasy. In a world in which reason has to be used for irrational purposes, Bloch argues that the world of the fairy tale contains a corrective: The utopian perspective becomes a critical, figurative reflection of everyday banality and subverts the arbitrary use of reason that destroys and confines the capacity of people to move on their own as autonomous makers of history. The critical utopias of fairy tales do not outline a graphic plan of what the future world will be like. Rather, their purpose is, as Ueding suggests, “to tear the affairs of human culture from the superstructure and sort them out from that ideology which legitimates and glorifies a society with false consciousness.”8 This means that the fairy tale shows the necessity for restoring the concerns of society to where they belong—with the people, the little fellows who are imbued with the power to make decisions for themselves. When Bloch refers to the “little fellows,” he generally means the lower-middle-class youth and marginal groups, whom he considered pivotal for bringing about socialism. That is, their solidarity with the proletarian

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class was a necessary ingredient for revolutionary change. In the contemporary situation, this classification of “little fellows” would have to be enlarged in the Blochian sense to include large sectors of the changing middle classes whose needs and awareness have suffered from the ideological indoctrination and technological machinations of the capitalist consciousness industry. Even the proletarian class itself would now have to be seen as part of the little people due to their diminished sense of autonomous class consciousness. The recovery of autonomy is crucial for building concrete utopias, and according to Bloch, literature can contribute to a reawakening through a process of estrangement. In particular, the fantastic images and magic of the fairy tales can estrange the reader to everyday life and expectations if they are combined with dreams and wishes which lend them a new quality determined by the Vor-Schein of the tale which awakens a utopian consciousness that may have been repressed and needs articulation. At its best, the fairy tale is always conscious of doing this. As Bloch time and again notes, the protagonist is the underdog, the youngest child, the most deprived, the most discontented, and the fool. In fact, the fairy tale thrives not only on the hope and wish projection of its narrators and audiences but also on their dissatisfaction. Bloch places special emphasis on dissatisfaction as a condition which ignites the utopian drive—somewhat similar to Freud’s emphasis on discontent (Unbehagen) in Civilization and Its Discontents, except that Bloch is more optimistic than Freud. The fairy tale gives full expression to the dissatisfactions of average people, and this is why it remains such a powerful cultural force among them. Here is the connection to other seemingly popular and trivial forms of art such as circuses, fairs, and sensationalist literature. Bloch has argued that socioeconomic developments bring about a certain non-synchronism and inequality in the lives of people, fractures in the relationship between being and consciousness.9 For instance, the consciousness of a certain group or class does not flow directly from the conditions of its existence. A group of people may still think in terms of a previous time or behave according to thought patterns and traditions of a past society while living in the present. This is often the case when the social development does not fully work out the contradictions of the past society while moving forward and leaves groups and classes of people dissatisfied, uprooted, confused, etc. Consequently, they yearn legitimately for the fulfillment of their needs and wants which may have been overlooked in, let us say, the transition

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from feudalism to capitalism, or in the movement in late capitalism from manual forms of labor and simple mechanics to automation and complex technology. In each case, the needs and wishes of certain groups of people may have been bypassed too quickly in the change of the socioeconomic structure, and they move forward out of step with the new times while looking and longing backward. What some high-culture critics dismiss disdainfully as popular or commercial art contains a wealth of non-synchronous elements, some entirely regressive, some legitimate. By dismissing popular culture as appealing to the base instincts of the masses, these critics fail to perceive the utopian potential of such art which embodies the wish projections of ordinary people, and they fail to mediate between the aesthetic tastes of social classes thereby ignoring the value of popular culture. Bloch endeavored to bridge this gap by pointing to the aesthetics of everyday life and popular culture as the realm which anticipated more strikingly and more immediately the possibilities for humankind to complete the project of gaining a home, i.e., creating a new society with unalienating work conditions. Here, it is important to stress again that Bloch’s ideas on non-synchronism and the fairy tale were developed in the 1920s and 1930s in response to fascism and the reactionary, mobilization of the petite bourgeoisie in Germany. The historical dimensions of his theory were defined by his conscious effort to oppose and clarify totalitarian manipulation. This is also why he expressed so much interest in pivotal groups of “little fellows”. To the degree that the domination of the masses (now including the middle classes) remains a given factor in the socioeconomic order of things, Bloch’s notions of inequality, non-synchronism, and aesthetics of everyday life remain valid. The little fellow as the average consumer consumed by bureaucracies and corporations indicates the problematic nature of transforming society along socialist humanist lines. Part of such a transformation depends on how one traces and reads the signs of what constitutes culture. As Bloch saw it, the fairy tale is the most vital artistic expression of ordinary people—their projection of how they want themselves to change and transform society. The fantastic form of the fairy tale carries a realistic lode of what is open-ended and fragmentary but can still be realized. It plays upon the imagination not to open it up to escape into a never-never land but to make greater contact with reality. The escape is estrangement or separation from a defeating situation which induces a feeling of possible liberation. In this sense, all the sensationalist popular literature of today must

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be studied with all its contradictions as literature which comes very close to the core of the dissatisfaction of little fellows’ lives and their need for emancipation. Consequently, such literature must be taken more seriously than it has been. Certainly, Tolkien’s works have been dealt with seriously.10 But they have not been examined for their radical thrust, and they certainly have not been related to Bloch’s theories. This is the framework which I shall now use to discuss them. First I want to comment on Tolkien’s own essay “On Fairy-Stories” and then show how such a work as The Hobbit contains more explosive power than one might imagine.

II Tolkien’s purpose in writing his essay “On Fairy-Stories” was threefold: He wanted to define them, trace their origins, and discuss their function. The first two points are dealt with in cursory fashion, and, like Bloch, Tolkien misinterprets the meaning and origins of folk and fairy tales. He, too, reduces the categories of the folk and fairy tales so that they become indistinct, and he underestimates the value of historical anthropological studies about the evolution of the folk tale. The result is a vague definition: “A ‘fairy-story’ is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic— but it is a magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific magician.”11 Faerie is also defined as the “Perilous Realm, which cannot be laughed at or explained away.” It must be taken seriously, for “the magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is (as will be seen) to hold communion with other living things” (13). Such a definition of folk or fairy tales has no basis in history, nor does it enable us to grasp the origins of the tales which have been studied much more thoroughly by other scholars.12 Nevertheless, Tolkien’s comments are most significant for an understanding of his own fairy tales. Like Bloch, he was primarily concerned with the sociopsychological effect of the tales as they are received by contemporary audiences. Thus, his fusing of folk and fairy tales into one genre is acceptable as long as we bear in mind that he wants to analyze how fairy tales and fantasy are esteemed and used today. Here, his

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humanistic and idealistic concerns are remarkably similar to those of Bloch, but before such parallels are drawn, let us examine the latter portion of Tolkien’s essay which deals with the value and function of fairy tales in the present. According to Tolkien, the worth of fairy tales depends on their function which is connected to estrangement: “They open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe” (32). By entering the realm of Faerie, Tolkien did not believe that we were entering a false or make-believe world. The fairy tale is a sub-creation of truth. If creation is the world and the creator, God, then the artist as sub-creator believes in his or her own creation which transports us to another world from which we can view and perhaps better grasp the primary forces acting upon us. Tolkien noted four factors which account for the magic power of the fairy tale: fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation. Since he attached special meanings to these terms, let us examine them in more detail. Essentially, Tolkien distinguishes imagination from fantasy. The former is the mental power of making images, while fantasy is a form of art which embraces the quality of strangeness and wonder derived in its expression from the image and lends the image an inner consistency of reality. Fantasy is thus the artistic mediator between imagination and the final result, sub-creation. Tolkien stresses that fantastic images are “images of things that are not only ‘not actually present,’ but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world, or are generally believed not to be found there” (47). This is its virtue—“the arresting of strangeness.” Time and again Tolkien argues that fantasy is a rational and natural human activity, and he seeks to grasp its social essence. For him the central desire and aspiration of human fantasy could be stated as follows: “It does not seek delusion nor bewitchment and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves” (53). Clearly, Tolkien is writing a defense of fairy tales and fantasy, and he takes issue with those traditionalists who have relegated the fairy tale to the realm of children and the domain of trivial art. In the process, he subscribes to some heretical views of fairy tales, and ironically, his staunch conservatism in religious matters is at the heart of his radical ideas. Tolkien detested machines, industrialism, and “progress” because they were signs that the human being was being devalued and that money was being worshiped as the almighty god. In opposition to this “fallen primal” world which was turning away from true religion,

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he sought ways through the sub-creation of fairy tales to recapture that humane essence which was becoming lost in the evolution of technology. His defense of fantasy had large sociopolitical ramifications, much larger than he himself realized. To state his theory of the fantasy in slightly different terms, we could say that fantasy is human labor power, the mental exertion of ordering images conceived by the mind for the purpose of enjoyment, enlightenment, and communion. Fantasy is liberating and can be shared. As it takes the form of a fairy tale, it provides three nurturing and civilizing qualities: recovery, escape, and consolation. According to Tolkien, by moving to the past or another world, the fairy tale enables readers to regain a clear view of their situations. Recovery includes return and renewal of health. The placing of objects from our everyday world in a luminous, estranged setting compels us to perceive and cherish them in a new way. The creative fantasy embodied in the fairy tale can help us see new connections between past and present. These connections must be made if we are to move forward in time more in keeping with our subjective concerns. The move forward or the general movement in the fairy tale is indeed an “escape,” and Tolkien persuasively argues that escape is not cowardly but can be heroic: “Why should man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” (60). Tolkien sees the world as a prison and as irrational. Fantasy is a form of protest against irrational confinement and such rationalized man-made things as “factories, or the machineguns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say ‘inexorable’ products” (63). And the fairy tale also provides escape from “hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death” (65). This escape would not be positive if it kept us suspended from reality which some fantasy tales do. Yet, this is not the case, as Tolkien stresses, with the fairy tale which liberates us so we can accept its consolation. Like Bloch’s philosophical understanding of the fairy tale, Tolkien’s evaluation of the fairy tale is grounded in the notion of hope: “The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, or sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary

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to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the wails of the world, poignant as grief” (68). Though Tolkien endows the fairy tale with Christian faith, he is not orthodox. The great virtue of the fairy tale does not lie in its promise of a better world after death but “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world” (71). Fantasy is imbued with an almost religious, mystical fervor: “in Fantasy he [Man] may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know” (73). This religious glorification of fantasy is not strange, and Tolkien unconsciously places his finger on what is missing or being distorted in contemporary Western society. Fantasy as it takes form in the fairy tale serves as a redeemer of humankind. It sets free the wants and wishes of human beings and declares that the pursuit of their fulfillment is valid and can provide validation of the self. Insofar as fantasy is not recognized in our everyday world as an occupation with needs to be taken seriously (just as the daydreamer is generally mocked), Tolkien’s religious devotion to fantasy assumes sociopolitical dimensions which must be further clarified. If we accept the notion of fantasy as the operative medium of our labor power which endows our images with meaning derived from unfulfilled wishes and needs, then the form which it takes is a kind of revelation, whether this be regarded as high or low art. The psychical and physical energy which goes into synthesizing images of the imagination in a fantastic work of art is a power that is closely associated with magic, for this power of fantasy is propelled by imaginings of changed circumstances and conditions. The roots of the imagistic projections lie in the very matter of existence and being which calls for a satisfactory response and will continually demand this until the want is stilled, not repressed. Since reason cannot entirely articulate and fulfill our needs and has actually been instrumentalized to govern or curb them, imagination rises up in protest and invents stratagems to undo the way the rational has been made irrational. Thus, if we understand our labor power in an expansive way as comprising the process of physically and mentally producing and reproducing conditions necessary for our sustenance, we can begin to see the sociopolitical meaning behind Tolkien’s and Bloch’s religious

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devotion to the fairy tale. Moreover, the stress on productive fantasy does not concern only the artist but the reader as well, for it provides the possibility for communion and consolation. As Anna K. Nardo has argued: Because the fictional role imposed on the reader of fantasy literature requires that he transcend the probable and the possible to play “the game of the impossible,” he may experience a greater loosening of the boundaries between fantasy and fact than in realistic literature. … The reader of fantasy literature must, as Irwin claims, “knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness.” It is this play-belief in a story which occurs in a play-world, not necessarily faith in a shadow of the Christian story, that offers the reader of fantasy literature Consolation for his irrevocable finiteness. Although Tolkien argues that the Joy accompanying the “Eucatastrophe” (happy ending) of much fantasy literature may be “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world,” we need not deny non-Christian fantasy the power of offering its readers Consolation. The play-belief necessary to join the game is belief enough.13

However, it can also be a search for belief or the disintegration of belief which impels author and reader to explore fantastic realms. For instance, in fairy tales the aesthetic rules of play and imaginative projections are always bounded by sociopolitical forces reflecting the religious and philosophical concerns of social classes or communities. What draws Tolkien and Bloch together in their views on the fairy tale is a secularization of religion. At first glance, this may seem untrue with regard to Tolkien, but it is noteworthy that his major works, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion are devoid of Christian doctrine and that even his essay “On Fairy-Stories” alludes to the underlying Christian implications of fairy tales more in a secular sense, and this mainly in the epilogue. To put it another way, like his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien was acutely aware, whether he stated this or not, that the essence of Christianity could only be conveyed to human beings in a secularized allegorical form, given the changing referential framework of values in a capitalist world which has compromised the aura of the Judeo-Christian tradition with crude utilitarian and rationalistic means for guaranteeing the sanctity of commodity production. Thus, fantasy is not only art for Tolkien, but religion, secularized religion, which is informed by a chiliastic perspective of a redeemed humanity. The reasons why Tolkien was forced to secularize most of his orthodox notions of Christianity can only

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be gleaned from the changing social conditions to which he responded out of protest. The failings of institutionalized religion, the rise of atheism and communism, the threats of war and fascism, the reification of values and human relations under capitalism—all these factors disturbed Tolkien, and it is quite clear that he created his mythological realm of the Middle Earth to demonstrate how human beings could “recover” religion to offset the forces of inhumanity. The irony here is that Tolkien raises the small person, the Hobbit, to the position of God, that is, he stands at the center of the universe and is the humanistic source of all creation. God is absent from the Middle Earth. The spiritual world manifests itself through the actions of the redeemed small person. And it is fantasy which liberates both the protagonist and the reader at the same time to seek redemption. Fantasy is at one and the same time the form and content of consolation. Tolkien’s unconscious secularization of religion brings him close to that Marxist viewpoint of religion most clearly associated with Bloch’s philosophy of hope. Here, it must be understood that Bloch never dismissed religion but carried forth its impulse dialectically to its most logical conclusion.14 The “promises” of religion—the millennium, the better life, the life after death, paradise—have become rooted more and more in the potential of humankind to realize and concretize them on earth than through the powers of some transcendental being since human beings have historically cultivated changing nature and themselves at the same time to gain more control over their own destinies. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice have become less meaningful due to technological developments, and human beings have increasingly sought immediate gratification of needs and wishes which cannot be provided by a transcendental being. This is also true of spiritual contentment which cannot be supplied by traditional and orthodox religions. This tendency toward immediate gratification of sensual and spiritual needs can lead and has led to strife, brutality, possessiveness, anarchy, and dehumanization. Clearly, these are only the negative tendencies in our polarized age. There are also positive aspects of immediate gratification, but both negative and positive point to a need to replace traditional religion by a faith which emanates from the Judeo-Christian tradition and yet replaces it on a higher level. For Bloch, religious faith and hope are not to be destroyed by socialism but will be placed in a materialist context that dispenses with the concept of a transcendental God only to redefine it as the supreme utopian problem.

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The true materialism, the dialectical one, while voiding the transcendence and reality of any divine hypostasis, does so without stripping the final qualitative contents of the process, the real utopia of a realm of freedom, of that which had been meant by an ens perfectissimum. Something attainable, something to be expected from the process, is not at all denied in dialectical materialism; a place for it is maintained, rather, and kept open as nowhere else. What this amounts to is that even in secularized form, and much more in utopian totality, the kingdom remains a messianic frontal space without any theism; indeed as increasingly demonstrated by every anthropologization of heaven from Prometheus down to the belief in a Messiah, it is only without theism that kingdom remains at all.15

The eschatological framework of Bloch’s thought revolves around a paradox: God must be eliminated in order for humankind to be liberated and seize the essence of religion. Revelation comes when the atheist secularizes faith which becomes one of the motivating forces of the historical process. Secularized faith is “the belief in a messianic kingdom of God without God. Therefore, far from being an enemy of religious utopianism, atheism is its premise: without atheism there is no room for messianism.”16 Bloch clearly imbues Marxism with the forceful messianic spirit of past religions which are appropriated and transformed by the deeds of human beings acting in and for themselves. Only in this way can real history come into being. Pivotal for Bloch is Marx’s assertion that “a being can be said to be independent only when it stands on its own two feet, and it stands on its own feet only when it owes its existence only to itself. A human being, who lives by the grace of another, regards itself as a dependent being. But I live entirely by the grace of another when I am not only indebted to another for the sustenance of my life but when this other being has, beyond this, created my life. This being is the source of my life, and my existence necessarily has a purpose outside of itself, too, when it is not my own creation.”17 This Marxist concept of the dialectics of existence (Dasein) points to the necessity of communality. Meaning cannot be achieved by a human being alone. The dependence on other beings must be acknowledged if the individual is to raise himself up and stride forward in an upright gait toward home, which, as we know, is the beginning of history, a realm without alienating conditions. The importance of communality, fraternity, and solidarity is striking in the writings of both Bloch and Tolkien as is the longing for a true

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home. The major difference between the two writers, who were eminently religious and idealistic, can be found in their respective positions toward capitalism. While both were anti-capitalist, Tolkien was more the reactionary romantic while Bloch was the progressive romantic—to a fault, for he overlooked the excesses of Stalinism in his idealistic critique of capitalism and lived to regret his compromise with Stalinism. Tolkien placed the blame for the decadence and crass materialism of contemporary society on the hubris of human beings who sinned by seeking to change the world through machines and by using money to promote their own glory. Bloch clearly honored the so-called hubris of human beings. He placed the blame for greed, exploitation, and waste on the capitalist system which he knew had to be superseded through the struggle of human beings to transform themselves into the more positive models they glimpsed in dreams and concrete utopias. He sought both to conserve the positive qualities of traditional religion and to replace the negative with illuminating ones which opened the path to a better world realizable in the here and now. Perhaps, if we turn to a discussion of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, we can come to a better understanding of the similarities and dissimilarities between Bloch and Tolkien. Here, I should like to do something unusual. Using Blochian categories, I shall explain the significance of such a work as The Hobbit while simultaneously criticizing its drawbacks. In the process, I hope to make clear why such a fantastic fairy tale remains so notable in literature and film, not just because of the current vogue for fantasy today but because the very commodification of fantasy has brought with it new sensual longings which commodity production itself cannot fulfill. The very strength of the system is also its weakness, and fantasy, even as it is being instrumentalized, demands a sensual and spiritual fulfillment which runs contrary to the exploitative goals of capitalism.

III The plot of The Hobbit follows the pattern of numerous folk and fairy tales. Bilbo Baggins, a small, unassuming, almost nondescript person, is chosen by a wizard named Gandalf for an adventure. He travels with thirteen rugged dwarfs and has numerous hair-raising encounters with trolls, goblins, wolves, and spiders, who represent the evil forces in the Middle Earth. After surviving these encounters, he helps the dwarfs

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regain their treasure-hoard from the dragon Smaug, who is killed by a great archer named Bard while attacking a nearby town of Men. Since the dwarfs want to keep the entire hoard for themselves, they must now contend with the elves and men who lay claim to some part of it. While they quarrel, the goblins and wild wolves appear and seek to annihilate them all. Thus, the battle of Five Armies takes place, and, while Bilbo plays it safe by vanishing from sight thanks to his magic ring, the elves, dwarfs, and men (aided by the eagles) defeat the forces of evil. Bilbo then returns home to his snug hobbit-hole, somewhat of a hero, but now regarded as not quite respectable and a little queer by other hobbits, who generally never dare to undertake such dangerous adventures. While Bilbo learns from the wizard Gandalf that he has played a hand in helping fulfill a messianic prophecy, the wizard reminds him to keep things in their proper perspective: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all of your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”18 A little fellow to be sure, but a giant in potential and deeds. Like all “little fellows,” Bilbo possesses vital powers which can contribute to the defeat of oppressors and the making of a new world. These powers are within him and must be brought out through “magic” (transformation) and shared communally to realize a common project with other beings. A hobbit is a forbear or descendant of all little fellow heroes—David, Tom Thumb, the brave little tailor, the exploited daughter, the youngest son, Pietro the fool, dumb Hans, Jack the giant killer, all those who do combat to right wrongs and create a just society. As Bloch stresses, these intrepid heroes show the holes in systems of domination through which small people can slip to liberate themselves and gain their ends. Their goals are socialist and utopian in nature in that they assert the potential for humanity to be on its own, not dependent on a system, on phantom gods. The individual moves into his or her own, undergoing a metamorphosis while gaining strength from the gifts of other beings. The building of the self and the other world is essentially a communal project. In The Hobbit, there is an important twist in the pattern at the beginning of the narrative, and this distinguishes it from most tales about “little fellows.” Traditionally, the little hero is courageous, initiates the adventure, and welcomes the chance to prove himself. Not Bilbo. He is perfectly content to rest in his pleasant hobbit-hole and must be prodded

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to go on an adventure. Tolkien’s description of Bilbo (and all hobbits for that matter) is extremely significant, for it is quite clear that he is depicting elements of himself and the masses of “nondescript” people in the world. Bilbo is an unlikely hero: fifty years old, portly, unambitious, a creature of routine, nothing attractive or alluring about him. In other words, Bilbo is the ideal passive consumer who would probably like to sit in front of his TV set, smoke a cigar, drink beer, munch on chips, and have his fantasies played out for him on an electronic screen. But Bilbo, like all small people, has a spark within him which, when touched, can cause a chain reaction and explosion of his latent powers. “Although he looked and behaved like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father,” Bilbo “got something a bit queer in his makeup from the Took side, something that only awaited to come out” (17). The Took side was his mother’s family which was known to be adventurous, and indeed, we soon discover that there is something “Tookish” about Bilbo. After a visit by Gandalf, the wizard, who is renowned for sending people on “mad adventures,” we know that trouble is brewing. Gandalf is preparing Bilbo for an adventure of his own. In fact, thirteen dwarfs, including their great king Thorin, invade Bilbo’s home the next day to prevail upon him to join their struggle and help regain their gold and kingdom from the dragon Smaug. If we were to continue our analogy with the contented TV viewer, this would be comparable to the great coach of a football team jumping out of the TV screen and telling our viewer that he has been chosen to lead the team into the fray against the foe. At first startled and uncertain, our humble little viewer, who has always had fantasies about such an adventure, is persuaded to try his luck when thirteen members of the football team show up at his house the next day, overwhelm him, and simply assume that he will now play a vital role in their victory, for their great coach has promised that the “idle viewer” is a slick operator, who will make all the difference in the fight against the opposing team. To return to the real story, that is, the fairy tale, the dwarfs (or our tried and tested football players) have some doubts about Bilbo’s abilities. One dwarf says quite frankly: “He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!” (30). However, the wizard-coach gets angry and asserts: “I have chosen Mr. Baggins and that ought to be enough for all of you. If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea himself” (33–34). This initial situation set up by Tolkien is the

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key to comprehending the utopian project of the narrative. The protagonist is an insignificant fifty-year-old creature who resembles a harmless grocer rather than your typical dashing hero. He is passive, not inclined to take risks, thinks about “out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration” (34). However, unbeknown to him, he has unusual powers which are waiting to be tapped. It is a question of the not-yethaving-become awaiting realization. In sum, Bilbo is described as a lower-middle-class shopkeeper who has confined his dreams to a provincial realm and limited his own capacity to fulfill his human potential. He is one-sided until the Took side can be given equal rights. Now who are the dwarfs? Why does Bilbo join forces with them? Who is the dragon? Why must he be overcome? The dwarfs are associated with miners and skilled workers. They are tough, somewhat crass, forthright, energetic, and brave. The dragon is a parasite; or to put it in sociopolitical terms, he is the picture-image of the capitalist exploiter. Tolkien tells us that “dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass-ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; and they can’t make a thing for themselves, not even mend a little loose scale of armor” (35). The dragon lives off the hard work of small people and accumulates wealth without being able to appreciate its value. The dwarfs, expropriated, seek to re-appropriate what is legitimately theirs. They cannot accomplish this alone but need and will continually need the help of hobbits, elves, men, and other friendly creatures. Exactly why Bilbo the hobbit joins forces with them is unclear at first. In orthodox Marxist terms—and far be it from me to call Tolkien an orthodox Marxist, although there are unusual similarities between orthodox Catholics and orthodox Marxists—Bilbo’s hesitation to join the dwarfs, i.e., the working class, is understandable since the lower middle class has always preferred to move upward and side with the ruling forces in society, namely the dragons, largely out of fear and social conditioning. Yet, the lower middle class can swing either way depending on how the unfulfilled wishes and needs may be satisfied by the praxis of the group or party they join. In this case, Bilbo is moved by the song of the dwarfs to recover what belonged to these hard-working, courageous creatures. He identifies with their cause and is swayed to give expression to his Tookish side.

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The rest of the tale is predictable. The adventure begins in May, for it is the time of rebirth for Bilbo, who gradually sheds his provincial habits to learn about himself and the necessity for brotherhood in the struggle against the evil forces who take the shape of trolls, a Gollum, wolves, and goblins. Tolkien makes it most clear at one point that these creatures are to be identified with the destructive agents of capitalism. In describing the goblins, he says: Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help (70).

In the initial encounters against trolls and goblins, Bilbo shows that he is no hero in the usual sense, for he is scared. He is just plain human and wonders why he ever left his hobbit-hole. However, soon thereafter he discovers the magic ring which has the power of making him invisible.19 This discovery signifies the self-discovery of invisible latent powers which are gradually emerging in Bilbo’s character as he faces challenge after challenge. As a symbol of transformation, the ring endows Bilbo with the power to perform in a way which he himself and the dwarfs never thought possible. In a sense, the ring is a gift which represents the recovery of Bilbo’s own gifts; it also suggests the circle of brotherhood, the commitment to a cause necessary to upend evil.20 From this point on Bilbo’s gifts will be put to use to help the dwarfs but also to deter their own avarice. During the long, grueling adventures they come to trust and respect Bilbo. Yet, they have become so obsessed with regaining their treasure that they are unwilling to share it once Smaug the dragon is killed. The whole pursuit of money, even if it is wealth that legitimately belongs to the pursuers, is viewed by Tolkien as a corrupting process. The dwarfs are described as “calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money” (204). The dragon’s rage is depicted as “the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted” (208). With the dragon’s

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death, the dwarfs refuse to compensate the elves, men, and other creatures, who directly and indirectly helped them defeat the monster. They become hoarders like the dragon, with the exception of Bilbo, who seeks to create harmony among the different groups. It is Bilbo, who presents the Arkenstone of Thrain to the men and elves so that they can have a better hand in bargaining for a share in the treasure and peace with the dwarfs. This act is a sacrifice on Bilbo’s part and also shows that his participation in the adventure was not, even from the beginning, based on material motives but on a desire to give expression to his Tookish side— to become whole with himself and the world at large. This world at large—the Middle Earth—is menaced by dark forces which are equated with money, machines, exploitation, slavery, greed, and irrationalism. Ironically, the power of the imagination provides the thread of reason which can restore peace and harmony to the world. This is the lesson of the final battle, and the dying Thorin, king of the dwarfs, acknowledges this when he blesses Bilbo: “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world” (273). There is a secure sense of home at the end of The Hobbit. Though Bilbo is considered somewhat strange by the other hobbits, he has regained his place in society with a more profound understanding of his powers and the knowledge of how to cope with the divisive forces in the world. He has also learned how to work with and trust other creatures and knows the necessity of brotherhood for maintaining peace. A small fellow at the beginning of the tale, he has won the respect of elves, dwarfs, men, and a wizard. And this does not go to his head. Bilbo remains small. That is, he remains humble because of the vast self-confidence he has gained. He is now in touch with himself through the power of fantasy, and it is Tolkien’s fantasy which allows us, too, to glimpse the possibilities of hope and home. Yet, there are certain disturbing features in the anticipatory illusion of home in Tolkien’s work. The utopian perspective becomes practically myopic due to the author’s regressive anti-capitalism. To begin with, Tolkien depicts a Middle Earth entirely without women and people of color.21 It is almost as though the girls are relegated to the kitchen or house while the boys are sent out to mix it up, have fun, and return “home” when all’s over. But both the world outside and home remain barren here as long as the presence of women and people of color is

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denied. Though it may be appropriate to view the male Bilbo as a literary symbol for all genders of “small folk,” the one-sided male-oriented Middle Earth allows no room for establishing the place and function of women and diverse creeds of people in reality or in fantasy. This is harmful to both female and male readers. (Let us not talk about Tolkien’s own psychological problems in this arena.) The general impression one receives after reading The Hobbit is that all crucial problems of the world must be fought out and resolved by white men. Women and people of color have no role to play except in reproduction, and even here, in the Middle Earth, it appears as though men are self-productive. Fraternity exists unto itself and is not to be disturbed by females. Yet, the very absence of women (not to mention, children and people of color) destroys the forward look of his utopia, for Tolkien inadvertently promulgates notions about women which hark back to feudalism. This is Tolkien’s quandary. Essentially, he wants to move forward toward a new humanism while moving backward. In certain instances of inequality and non-synchronism, this may indeed be progressive insofar as capitalist progress has outstripped human subjectivity that feels plundered and cannot find adequate forms to express needs which have been left in the lurch. In this light, Tolkien is correct to step back into the past, for he wants to restore and recapture the humanist essence of the utopian project. We can define this as “human beings coming into their own,” “the upright gait,” or “home.” But, by stepping back into the past, Tolkien gets lodged there and has difficulty projecting a way back into the present and future. As in many folk tales which were widespread in feudalism, there is no change in social relations at the end of The Hobbit or in The Lord of the Rings. Essentially, the world is temporarily purged of evil, and Bilbo accepts his tiny place in the male-dominated hierarchy of the world with humility as does Frodo later on. Nothing against humility, but home life does not become endowed with a quality of freedom. What was magnificently expressed as the full creative powers in the adventures of Bilbo and Frodo retires in favor of the comfortable old life. It is the eternal recurrence of the old after the good new has been perceived and even partially realized. Tolkien’s strong Catholic views stand in the way of his utopianism and are decisive in making his secularization of religion contradictory. Evil comes from the arrogance, greed, sloth, pride and vanity of humankind. The seven deadly sins are at work in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and the virtuous Bilbo and Frodo as the innocents are set up

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as an example to humankind. They are seemingly enlightened at the end of their adventures, but the secret message is that there are forces greater than humans in the world, and we must know our place, accept it, do our duty when we are called upon in the name of good, i.e., God. Harmony as ordained by higher forces must be restored. This is in contradiction to what Bloch praised in the ideal fairy tale: “consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly.” These maxims lose their cutting edge when Tolkien makes his hero a male who liberates himself to learn about humility. What Bloch admired most about the best of folk and fairy tales was their anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic quality—the disregard for hierarchy, the ceaseless impulse to break out and realize the surging dreams of the imagination, the rejection of the master/slave relationship. This is not to say that Tolkien, when all is said and done, was a reactionary. On the contrary, his works were much more progressive than even he himself realized. And this is the very reason why the comparison of Bloch with Tolkien is fruitful: The mixed messages of Tolkien’s fantasy works can be made more clear when seen in light of Bloch’s philosophy. In particular, the positive value of their popularity can be distinguished from their commodity value. Admittedly, it is extremely difficult to estimate the value of such bestsellers as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, particularly when fantasy has become a vogue. In Tolkien’s case, the situation is compounded by a tremendous craze22 which transformed his fantasy world into a commercial industry closely resembling that of Walt Disney. For sale are artefacts resembling his creatures, posters, calendars, T-shirts, buttons, records, costumes, etc. There have been TV productions and spectacular films by Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson based on Tolkien’s works. The variety of Tolkieniana on the markets of the United States and Great Britain is immense and has spread to foreign countries. Correspondingly, Tolkien clubs have also mushroomed in the last thirty years. All this is obviously part of a fad, but a fad to be taken seriously. As C. N. Manlove has pointed out: The trilogy came just when disillusion among the American young at the Vietnam war and the state of their own country was at a peak. Tolkien’s fantasy offered an image of the kind of rural conservationist ideal or escape for which they were looking (it also could be seen as describing, through the overthrow of Sauron, the destruction of the U.S.). In this way The

144  J. ZIPES Lord of the Rings could be enlisted in support of passive resistance and idealism on the one hand and of draft-dodging and drugs on the other. A second factor may have been the perennial American longing for roots, a long tradition and a mythology: these things are the fibre of Tolkien’s book, where every place and character is lodged at the tip of an enormous, growing stem of time. For the subsequent success of the book in Britain one can offer as possible reasons (a) Tolkien’s being a British writer – his country at last claiming him for its own, (b) following the fashion, (c) the pastoral ideal held by youth (without the sense of crisis to sharpen it).23

Clearly when friends in a Tolkien club or in myth and fantasy organizations gather together to read the master’s works, or when millions of people in the West continue to be drawn to this strange world, then this cannot be dismissed as trivial—as another sign of how the masses can be misled, deluded, and mystified. Undeniably, these elements are there, but I believe that it is more important to analyze the form of community and communion which Tolkien’s fantasy offers his readers. Despite the imbalance, ambivalence, and stereotypes in Tolkien’s contrived Manichean world, aptly dissected by Manlove,24 The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings still manage to stimulate a sense of sharing, reverence, devotion, and communion among Tolkien fans that cannot be found in the everyday relations of society itself. What is missing in reality is discovered by the fantasy which does not simply pacify the reader but reinforces the need to overcome the divisiveness and fragmentation of everyday life. In the particular case of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo and Frodo demonstrate a way to reach out to their fellow creatures, present a secularized religious communion which offers the hope to alienated individuals that imagination can pierce the administered walls of their existence and illuminate the path toward a utopia within humankind’s grasp. Bloch saw this clearly: So religious imagination cannot be dismissed in toto even after a successful disenchantment of the world image; it can be overcome only by a specific philosophical concept that will do justice to the ultimate intended substance of the imagination. For what was alive and is rising in the midst of all is this sighing, this conjuring, this preaching at the red dawn; and even amid the mythical nonsense that is so easy to note there lived and rises the unfinished question that has been burning only in religions, the question of the sense we cannot make out of the meaning of life. It is the true realism that will be stirred by this question, one so far removed from mythical

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nonsense as to be responsible, rather, for every bit of sense. Needed, therefore – because of the particularly total pull of desire from this sphere – is a new anthropology of religion. And overdue – because of the particularly totally intended essence of perfection in this sphere – is a new eschatology of religion. Both without religion, but both with the corrected, unfinished problem of mankind’s growing such enormous wings, such changing and at times incompatible wings, including some that adjoin obvious fool’s paradises and yet keep tempting, attempting the uncommon sense – according to the human-social horizon.25

Certainly, Bloch was pointing to something much more profound in his philosophical works than Tolkien could ever realize in his fantasy world. And it is important to keep in mind the crucial differences between Bloch the Marxist and Tolkien the Catholic. Bloch was essentially a critic of utopias and sought to grasp why humankind had failed thus far to overcome the obstacles confronting the concretization of utopia on this earth in the here and now. He harked back to the past only insofar as it might illuminate the future, and such terms as “future, “humanity,” and “utopia” were always closely tied to a socialist perspective. That is, Bloch’s idealism was part of a religious faith that had its roots in a materialist anthropology, objective conditions of existence, and human needs and potentialities. For Bloch, the fairy tale was a kind of light beacon of socialism. In contrast, Tolkien was a producer of utopias who presented solutions and answers to the problems confronting humankind. He harked back to the past because he esteemed traditional religion and conservative forms of government. His perspective was definitely regressive but not reactionary, for his sympathies remained with the common people whom he regarded as exploited by capitalism and technology. For Tolkien, the fairy tale was artistic compensation and a healer of the injuries which human beings had to bear. Though Tolkien provides answers to humankind’s plight in the contemporary world, they are contradictory and need the critique of Bloch if we are to comprehend the utopian function of Tolkien’s works of fantasy. The powerful interest expressed by people in the Western world in Tolkien’s fantasy world is indicative of a need for a new eschatology of religion. Certainly, this interest is also due to the commodification of Tolkien as well, and Tolkien is often simply consumed as just another marketable fanciful product. However, Bloch’s notion of the “religious imagination” suggests a more important motive for the high

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consumption of Tolkien. The religious imagination responds to the genuine utopian thrust in his works, and, whether one considers his fairy tales low or high art, serious fantasy, or mere commercial entertainment, it must be recognized that he uncovers a social need of the religious imagination and points to the widening gap between a technologically constraining society and its alienated individuals in search of authentic community. Orthodox though Tolkien as a Catholic was, he was also radical as a sub-creator of utopia. His home may not be the concrete utopia of Bloch’s socialist vision, but it is nevertheless an anticipatory illusion which houses some emancipatory impulses and provides hope that human beings can still come into their own.

Notes







1. On Karl Marx, trans. John Maxwell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 44–45. I have altered the translation slightly. 2.  For biographical information on Bloch, see Erhard Bahr, Ernst Bloch (Berlin: Colloquium, 1974); David Gross, “Ernst Bloch: The Dialectics of Hope,” in The Unknown Dimension, eds. Dick Howard and Karl Klare (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 107–30; Douglas Kellner and Harry O’Hara, “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique 9 (Fall 1976): 11–34; Silvia Markun, Ernst Bloch (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977); Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosopher of Hope (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch – Leben und Werk (Elster: Moos & Baden-Baden, 1985); and Burghart Schmidt, Ernst Bloch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986). 3.  J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 128. 4. Aside from Carpenter’s important biography, see Daniel Grotta, J. R. R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth (New York: Warner, 1976) for another insightful interpretation of his life. 5. Ernst Bloch, Die Kunst, Schiller zu sprechen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1969), 10–14. See also The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 163–66. 6. See “Better Castles in the Sky at the Fair and Circus, in Fairy Tales and Colportage,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 167–85. 7.  Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins 1, ed. Gert Ueding (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 22. 8. Ibid., 9. 9.  See “Non-synchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22–38.

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10. For some of the pertinent studies, see Michael Drout, ed., J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (New York: Routledge, 2006); Patrick Harrington, ed., Tolkien and Politics (London: Third Way Publications, 2003); Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien—Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); and Michael White, Tolkien: A Biography (New York: New American Library, 2003). 11. The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 10. This essay was first delivered as a lecture at St. Andrews on March 8, 1939. Tolkien revised the lecture during the early 1960s, and it was published in 1964. 12. The scholarly works on folk and fairy tales are too numerous to list in their entirety. Two of the best on the folk tale are Stith Thompson, The Folk tale (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1946); Max Lüthi, Märchen (Stuttgart: Metzler: 1962), which has been revised by Heinz Rölleke in the 9th edition published in 1997. For an introduction to the literary fairy tale, see Mathias Mayer and Jens Tismar, Kunstmärchen, 3rd rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997); Jack Zipes, When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1999). Alan Dundes has gathered some of the most important essays by the founders of folklore that touch on this topic. See International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 13. “Fantasy Literature and Play: An Approach to Reader Response,” The Centennial Review 2 (1978): 207. 14. Cf. my essay, “The Messianic Power of Fantasy in the Bible,” Semeia (1992): 7–22. “Bloch seeks to ground the Bible in humanity and materiality in The Principle of Hope paradoxically so that it will inspire us to fly. In his reading of the Bible he focuses time and again on Moses and Jesus as symbolical figures representing humankind’s exodus – the rebellion against despotism, the moving out to experiment and explore in search of the promised land, which is both a penetration into God and voyage toward realizing the divine in humanity. All religions have their own utopian symbolism, but Bloch places greatest emphasis on the JudeoChristian images in the Bible because their intentionality is connected to an enlightened view of the world that seeks to clarify the ontological situation of humankind” (9). 15.  Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 161. This essay is taken from Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 16. Ibid., 162. For a thorough discussion of Bloch’s notions on religion, see Gerard Raulet, “Critique of Religion and Religion as Critique: The Secularized Hope of Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique 9 (1976): 71–85.

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17. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1968), 246. 18. The Hobbit (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 286–87. Hereafter, all page references to the book will be in the text. 19. Though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent Tolkien was influenced by Richard Wagner’s Ring tetralogy, the parallels are uncanny. In fact, if one were to do a study of Tolkien and Wagner on the basis of their romantic anti-capitalism, the similarities between the two might even be seen to be more striking. Some spade work has been done by William Blissett, “The Despots of the Rings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 58 (1959): 448– 56; Lin Carter, Tolkien: A Look Behind ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (New York: Ballantine, 1969), chs. 8–16. 20. The meaning of the ring changes dramatically in The Lord of the Rings, and its signification becomes greater. The power of the ring depends on the moral integrity of the ring-bearer, and Frodo exemplifies the greatness of the little fellow, the humanitarian guardian of civilization. 21. The picture of the Middle Earth becomes more varied and complex in The Lord of the Rings, but it remains essentially a conservative male world, and the value of women is determined by the manner in which they are prized and praised by men. 22. See Lin Carter’s comments in his introduction to Tolkien: A Look Behind ‘The Lord of the Rings’, 1–6. 23. Modern Fantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 157. 24. Ibid., 158–206. 25. Man on His Own, 164–65.

CHAPTER 8

Kitsch, Colportage, and the Liberating Potential of Vor-Schein in Fairy Tales

Our views of child-rearing, socialization, the environment, technology, and politics have changed to such a great extent since World War II that classical folk and fairy tales actually appear too backward-looking to many progressive-minded critics and creative writers. They are accordingly considered quaintly non-synchronic and anachronistic and dismissed as trivial entertainment, largely for children or infantile adults. Moreover, the tales are often regarded as sexist, racist, and authoritarian, and the general contents are said to reflect the concerns of semi-feudal, patriarchal societies.1 In short, many critics argue that the tales are more like distractions and commodified spectacles than inspiring and revolutionary stories à la Bloch. What may have engendered experiments and hope for better living conditions centuries ago has become more inhibiting in the world of the rapid-changing twenty-first century. They are not to be believed. The discourse of classical folk and fairy tales, their end effect, cannot be considered enlightening and emancipatory in face of possible nuclear warfare, ecological destruction, growing governmental and industrial regimentation, and intense economic crises. Their function is to provide entertainment so that we take our minds off what is really happening to us. They induce us to be happy because of their happy ends. They enclose us in false fantasies. All this may be true to a certain extent, but as Bloch has pointed out in most of his works, there are numerous classical folk and fairy tales that still speak to our needs young and old. They still contain revolutionary elements of Vor-Schein (anticipatory illumination). These are the stories that © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_8

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illuminate possibilities for attaining personal autonomy and social freedom, and it would be foolish to reject the entire classical canon as socially useless or aesthetically outmoded. Moreover, as we know, the classical fairy tale as genre in the West has not been static. Such nineteenth-century writers as Hans Christian Andersen, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Wilhelm Hauff, Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, John Ruskin, George Sand, Collodi, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, Edith Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, and numerous others, now designated as “monumental classics,” opposed the authoritarian tendencies of the civilization process and expanded the horizons of the fairy-tale discourse. They prepared the way for utopian and subversive experiments which altered the fairy-tale discourse at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hope for liberating changes in social relations and political structures was conveyed through politically symbolic acts of writers who criticized the abusive treatment of children and the repressive methods of sexual pedagogy. Still, the innovative tales produced for children and adults during the first three decades of the twentieth century did not successfully reutilize fantastic projections and configurations of the classical fairy tales to gain wide acceptance among the intended audience. They were certainly inspiring and audacious,2 but, if anything, the fantastic features of these tales were used to compensate for the growing rationalization of culture, work, and family life in Western society and to defend the imaginative thinking. Vor-Schein was really on the defensive while appearing to be offensive. Something else was on the march in the name of progress and civilization. The Taylorization of factory and office life, the panoptic organization of schools, hospitals, and prisons, the technical synchronization of art to create formations such as chorus lines and choreography resembling conveyor belts, the celebration of uniform military power in parade and warfare, the use of technology to promote consumerism, the formation of a celebrity culture—these were the real sociopolitical tendencies against which the progressive and experimental fairy tales reacted at the beginning of the twentieth century. These were the forces that confined and subdued the protest elements in the fairy-tale discourse during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, while young soldiers were slaughtered and millions of innocent people were either murdered in their “home” or in concentration camps. Since then, especially since the 1970s, the fantastic as anticipatory illumination in fairy tales for young and old has pugnaciously emerged again, in the spirit of Bloch, to take the offensive. Most of all, it is the

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truth in emancipatory folk and fairy tales that demands a hearing and realization. Yet, it is not merely the survival of truth and goodness reflected in contemporary fairy tales but the fantastic projection of possibilities for non-alienating living conditions. Hope for such a future followed upon the struggles of the 1960s marked by civil rights movements, anti-war protests, the rise of feminism, and demands for autonomy by minority groups and small deprived nations throughout the world. Though this hope has been diminished somewhat during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and though the utopian tendency has often turned dystopian, many writers still envision the fairy tale as a means to critique the barbarian turns of the civilizing process— and they do this with the belief that social change is still possible. Since it would be too difficult to cover the entire development of the literary fairy tale in response to these struggles since 1945 and to demonstrate how and why fairy-tale writers have sought to use fantastic projections in a liberating manner that reflects Bloch’s notions of Kitsch, Colportage, and Vor-Schein, I want to limit myself to a small number of representative writers in the UK, the United States, Italy, Germany, and France who have expressly tried to make their tales more emancipatory and critical in light of restriction in advanced industrial countries. The focus of my brief analysis will be on emancipatory tales from the 1950s to 2000 to bring out the hope that emerged after World War II. My concern is twofold: I want to depict the motifs, ideas, styles, and methods used by postwar writers to make the anticipatory illumination within the fairy tales more liberating. I want to question whether the intentions of a liberating fairy tale can actually have the effect desired by the writer in societies where socialization is concerned most with control, discipline, and rationalization and ruled by oligarchies. But before I address these two points, it is crucial to discuss the “power” of the literary fairy tales in general, the classical and the innovative, to clarify the meanings of such terms as progressive and regressive, liberating and inhibiting, and colportage and kitsch. In other words, the classical fairy tales have not retained their appeal among children and adults simply because they comply with the norms of the civilizing process. They have an extraordinary power, and Georges Jean locates this power on the conscious level in the way all good fairy tales aesthetically structure and use fantastic and miraculous elements to prepare us for our everyday life.3 Magic is used paradoxically not to deceive us but to enlighten us. On an unconscious level, Jean believes that the best fairy

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tales bring together subjective and assimilatory impulses with objective intimations of a social setting that intrigue readers and allow for different interpretations according to one’s ideology and belief.4 Ultimately, Jean argues that the fantastic power of fairy tales consists in the uncanny way they provide a conduit into social reality. Yet, given the proscription of fairy-tale discourse within a historically prescribed civilizing process, a more careful distinction must be made between regressive and progressive aspects of the power of fairy tales in general to understand the liberating potential of contemporary tales for young and old. Here, I want to discuss Bloch’s concept of “anticipatory illumination” and “home” as constitutive elements of the liberating impulse behind the fantastic projections in fairy tales, whether they be classical or experimental. Their ideas will be related to Jean Piaget’s notions of how children view and adapt to the world so that we can grasp the regressive and progressive features of contemporary fairy tales as politically symbolic acts seeking to make their mark on history.

I Reading is estrangement. No matter what we read. Words on a page are magic and take us briefly or completely to another world. Actually, the complete reversal of the real world has already taken place before we begin reading a fairy tale on the part of the writer, and the writer invites the reader to repeat this uncanny experience. The process of reading involves dislocating the reader from his/her familiar setting and then identifying with the dislocated protagonist so that a quest for the Heimische or genuine home can begin. The fairy tale ignites a double quest for home: One occurs in the reader’s mind and is psychological and difficult to interpret, since the reception of an individual tale varies according to the background and experience of the reader. The second occurs within the tale itself and indicates a socialization process and acquisition of values for participation in a society where the protagonist has more power of determination. This second quest for home can be regressive or progressive depending on the narrator’s stance vis-à-vis society. In both quests, the notion of home or Heimat, which is closely related etymologically to heimlich and unheimlich, retains a powerful progressive attraction for readers of fairy tales. While the uncanny setting and motifs of the fairy tale already open us up to the recurrence of primal experiences, we can move forward at the same time because it opens us

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up to what Freud calls “unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in fantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will.”5 Obviously, Freud would not condone clinging to our fantasies in reality. Yet, Ernst Bloch would argue that some are important to cultivate and defend since they represent our radical or revolutionary urge to restructure society so that we can finally achieve home. Dreaming which stands still bodes no good. But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause appears quite differently and excitingly alive. The dim and weakening features, which may be characteristic of mere yearning, disappear; and then yearning can show what it really is able to accomplish. It is the way of the world to counsel men to adjust to the world’s pressures, and they have learned this lesson; only their wishes and dreams will not hearken to it. In this respect virtually all human beings are futuristic; they transcend their past life, and to the degree that they are satisfied, they think they deserve a better life (even though this may be pictured in a banal and egotistic way), and regard the inadequacy of their lot as a barrier, and not just as the way of the world. To this extent, the most private and ignorant wishful thinking is to be preferred to any mindless goose-stepping; for wishful thinking is capable of revolutionary awareness, and can enter the chariot of history without necessarily abandoning in the process the good content of dreams.6

What Bloch means by the good content of dreams is often the projected fantasy or the anticipated illumination that generates the action of fairy tales with a forward and liberating look: human beings in an upright posture who strive for an autonomous existence and non-alienating setting which allows for democratic cooperation and humane consideration. Real history which involves independent human self-determination cannot begin as long as there is exploitation and enslavement of humans by other humans. The active struggle against unjust and barbaric conditions in the world leads to home, or utopia, a place nobody has known but which represents humankind coming into its own: The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical: that is, comprehend their own roots. But the root of history is the working, creating man, who rebuilds and transforms the given circumstances of the world. Once man

154  J. ZIPES has comprehended himself and has established his own domain in real democracy, without depersonalization and alienation, something arises in the world which all men have glimpsed in childhood: a place and a state in which no one has yet been. And the name of this something is home or homeland.7

Philosophically speaking, then, the real return home or recurrence of the uncanny is a move forward to what has been repressed and never fulfilled. The pattern in most fairy tales involves the reconstitution of home on a new plane, and this accounts for the power of its appeal to both children and adults. Life can be better. Our hope drives the wishes embedded in the best of fairy tales. As we have already seen, Bloch’s two major essays on fairy tales, “Das Märchen geht selber in Zeit” (“The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time”) and Bessere Luftschlösser in Jahrmarkt und Zirkus, in Märchen und Kolportage” (“Better Castles in the Sky and at the Fair and Circus, in the Fairy Tale and Colportage”),8 Bloch is concerned with the manner in which the hero and the aesthetic constructs of the tale illuminate the way to overcome oppression. He focuses on the way the underdog, the small person, uses his or her wits not only to survive but to live a better life. Bloch insists that there is good reason for the timelessness of traditional fairy tales: The mirror of the fairy tale has not become opaque, and the manner of wish-fulfillment that peers forth from it is not entirely without a home. It all adds up to this: the fairy tale narrates a wish-fulfillment that is not bound by its own time and the apparel of its contents. In contrast to the legend, which is always tied to a particular locale, the fairy tale remains unbound. Not only does the fairy tale remain as fresh as longing and love, but the demonically evil, which is abundant in the fairy tale, is still seen at work here in the present, and the happiness of ‘once upon a time,’ which is even more abundant, still affects our visions of the future.9

It is not only the timeless aspect of traditional fairy tales that interests Bloch, but also the way they are modernized and appeal to all classes and age groups in society. Instead of demeaning popular culture and common appeal, Bloch endeavors to explore the adventure novels, modern romances, comics, circuses, country fairs, and the like. These are the works that constitute colportage. He refuses to make simplistic qualitative judgments of high and low art forms, rather he seeks to grasp the

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driving utopian impulse in the production and reception of artworks for mass audiences. Time and again he focuses on fairy tales as indications of paths to be taken in reality. What is significant about such kinds of “modern fairy tales” is that it is reason itself which leads to the wish projections of the old fairy tale and serves them. Again what proves itself is a harmony with courage and cunning, as that earliest kind of enlightenment which already characterizes “Hansel and Gretel”: consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly. These are the genuine maxims of fairy tales, and fortunately for us they not only appear in the past but in the now.10

Bloch sets the general parameters for helping us understand how our longing for home, which is discomforting and comforting, draws us to folk and fairy tales, but we must also grasp that fairy tales which originally stemmed from the gatherings of common people who expressed their needs and fears through metaphorical stories have been turned into kitsch and colportage in the course of centuries and can keep listeners and readers spellbound in the darkness of the moment. Enlightenment, according to Bloch, can only follow from the dialectical clash of the tendencies of kitsch and colportage in diverse cultures. In Heritage of Our Times, Bloch wrote: Here even what is insipid readily comes together. It writes for unalert people in the style they wish for themselves. The inside of the readers is itself squashed here, their outside they perceive is not the one in which they really are. A writer who did not deal in cut-and-dried feelings would not find any place here, in a stratum which lives by lying to itself and being lied to, which not only wants, but is itself largely kitsch … This sayable stuff has both its market here from which it lives, and its so-called fount from which it draws. Bright young feeling and similar expressions none of which is bright young or felt any more, teem from the fount. The end remains fervent kitsch, which does not exclude filth; love’s young dream and the craze for budding flesh are thus well suited for contemplative hours. These heroes do not lead us into any provocative life, but simply to grope in the dark. There is again little scope here, rummaging around in the mustiness

Rubbish, garbage, junk are spread by culture industries throughout the world. Bloch did not and would have never done a sociological

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analysis of how Kitsch is spread and disseminated throughout the world. He left that to the Frankfurt School and its followers. However, he condemned “inauthentic” culture that was especially associated with the commodification of the arts and sciences in the United States and other capitalist countries. This “condemnation” was not blind-sighted because Bloch endeavored to locate the tiniest bit of anticipated illumination in all the arts, especially in the creations of common people. Most important for Bloch was the distinction between Kitsch and colportage. As Gert Ueding has remarked in his superb study, Glanzvolles Elend: Versuch über Kitsch und Kolportage: Once again this must be stressed: what research designates as trivial and popular literature or colportage is not identical with kitsch. First of all, Bloch himself had already drawn attention at the beginning of the twentieth century to the difference within disdained literature, and he systematized the difference between kitsch and colportage. In Bloch’s aesthetics of the anticipatory illumination the concept of colportage that stems from the sphere of distribution of the literature market gains a new meaning: the country fair like colportage preserves in a crucial way decisive categories that the educated middle-class had already lost and distorted for a long time. Most of all the categories preserve the desire to live (Seinwollen) as well as life that is lacking something (das fehlende Leben), such as a colorful life.11

If, indeed, adventure and experimentation have been diminished or taken out of life, the tiniest authentic elements of minor literature and art must be taken seriously because they may reveal the way toward illumination and enlightenment. Bloch did not elevate particular art forms or genres over others. He did not exclude anything from his vision. As an educated German critic born in the nineteenth century, his examples of what constitutes colportage such as Karl May’s bizarre Western novels and unknown German authors are somewhat outdated. Yet, many of the examples are worth pursuing. As a reader fond of detective novels, Bloch insisted that readers should become detectives and search out the sparks of anticipated illumination in everything they read, saw, or heard. As we know, he prized the fairy tale as genre because it was similar to colorful country markets and bewildering labyrinths. Fairy tales can point the way out of darkness. They spring from the earth, from nature and the materials of life. They refuse to abandon hope.

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II In examining the unique narrative modes developed by “counter-cultural” fairy-tale writers at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, it will become apparent that their experiments are connected to their endeavors to transform the civilizing process. They interject themselves into the fairy-tale discourse on civilization first by distancing themselves from conventional regressive forms of writing, thinking, and illustration: The familiar is made unfamiliar only to regain a sense of what authenticity might be on a psycho- and socio-genetic level. Or, to put it another way, by seeking what “unadulterated” home might mean under non-alienating conditions, the fairy-tale writers transfigure classical narratives and distinguish their final constellations of home by provoking the reader to reflect critically upon the conditions and limits of socialization. The counter-cultural intention is made manifest through alienating techniques which no longer rely on seductive, charming illusions of a happy end as legitimation of the present civilizing process, but make use of jarring symbols that demand an end to superimposed illusions. The aim is to make readers perceive the actual limits and possibilities of their deep personal wishes in a social context. The narrative voice probes and tries to uncover the disturbing repressed socio-psychological conflicts so that young readers of every race and creed might imagine more clearly what forces operate in reality to curtail freedom of action. Uncomfortable questions about arbitrary authoritarianism, sexual domination, and social oppression are raised to show situations that call for change and can be changed. In contrast to the classical fairy tales of the civilizing process, the fantastic projections of the liberating tales are not used for rationalistic purposes to instrumentalize the imagination of readers, but rather to subvert the controls of rationalization so that readers can reflect more freely upon ego disturbances and perhaps draw parallels to the social situation of others which will enable them to conceive of work and play in a collective sense. Needless to say, there is a multitude of ways one can write a liberating tale. Here, I want to concentrate on just two major types of experimentation that have direct bearing on cultural patterns in the West. One type can be called the transfiguration of the classical fairy tale. Generally, the author assumes that the young reader is already familiar with the classical tale and depicts the familiar in an estranging fashion. Consequently, the reader is compelled to consider the negative aspects

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of anachronistic forms and perhaps transcend them. The tendency is to break, shift, debunk, or rearrange the traditional motifs to liberate the reader from the contrived and programmed mode of literary reception. Transfiguration does not obliterate the recognizable features or values of the classical fairy tale but cancels their negativity by showing dialectically how a different aesthetic and social setting relativizes all values. To this extent, the act of creative transfiguration by the author and the final artistic product as transfiguration are geared to make readers aware that civilization and life itself are processes which can be shaped to fulfill basic needs of the readers. Though the liberating and classical fairy tales may contain some of the same features and values, the emphasis placed on speculative dialectics in transfiguration as process, both as narrative form and substance, makes for a qualitative difference. The second type of experimentation similar to transfiguration can be called the fusion of traditional configurations with contemporary references within settings and plotlines unfamiliar to readers yet designed to arouse their curiosity and interest. Fantastic projections, often montages, are used here to demonstrate the changeability of contemporary social relations, and the fusion brings together all possible means for illuminating a concrete utopia. In effect, both the narrative techniques of fusion and transfiguration are aimed at disturbing and jarring readers so that they lose their complacent attitude toward the status quo of society and envision ways to realize their individuality within collective and democratic contexts. However, what distinguishes the contemporary writers of liberating tales is their strident, anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-authoritarian perspective. For instance, Harriet Herman’s “The Forest Princess” (1975) varies the traditional “Rapunzel” fairy tale to question male domination and sexual stereotypes. Her story concerns “a princess who lived alone in a tall tower deep in the woods. An invisible spirit had brought her there when she was just a little girl. The spirit watched over her bringing her food and clothing and giving her special gifts on her birthday.”12 One day after a storm she saves a prince who had been shipwrecked. At first she thinks that, she, too, is a prince since she looks very much like him and does not know that there are differences in sex. They begin living together and teaching each other their respective skills. But the prince misses his home, and the princess agrees to go to the golden castle if he will teach her the secrets of that place. However, the princess is compelled to change at the golden castle—to wear fancy clothes and makeup

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and to restrict her activities to the company of other girls. Against the orders of the king she teaches them how to read, and, since the prince does not want to go riding with her, she practices riding by herself. On the prince’s fourteenth birthday, she exhibits her astonishing riding skills to the entire court. The king decides to reward her with one wish, and she replies: “Your majesty, what I have done today could have been done by any of the boys and girls in your land. As my reward I would like the boys and girls to ride horses together, to read books together and to play together.”13 But, the king refuses to grant this wish, saying that the boys and girls are happy the way they are—despite their protests. The princess realizes that she must leave the golden castle, and nobody knows where she is today. However, we are told by the narrator that after her departure her wish came to be fulfilled because fairy tales must end happily. The irony of the ending suggests a contrast: Though fairy tales must end happily, life itself must not, and thus the reader is compelled to consider the reasons for a lack of happiness or home in reality.14 Moreover, the possibility for a comparison with the traditional “Rapunzel” is given so that the authoritarian quality of the older tale becomes visible. Similar to Herman’s work, four women of the Merseyside Women’s Liberation Movement in Liverpool, England, began publishing fairy tales to counter the values that had been carried by the traditional fairy tales— acquisitive aggression in men and dutiful nurturing of this aggression by women. They argued that “fairy tales are political. They help to form children’s values and teach them to accept our society and their roles in it. Central to this society is the assumption that domination and submission are the natural basis of all our relationships.”15 In response, they rewrote such well-known classics as “The Prince and the Swineherd,” “Rapunzel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Snow White,” all published in 1972. In “The Prince and the Swineherd,” a gluttonous prince is made into the laughing stock of the people by Samia the swineherd. In “Red Riding Hood,” the setting is a timber mill town in the North, and the shy little girl Nadia learns to overcome her fear of the woods to save her great-grandmother from the wolf, whom she kills. His fur is used as the lining for Red Riding Hood’s cloak, and the great-grandmother tells her: “This cloak now has special powers. Whenever you meet another child who is shy and timid, lend that child the cloak to wear as you play together in the forest, and then, like you, they will grow brave.”16 From then on, Red Riding Hood explores and goes deeper and deeper into the forest.

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In both these tales, the small, oppressed protagonists learn to use their powers to free themselves from parasitical creatures. Life is depicted as an ongoing struggle and process so that the “happy” end is not an illusion, i.e. not depicted as an end in itself but the actual beginning of a development. The emancipatory element comes about when the fantasy (imagination) of the protagonists themselves is projected within the tale as a means by which they can come into their own and help others in similar situations. Like the Merseyside Group, Tomi Ungerer was drawn to rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood (1974),” which he entitled “a reruminated tale.”17 Though his perspective is emancipatory, it is much different from that of the Merseyside group. As in his revision of Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which he entitled “Alumette,” he is irreverent, sly, and anarchistic. His wolf, dressed like a classy baron, is much different from the devious wolf of the traditional tale, and his Red Riding Hood is “the real no-nonsense one,” which means that she is not gullible or afraid to voice her opinion. We learn that her grandmother is mean and cranky and even beats her sometimes. So she stops to pick berries to delay her visit. When the wolf appears, he states candidly: “I know of your grandmother and all I can say is that her reputation is worse than mine.”18 He offers to take her to his castle and treat her like a princess in a fairy tale. Red Riding Hood is suspicious. She begins to ask questions about the wolf’s jowls and tongue, and he insists that she stop asking foolish questions. He overcomes her objections and tells her that her parents and grandmother will be able to care for themselves. So the wolf and Red Riding Hood marry, have children, and live happily, and the nasty grandmother shrinks in size and remains mean as ever. Ungerer’s tale uses irony and clever reversals to break the sexual taboos of the traditional tale. The “uncanny” wolf becomes identified with familiar sexual longings of childhood pleasure instincts, and the transformations in the tale are calculated liberating effects, measured against the super-ego function of the parents and grandmother. The wolf allows Red Riding Hood to grow and enter into a mature sexual relationship. What becomes “home” in this fairy tale is less social in implications than in other liberating tales, but it does make a claim for the autonomy of the young girl and wolf, who demonstrate that “reputations” spread through rumors of old tales no longer hold true and should not be taken at surface value today.

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For the most part, the post-1945 tales of “Little Red Riding Hood”—and there are hundreds—transfigure and criticize the traditional transgression perpetuated against the girl as a helpless, naive, and sweet thing and against the wolf as evil predator and troublesome male rapist. In “Little Polly Riding Hood (1967),”19 Catherine Storr depicted a clever and independent girl, whom a bumbling wolf would like to eat. Time and again she outwits the comical wolf, who uses the old “Red Riding Hood” tale as a manual on how one should behave. Naturally, his announced expectations are never fulfilled. In a more serious vein, Max von der Grün rewrote the tale to comment on prejudice and conformity.20 His Red Riding Hood is ostracized by the community because of her red cap, which is strongly suggestive of the anti-Semitic and anti-Communist feelings which existed in Germany at one time. There have also been tales written in defense of the wolf, such as Iring Fetscher’s “Little Redhead and the Wolf” (1974) and Philippe Dumas and Boris Moissard’s “Little Aqua Riding Hood” (1977).21 Fetscher gives a wry, mock-psychological interpretation which depicts the father killing the wolf because the beast had befriended Red Riding Hood’s brother, whom the neurotic father disliked. In the story by Dumas and Moissard, there is another ironic portrayal; this time it is Red Riding Hood’s granddaughter who frees the grandnephew of the wolf from the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes because she wants to relive the classical story and become a star in Parisian society. However, the wolf is wise, for he has learned a lesson from the tragedies that have occurred in his family. He flees to Siberia and warns young wolves about the dangers of “civilization” in France. The reversal of the classical fairy tales is at the center of the other stories in Dumas and Moissard’s book Conte à l’envers, and it is the basis of such other collections as Jay Williams’ The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Tales (1979),22 Jane Yolen’s Dream Weaver (1979),23 and Hans-Joachim Gelberg’s Neues vom Rumpelstilzchen (1976).24 The traditional stories are transfigured so that their repressive substance is subverted. The reversal of form, characters, and motifs is intended to expand the possibilities to question the fairy-tale discourse within the civilizing process. Aside from the transfiguration of fairy tales, the second most common manner in which writers of fairy tales have endeavored to suggest options to dominant cultural patterns is through the fusion of actual references to disturbing social occurrences in contemporary society.

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Here, I want to focus on four remarkable fairy-tale experiments in Italy, Germany, France, and England. The international quest for liberation and a new sense of home manifested in different fairy tales is clearly a reaction against international trends of domination, standardization, and exploitation. In Italy, there is a consistent protest for freedom in the creative work of Adela Turin, Francesca Cantarellis, Nella Bosnia, Margherita Soccaro, and Sylvie Selig. Seven of their books have been translated and distributed by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative in London.25 Significant here is the tale entitled Of Cannons and Caterpillars (1975). The very first paragraph sets the dramatic predicament of modern society: No one in the palace of King Valour any longer remembered the first war. Not the ministers or the privy councillors, or the secretaries, observers, or the directors, or the reporters, the strategists or the diplomats; not even the generals, the colonels, the sergeants, the majors or the lieutenants. Not even Terence Wild, the very oldest soldier alive, stitched and restitched, with one glass eye, one wooden leg, and a hook in place of a hand. Because after the first war, there had been a second war, then a third, a fourth, a fifth, and then a twentieth and a twenty-first too, which was still going on. And no one in the palace of King Valour could remember anything about peaches or sparrows, or tortoise-shell cats, or bilberry marmalade, or radishes, or bed-sheets spread out to dry on green meadows. Besides, King Valour had become enthusiastic about his plans for a twenty-second war: “Not a single tree will be left standing, not a blade of grass will survive; no, not one solitary shamrock or grasshopper,’ so he predicted, ‘because we have the ultimate weapon, diabolical defoliants, deathrays, paralysing gas and cannons of perfect accuracy.”26

Grotesque and comically exaggerated as King Valour may seem, his manner of thinking is not unlike that of some of our contemporary statesmen. His menace and madness are sadly recognized by his own wife Queen Delphina, who is sentenced to live in the modern skyscraper castle behind bullet-proof windows with her daughter Princess Philippina and 174 widows and war orphans, both boys and girls. Confronted with a synthetic, suffocating technological life, Delphina endeavors to teach her daughter about nature, including caterpillars, flowers, animals, vegetables, etc., by writing illustrated stories for her. As her storybook expands, Philippina and all the widows and orphans of the

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skyscraper become less sad. Then one “evening King Valour returned in excellent humour: a new war had just been declared, and it promised to be the longest most homicidal ever… So he decided that the Queen, the Princess, widows, and orphans were to leave on a Saturday morning for the Castle of King Copious, which stood further away from the battlefields.”27 This decision turns out to be fortunate for the queen and her entourage. Along the way they stop at an abandoned castle ruined by wars, and because it is so beautifully situated in the country, they decide to renovate the buildings and cultivate the land. So they unpack the big Book, and all the dreams that had been pictured in the Book they now endeavor to realize in their surroundings. Many years pass, and we learn that King Valour and his wars are all but forgotten. However, the transformed castle flourishes in the middle of a busy, densely populated village, and everyone knows the name of Delphina, the legendary writer of the beautifully illustrated Book. This extraordinary anti-war fairy tale is uniquely illustrated with pictures projecting a critique of authoritarianism and the possibility for collective democratic life: The entire concept of the fairy tale encourages the creative realization of peaceful coexistence. Moreover, it is a fairy tale in praise of the utopian power of fairy tales. Delphina manages to retain the principle of hope and humanism in the prison-castle of her husband by writing the illustrated book for her compatriots. Given the opportunity to escape a sick situation, they become joyful and creative. Their sterile existence is exchanged for a life without fear and oppression. Thus, finally they can come into touch with their own skills and harness technology to serve their collective needs in peace. The dangerous potential of technology and bureaucracy to create means for enslaving humankind is portrayed with even greater insight and originality in Michael Ende’s 270-page fairy-tale novel Momo (1973).28 This work won the German Youth Book Prize and has been translated into seventeen different languages and made into a film. It recalls the struggles of a little Italian orphan, a wiry, ingenuous girl named Momo, somewhere between the ages of eight and twelve, who makes her home in the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheater. Since she has the amazing gift of listening to people’s problems in such a way that they are provided with the power to come to their own solutions, she is regarded as somewhat saint-like and is protected by everyone in the neighborhood. Surrounded by all sorts of children who play in

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the amphitheater and her two special friends, Beppo the street cleaner and Gigi the young con-artist, she lacks nothing and prospers through her wit and creativity. In general, all the people in the district are poor, but they try to share and enjoy what they have with one another and struggle to improve the quality of their lives at their own pace and time. Unknown to them, however, their manner of living and playing is being threatened by the time-savers, men dressed in gray whose ashcolored faces match their suits. They wear stiff round hats, smoke gray cigars, and carry blue-gray briefcases. Nobody knows who these men are, and everyone forgets them once they enter and influence their lives to conduct themselves according to such principles as “time is money,” “time is costly,” or “saved time is double time.” So great is their clandestine impact that the city gradually begins to transform itself into a smooth-functioning machine. Buildings and streets are torn down to make way for modern technology and automatization. Everyone rushes around seeking ways to save time and make more money. The total architecture of the city informs the psyche of people’s minds that are now geared to work for work’s sake. The gray men gain control over everyone and succeed in isolating Momo. Only after she finds her way to the “nowhere house” of Master Secundus Minutus Hora is she safe from the threat of the gray men, for it is Master Hora, a wizened and humane guardian of time, who can explain the essence of time to Momo—that it resides in the heart of each individual and can become as beautiful as the individual decides. Given this realization, Momo seeks to struggle against the gray men, and with Master Hora’s help and that of a magic turtle, she eventually undermines the nefarious plans of the gray men: Time is liberated so that human beings can determine their destiny. Ende’s colorful fairy-tale novel is told in such a fashion that the events could seemingly take place in the past, present, or future. In unusual symbolical form, he incorporates a critique of instrumental rationalization so that it becomes comprehensible for readers between the ages of eight and fifteen. As is the case in most contemporary fairy tales with liberating potential, Ende has a female protagonist bring about or point a way to change. While Momo comes into her own as an individual, social relations appear to be reconstituted in a manner that will allow time to blossom for everyone. Nevertheless, there are problems with the ending of Momo, which is deceptively emancipatory. That is, Ende employs the fantastic to celebrate individualistic action or the privatization of the imagination. Such individualism is supposed to be the answer

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to the growing rationalization of everyday life, and it is celebrated in Ende’s second best-seller, Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story, 1979),29 in which a fat, fearful boy named Bastian discovers that he can use his imagination to invent a never-ending story which helps him adjust to reality. Ende has Bastian steal a book, and, as the boy reads it in a secluded place, he feels summoned by the troubled realm of Phantásien, where he has numerous adventures. Aided by his devoted friend Atréju and magical animals, he prevents Phantásien from being destroyed. Upon returning to reality, he becomes reconciled with his father and feels strong and courageous enough to take on the world. In contrast to Momo, The Neverending Story depicts a pursuit of home as a form of regression and compromise. Moreover, there are too many traditional clichés and stereotypes in Ende’s endeavor to endorse the student revolt slogan “all power to the imagination,” so that, in the final analysis, his story actually deludes readers and prevents them from seeing their potential and problems against the background of social forces manipulating and exploiting both consciousness and imagination. Such delusion is not the case in Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s remarkable fairy-tale novel La Fée et le Géometre (The Fairy and the Land Surveyor, 1981).30 Andrevon describes an idyllic verdant country filled with fairies, dwarfs, gnomes, witches, magicians, elves, dragons, and sylphs, who live in harmony with one another without rules, money, or rationalized relations of production. Nor is nature threatened with gross exploitation. All creatures benefit from their interchange and exchange with one another, and sexual discrimination does not exist. Each individual works and plays according to his or her own need, that is, until Arthur Livingschwartz, an explorer, who works for an international conglomerate, discovers this paradise. From this point on, Andrevon portrays the gradual colonization of the verdant country. Technicians, scientists, soldiers, architects, and businessmen arrive and transform the small virgin land into a tourist resort with a tiny industrial capacity. Roads, towns, and factories are built. Nature is devastated and polluted. The gnomes, dwarfs, fairies, and elves are compelled to work for money and to regulate their time and lives according to the demands of outsiders, who now control the production of the country. There are intermarriages between humans and the fairy creatures, and some, like the fairy Sibialle and the land surveyor Loïc, try to oppose the onslaught of colonization and industrialization. However, it is not until their daughter and other children from mixed marriages grow up and experience human exploitation and ecological

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destruction in the name of progress that a strong organized protest movement develops. There are struggles over the construction of nuclear reactors, the encroachment of nature by industry and highways—all without violence. These struggles commence as Andrevon concludes his narration: The country of the fairies will never be as it was before. The country of the fairies will not regress. To live does not mean to move backward but to move forward. It means to be like the shark and to advance unceasingly. And the shark is not a malicious creature. He must live like all of us. That’s all. The best thing that can happen to the country of the fairies is not a return to the past, nor should it seek to model itself after the human world. It can become different, mixing the qualities of fairies and humans alike.31

Whether this can happen, whether the struggle of the people in the verdant country to change their lives can succeed, remains an open question at the end of this fairy tale. Yet, Andrevon manages to raise most of the significant social and political questions for today’s youth in a discourse that provides an inkling of home. He does not paint rosy illusions by offering an individualistic solution to the instrumentalization of magic, fantasy, and natural needs the way Ende does in The Neverending Story. In fact, he sees the collective opposition to possible ecological and social destruction arising out of the contradictions created by capitalist colonization itself. In this sense, he views modern technology and industrialization as revolutionary, as transformative forces which can be beneficial to living creatures and nature, only if they are not employed for profit and exploitation. Unlike some romantic anti-capitalist writers of fairy tales like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who look back conservatively to the past for salvation, Andrevon knows that technology and industry are not evil per se. He assumes the viewpoint of the socialist ecologist and points toward the struggle for a qualitatively new type of “homeland” with optimism. Not all progressive fairy-tale writers are as optimistic as Andrevon is. For instance, Michael de Larrabeiti writes from the perspective of the urban lower class, and he draws different conclusions than Andrevon in his endeavor to subvert and satirize Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Richard Adams’ Watership Down. In his first fairy-tale novel The Borribles (1978),32 he created fictional characters from his own childhood in

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Battersea, who are notable for their social defiance. Borribles are outcasts or runaways who value their independence more than anything else because they take a deep delight in being what they are. They avoid adults and especially policemen who represent arbitrary authority. Their ears grow long and pointed, a sign of their non-conformism, and if they are caught by the law, their ears are clipped and their will is broken. Borribles exist everywhere in the world, but de Larrabeiti writes mainly about the Borribles who inhabit London. In his first novel, he wrote about the Borribles’ great struggle with the high and mighty Rumbles, representative of middle-class snobs, and the loss of a vast treasure in the River Wandle. In the sequel, The Borribles Go for Broke (1981),33 he depicted the further adventures of a small group of Borribles, who are manipulated by Spiff, the irascible Horrible chief, to search for the lost treasure in the underground territory of the treacherous Wendles. Actually, the group of Borribles (consisting of the two tough girls Chalotte and Sidney, a Bangladeshi named Twilight, Stonks from Peckham and Vulge from Stepney) primarily wants to rescue the horse Sam, who had been of immense service to them on their, Great Rumble Hunt. The police, however, have created a Special Borrible Group (SBG) under the command of the fanatic inspector Sussworth, and the Borribles are pursued with vengeance. In fact, at one point they are even captured by the SBG but then rescued by an extraordinary tramp named Ben, who is a grown-up Borrible in his own way. Though the Borribles and Ben have no difficulty in making fools of the police, it is a different story with the Wendles in the sewers of London. Spiff has instigated everything so that the Borribles must help him search for the lost treasure and eliminate the tyrannical chieftain Flinthead, who turns out to be Spiff’s brother. Ultimately, Spiff and Flinthead are both killed, the Borribles escape, and Sam is rescued. However, the Borribles are not happy in the end unless they can continue bickering and arguing among themselves about their next step in opposition to the normal routine of an oppressive society. It is difficult to do justice to the style and manner in which de Larrabeiti makes the unbelievable believable. His starting point is obviously the young lumpenproletariat, the down and out of the London lower classes. In this novel, he begins by focusing on the interaction between Chalotte as hard-nosed courageous girl and Twilight as sensitive and sensible Bangladeshi. His immediate concern is to establish the integrity and skills of these two characters, generally representative of females and minority groups. Thereafter, he expands the scope of

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his attention by depicting the relations between Ben as adult dropout and the Borribles as defiant young outsiders. At first the Borribles distrust Ben, but they learn quickly that his principles are similar to theirs: he lives from day to day contented with the waste and abundance of a wasteful society, abhors the deadliness of routine, shuns profit-making, and minds his own business. All this is proclaimed in his special song: Let the world roll round an’ round Wiv its hard-worked folk in fetters: All’oo think themselves yer betters, Money-mad and dooty bound. Make yer choice, there ain’t so many, No ambition’s worth a fart; Freedom is a work of art— Take yer stand with uncle Benny!34

Together Ben and the Borribles reveal how creative and adroit one must be to gain and protect one’s independence. Not only are they surrounded by powerful social forces demanding law and order just for the sake of law and order, but they must contend with each other’s disrespectful and suspicious natures. De Larrabeiti’s fantasy projection shows lower-class life more like it is than many so-called realistic novels for young readers. He does not mince his words nor pull punches. His character portrayals and command of colloquial speech, especially Cockney, are remarkable. At times, his plot lines are too contrived, and he lets his imagination carry him away. (Yes, even in fantasy literature this is possible.) Still he manages to employ the fairy-tale discourse to deal with themes pertaining to racial, sexual, and political struggles of the present in such a way that young readers can comprehend the importance and urgency of protest by outsiders. There is no such thing as “home” in this fairy-tale novel. It is the refusal of the Borribles to go home, to make a regular home, which demonstrates the false promises of the classical fairy tales that celebrate regressive notions of home in their so-called “happy endings.”

III Most of the tales discussed up to this point—and there are hundreds more one could discuss35—provide a social and political basis for the fantastic projection so that it is instilled with a liberating potential. The

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configurations of the experimental fairy-tale discourse shift the perspective and meaning of socialization through reading. The active, aggressive behavior of male types in the classical fairy tales gives way to a combined activism on the part of both males and females who uncover those wishes, dreams, and needs which have been denied by social structures and institutions. The fantastic projections carried by the plots, characters, and motifs of the tales reflect the possibility for a transformation of constraining social conditions through major changes in social relations. The fairy-tale discourse in general is confronted with a demand to transform itself and become more emancipatory and innovative. The question, however, remains as to whether the experimental tales are truly liberating and can achieve their object. That is: Can they have the desired effect on young readers? Several critics have pointed to the difficulties in predicting the effect which emancipatory literature can have on children.36 For the most part, particularly in regard to the classical fairy tales, children resist change. If they have been reared with the old tales, they do not want them altered. If their social expectations have been determined by a conservative socialization process, they find changes in fairy tales comical but often unjust and disturbing even though the tales purport to be in their interests and seek their emancipation. Yet, it is exactly this disturbance which the liberating fairy tales seek on both a conscious and unconscious level. They interfere with the civilizing process in hope of creating change and a new awareness of social conditions. This provocation is why it is more important for critics to recognize the upsetting effect of emancipatory tales and to study their uncanny insinuations for old and young readers. The quality of emancipatory fairy tales cannot be judged by the manner in which they are accepted by readers but by the unique ways they bring undesirable social relations into question and force readers to question themselves. In this regard, the liberating potential of the fantastic in experimental fairy tales will always be discomforting, even when concrete utopias are illuminated through the narrative perspective. With some exceptions, the emancipatory tales are skillfully written and employ humor and artwork in original, stimulating ways to accomplish their paradoxical kind of discomforting comfort. The major difficulty facing the emancipatory fairy tales, it seems to me, lies in the system of distribution, circulation, and use of the tales, and all this is dependent on the educational views of teachers, librarians, parents, and those adults

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who work with children in community centers. The more regressive tales of Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, Andersen, and other conservative writers are used in schools, libraries, and homes without a blink of the eye, but the unusual, forward-looking, fantastic projections of the liberating fairy tales have not found general approval among the publishers and adults who circulate the tales. Many religious groups seek to ban fairy tales of all kinds from schools because of their putative pagan and blasphemous contents. Unfortunately, they do not realize how “dangerous” the messianic tales of the Bible might be for their children. This is not to say that there has been no headway made by the experimental fairy tales and by adults who experiment with fairy tales. Throughout the Western world storytellers, writers, publishers, and educators have developed new methods and techniques to question and expand the classical fairy-tale discourse. In Italy, Gianni Rodari,37 perhaps the most unknown writer of fantasy in the West for children, created a series of games intended to deconstruct classical fairy tales in the hope of stimulating children to create their own modern versions. By introducing unusual elements into the fairy tale, for instance, by making Cinderella disobedient and rebellious, or having Snow White meet giants instead of dwarfs and organizing a band of robbers, the child is compelled to shatter a certain uniform reception of fairy tales, to re-examine the elements of the classical tales, and to reconsider their function and meaning and whether it might not be better to alter them. Rodari published numerous innovative books such as Venti Storie più una (Twenty Stories Plus One, 1969) and Tante Storie per giocare (Many Stories to Play With, 1971), in which he either revised fairy tales in contemporary settings or proposed different plots and endings to traditional tales. As Maria Luisa Salvadori has demonstrated,38 his influence on present-day writers of fairy tales in Italy such as Bianca Pitzorno, Roberto Piumini, and Marcello Argilli is immense. In France, Georges Jean39 has described various pedagogical means which he used in schools to enable children to become more creative in their use of fairy tales. He describes certain card games in which children are called upon to change characters or situations of the classical fairy tales so that they relate more directly to their own lives. Jean considers the reinvention of fairy tales as a means for children to become aware of traditional discourse and the necessity to modernize it. Perhaps the best example of such reinvention is the production of unusual tales by Pierre Gripari, who published three important books, Contes de la rue

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Broca (Stories from Broca Street, 1967), Contes de la rue Folie-Méricourt (Tales from Méricourt Street, 1983), and Patrouille du conte (Fairy Tale Patrol, 1983), which clearly comment on the norms and standards of the French civilizing process. In particular, Patrouille du conte is a provocative account of how eight children endeavor to humanize the world only to bring about more barbarianism with their politically correct agenda. It is indeed the tendency toward “political correctness” that has engendered change, but not in a doctrinaire or destructive manner as Gripari has projected in his fairy-tale novel. In the United States, for instance, writers and illustrators of fairy tales for young readers such as Jane Yolen, William Steig, Maurice Sendak, Donna Jo Napoli, Francesca Lia Block, Gregory Maguire, and many others have explored problems concerned with child abuse, drugs, sexism, violence, and bigotry through their transformation of the traditional fairy-tale motifs and plots. This is also true in the UK, where writers such as Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Michael Rosen, Adèle Geras, Michael Foreman, Diana Wynne Jones, Berlie Doherty, and others have produced tales that reflect upon social conditions in humorous and yet serious ways. One of the more exceptional picture books published in the twentyfirst century, a liberating fairy tale, which owes its political and artistic profundity to the progressive experiments by writers and illustrators of the post-1945 epoch, is Brundibar written by Tony Kushner and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Based on a short opera composed by Hans Krása with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister in 1938, the story has an important history connected to the Holocaust. It concerns a brother and sister named Pepicek and Aninku, who are sent to a nearby village by a doctor to fetch milk for their sick mother, otherwise she will die. The children have no father. Moreover, they have no money. So, when they arrive in the village, the milkman refuses to give them milk. The only way to earn money is through singing, but Brundibar, the organ grinder man, drowns out their singing and collects all the money. Fortunately, a sparrow, a cat, and a dog come to their aid, and Pepicek and Aninku recruit the children of the village to sing with them and vanquish Brundibar. Then, they take the money they received from the onlookers, buy milk, and save their money. In their collaborative work, Kushner and Sendak altered the story somewhat to draw parallels with the Nazi period and contemporary America. Originally, Hoffmeister and Krása sought to address conditions under the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and after the opera

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was secretly performed in an orphanage in Prague in 1941, it was performed 55 times by prisoners of the concentration camp Theresienstadt without the Nazis realizing that the organ grinder Brundibar was a symbolical representation of Hitler. There is, however, no doubt who Brundibar is in the Kushner/Sendak picture book. Sprouting a scraggy mustache, Brundibar recalls the posturing Hitler as a bully, and Kushner and Sendak make a major change at the end of their tale. After the children sing, “The wicked never win! We have our victory yet! Tyrants come along, but you just wait and see! They topple one-two-three! And thus we end our song. Our friends make us strong!” They add a sobering coda written by Brundibar himself: “They believe they’ve won the fight, they believe I’m gone – not quite! Nothing ever works out neatly – Bullies don’t give up completely. One departs, the next appears, and we shall meet again my dears! Though I go, I won’t go far. … I’ll be back.” The clear reference is to other bullies and tyrants in the world, now including the President of the United States. It is not necessary for Kushner and Sendak to name names and be overly didactic because the fairy tale, while optimistic, seeks to show how the barbarianism of the civilized world did not end with the destruction of the concentration camps and the death of Hitler. In this regard, their story is a remarkable political history lesson that offers children hope while at the same time opening their eyes to present dangers of tyranny. What is interesting is the colorful manner, the free verse and the startling naïve images, in which Kushner and Sendak narrate how two children take destiny in their own hands and save their home. They return to their mother with great courage, confidence, and consciousness. Liberated from the oppressor Brundibar, they set readers free to think how they might use their creative talents and imagination to liberate themselves. The work of Kushner and Sendak, and others who have before them, makes it quite clear, however, that until progressive social ideas are set into practice among adults, the emancipatory fairy tales will remain restricted in their use and effect among children. Bloch’s hope for the re-functioning of culture through fairy tales remains a Not-Yet (Noch Nicht) category. In other words, until there is a more progressive shift within the civilizing process itself, the liberating potential of these tales will be confined to those social groups seeking that end. One thing, however, is certain: The writers and illustrators themselves have experienced some sense of emancipation in projecting their wish-fulfillments through the magic of the fairy tales. Home for them is achieved through

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the creative production of these subversive tales which allow them to regain a sense of their familiar longings through the uncanny. It is this sensory experience that they want to share with us symbolically, for their sense of liberation can only be confirmed when others read and benefit from the subversive power of their art.

Notes







1. See Claire R. Farrer, ed., Women and Folklore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975); Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models (New York: Doubleday, 1979); Marcia Lieberman, “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale,” College English 34 (1972): 383– 95; Allison Lurie, “Fairy Tale Liberation,” The New York Review of Books (17 December 1970): 42; Heather Lyons, “Some Second Thoughts on Sexism in Fairy Tales,” in Literature and Learning, ed. Elizabeth Grugeon and Peter Walden (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1978), 42–58; Robert Moore, “From Rags to Witches: Stereotypes, Distortions and Anti-humanism in Fairy Tales,” Interracial Books for Children 6 (1975): 1–3; Jane Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” Children’s Literature in Education 8 (1977): 21–29; and Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Die Göttin und ihr Heros (Munich: Frauenoffensive, 1981). 2. See Julia Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel, eds., Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (New York: NYU Press: 2008); Kimberley Reynolds, Jane Rosen, and Michael Rosen, eds., Reading and Rebellion: An Anthology of Radical Writing for Children 1900–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Michael Rosen, ed., Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fair Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Matthew Gale and Katy Wan, Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919–33 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Jack Zipes, ed., Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 3. Le Pouvoir des Contes (Paris: Casterman, 1981), 153–54. 4. Ibid., 206–209. 5. Freud, “The Uncanny,” New Literary History, 630. 6. “Karl Marx and Humanity: The Material of Hope,” in On Karl Marx (New York: Seabury, 1971), 30–31. 7. Ibid., 44–45.

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8. For a detailed discussion of Bloch’s essays, see my “Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), xi–xliii and my chapter “The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J. R. R. Tolkien the Catholic,” in Breaking the Magic Spell, 129–59. 9. Ibid., 133. 10. Ibid., 135. 11. Glanzvolles Elend: Versuch überKitsch und Colportage (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 66–67. 12. Berkeley: Rainbow Press, 1975, 1–2. 13. Ibid., 38. 14.  Herman wrote a sequel to this story, Return of the Forest Princess (Berkeley: Rainbow Press, 1975), which is, however, not as stimulating and open-ended as her first tale. 15. Red Riding Hood (Liverpool: Fairy Story Collective, 1972), 6. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. For the manifold ways that “Little Red Riding Hood” has been revised in the course of history, see my book The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993). For the most recent commentary, see Sandra Beckett, Recycling Red Riding Hood (New York: Routledge, 2002); Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 18. A Storybook (New York: Watts, 1974), 88. 19. Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf (Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, 1967), 17–23. 20. “Rotkäppchen,” in Bilderbogengeschichten. Märchen, Sagen, Abenteuer, ed. Jochen Jung (Munich: dtv, 1976), 95–100. 21. See Iring Fetscher, Wer hat Dornröschen wachgeküt? (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), 28–32; Philippe Dumas and Boris Moissard, Contes à l’envers (Paris: l’école des loisirs, 977), 15–26. 22. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979. 23. Cleveland: Collins, 1979. 24. Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg, 1976. 25.  See Adela Turin and Margherita Saccaro, The Breadtime Story; Adela Turin, Francesca Cantarelli, and Nella Bosnia, The Five Wives of Silverbeard; Adela Turin and Sylvie Selig, Of Cannons and Caterpillars; Adela Turin and Nella Bosnia, Arthur and Clementine, A Fortunate Catastrophe, The Real Story of the Bonobos Who Wore Spectacles; and Sugarpink Rose. All were published by the Writers and Readers Publishing

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Cooperative between 1975 and 1977. There have also been translations in German and French. 26.  Of Cannons and Caterpillars, 1. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. Stuttgart: Thienemann, 1973. 29. Stuttgart: Thienemann, 1979. 30. Paris: Casterman, 1981. 31. Ibid., 264. 32. London: Bodley Head, 1978. 33. London: Bodley Head, 1981. 34. Ibid., 80. 35. For example, see Christine Nöstlinger, Wir pfeifen auf den Gurkenkönig (We Don’t Give a Hoot for the Pickle King [Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg, 1972]); Ursula LeGuin, The Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Orsinian Tales (1976); John Gardner, Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975), Gudgekin the Thistle Girl and Other Tales (1976), and The King of the Hummingbirds and Other Tales (1977); and Robin McKinley, Beauty (1980). 36. Cf. Nicholas Tucker, “How Children Respond to Fiction,” in Writers, Critics, and Children (New York: Agathon, 1976), 177–78; Maximilian Nutz, “Die Macht des Faktischen und die Utopie. Zur Rezeption emanzipatorischen Märchen,” Diskussion Deutsch 48 (1979): 397–410. 37. See The Grammar of Fantasy, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1996). 38. Maria Luisa Salvadori, “Apologizing to the Ancient Fable: Gianni Rodari and His Influence on Italian Children’s Literature,” The Lion and the Unicorn 26/2 (2002): 169–202. 39.  Le Pouvoir des Contes, 203–32.

CHAPTER 9

Epilogue: Why Hope?

Ernst Bloch may be dead, but his cry for and defense of hope for a better world still lives, and it is more urgent than ever before. We are living in seemingless hopeless times, and yet, it is exactly the despair of present injustices and inequalities which generates hope that things could be different. It is the dialectical negativity of hope that exposes corruption and ruthless power in the world. It is anticipatory illumination that sheds light on the telos of integrity and shows us where to go even if we may never reach our goal. It is the direction that counts, not the arrival. It is the hopeful struggle toward ethical enlightenment that leads to justice. In contrast to the mud-slinger Terry Eagleton, a professor of English, whose shallow mind reflects a good deal of his shallow knowledge about philosophy, politics, and hope, Bloch steadfastly kept his mind and pen on crucial social and political issues that affected the lives of common people throughout the world and rarely sought to belittle individuals the way Eagleton has done to Bloch in his book, Hope Without Optimism (2015). What Eagleton has done in his nasty drivel to discredit Bloch and his philosophy of hope does not serve anyone except Eagleton’s ego. Though disturbed by Eagleton’s defamation of Bloch, I have no intention of spending much time in critiquing his essay1 on Bloch in my short epilogue. Instead, I prefer to discuss Bloch’s notion of hope as a motivating factor in the praxis of people seeking ethical means to transform the world. Nevertheless, given Eagleton’s notorious stature as a public intellectual in the UK and elsewhere and given the shameful manner in which he has endeavored to smear Bloch’s reputation. I want to © The Author(s) 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5_9

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say a few more words about Eagleton’s essay because his reckless critique of Bloch raises the general question: Why hope? Why hope when intelligent critics like Eagleton might spend their time better contributing incisive critiques of conditions that have contributed to the rise of fascism throughout the world than falsely depicting Bloch as a kind of mystical and maniacal guru? So, after a brief response to Eagleton’s warped “tirade” against Bloch, I’ll turn to recent explorations of Bloch’s works that might enable readers to grasp the urgent and essential appeal of his philosophy. At the same time, I want to make it clear that this is not a “defense” of Bloch’s complex thinking. It needs no defense.

Eagleton’s Bewildering Critique of Bloch Eagleton devotes an entire chapter to Bloch in Hope Without Optimism, and I want to begin by citing one vicious attack, characteristic of his writing style, and critique of Bloch throughout his book: As one who railed against what he called the ‘malnutrition of the socialist imagination,’ however, Bloch is at risk of a conceptual obesity of Rabelaisian proportions. What some might see as impressive erudition, others might regard as an alarming case of intellectual bulimia. Nothing could be further from his overblown sensibility than the classical virtues of tact and reticence. The very ideas of sparseness and obliquity are unknown to him. His thought is powered by a well-nigh pathological drive for universal knowledge, one that prefigures the so-called Totum of communist utopia. In this case, too, the form of his work is at one with its content. Yet, the paradox of this stunningly diverse body of work is its fundamentally monotone quality. Its prodigal range exemplifies again and again the same rather slender set of concerns.2

Two elements stand out in his scathing critique of Bloch and his philosophy. The first is an angry if not nasty attitude toward Bloch that is basically ad hominem. Throughout the rest of his essay, Eagleton will call Bloch a Stalinist, Lefty, Communist, romantic vitalist, libertarian, and a Marxist Schelling, using disparaging adjectives and exaggerated witty remarks to make it seem that Bloch has nothing to offer contemporary readers of philosophy. The second element pertains to Eagleton’s self-righteousness. Throughout the chapter, he intends to show how Bloch is not a true Marxist and has given Marxism a bad name. Clearly, Eagleton is the only one capable of judging what Marxism means

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and who is a genuine Marxist. In an earlier review of another one of Eagleton’s many books, After Theory (2004), the American critic William Deresiewicz sums up the major defaults in Eagleton’s writing and thinking in most of his books to date: Eagleton’s argument is often not much of an argument at all but rather a series of assertions that sympathetic readers are likely to agree with but hardly stand up to the kind of rigorous analysis he himself uses so tellingly against his opponents. The fact is that for all his polish and brilliance as an explicator of other people’s ideas, Eagleton has never been much of an original thinker, (Those who can, think up Marxism; those who can’t, apply such insights to Clarissa or Wuthering Heights). He even acknowledges as much in The Gatekeeper, referring to a youthful job as an encyclopedia salesman as his ‘earliest experience of peddling ideas to the masses, a project which was later to become my full-time occupation.’ The remark may be funny, but it’s no joke. Here, trying to create a kind of moral-political Theory of Everything, he gets badly out of depth.3

In fact, Eagleton is out of depth while trying to explain and critique Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. Aside from his making light of and writing misleading sketches about Bloch’s escape from the Nazis and his so-called commitment to Stalinism, Eagleton reveals a profound lack of knowledge of continental philosophy and an inability to read German and French important research on Bloch’s ideas.4 As Deresiewicz remarks, Eagleton does not write coherently “but proceeds instead by zigs and zags, often little more than a grab-bag of discussions, definitions and digressions.”5 The result is that he fails to generate his own concept of hope that might explain its prodigious if not pugnacious qualities, for it is the pugnacity of hope that, I believe, attracted Bloch and caused him to explore the multifarious aspects of hope and its necessity for us to survive in hopeless times. The best one can say about Eagleton’s book is that it opens up further discussions of whether hope is vital in people’s lives, and whether Bloch’s writings contribute to its vitality.

Following in the Footsteps of Bloch In 2008, the German–American professor, Klaus Berghahn, wrote a significant study of Bloch’s different works with the title Zukunft in der Vergangenheit: Auf Ernst Bloch’s Spuren (The Future in the Past: Following the Traces of Ernst Bloch). The title is interesting because it

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encompasses two key principles in Bloch’s works: (1) we cannot move forward and create substantial changes in society unless we have a firm grasp of history and can acknowledge our inadequacies and failures to realize our hopes; (2) we must pay attention to the tiniest traces of little things and events that occur in our lives and may help us move forward and lighten the way toward a better future. Berghahn devotes the chapters of his book to Bloch’s concept of utopia and how it has been used in modern art and literature to reflect general dissatisfaction with the conditions in the contemporary world that cause so much deprivation and poverty. His work is among the best studies of applying Bloch’s ideas to the actuality of the twenty-first century, and I should like to cite and comment on a few other significant studies that reveal how Bloch, unaware to many English-speaking students and scholars of utopian studies, has stamped our thinking and provided political insights into the current rise of authoritarianism and fascism in the world. The first place to start is, of course, Germany and the founding of the International Bloch Gesellschaft in 1986. This society is largely responsible for some of the best critical studies of Bloch’s works and has held annual meetings up to the present to further more interest in his work. Moreover, the society has published a yearbook from 1990 to the present with critical studies by Bloch scholars in Europe and North America as well as a monthly informative newsletter. The German founders and members of the society are among the most astute young philosophers in Europe, and aside from writing well over 50 major studies of Bloch’s works, not always in agreement with the “Master,” certain members have published a superb thick volume of short essays called a Bloch Wörterbuch (A Bloch Dictionary) in 2012.6 “Typically German,” it is noteworthy for what the Germans call deutsche Akribie (German meticulousness). Since I have made ample use of this superb dictionary and numerous other works in German, I shall not single out a particular book for attention published in our “hopeless” twenty-first century. However, I should note the special 2018 issue on the actuality of Ernst Bloch’s works published by Das Argument, a respected journal of social sciences and philosophy. The essays cover topics such as nationalism, multiculturalism, religion, and feminism and demonstrate how Bloch’s progressive ideas still play a role in cultural debates. Finally, I want to mention Ivan Boldyrev’s Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries (2014),7 which is an invaluable study of Bloch’s relations with such leading German intellectuals of the twentieth

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century as George Lukács, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Bloch knew all these men personally, and they shared many of the same concerns related to philosophy and politics of the twentieth century. In many instances, Bloch had quarrels and differences with these prominent intellectuals that are not well known, and by fully discussing them, Boldyrev, a Russian scholar, who taught in Germany, shows how Bloch’s utopian thought may have more of a lasting impact in Western culture than the works of his friends. In the United States and UK, the reception among English-speaking scholars of Bloch’s works has been somewhat lukewarm, despite the translation of most of his key works in the last twenty years. Among these critics, the American professor of comparative literature, Fredric Jameson, is certainly the pioneer or should be considered the pioneer of Bloch studies in English-speaking countries. His chapter in Marxism and Form (1971)8 was and still is one of the most thoughtful and perceptive analyses of the key ideas in Bloch’s major work. Indeed, he has put his finger on the essence of Bloch’s concepts of utopia and hope: Bloch’s hermeneutic … finds its richness in the variety of its objects themselves, while its initial conceptual content remains relatively simple, relatively unchanging: thus little by little wherever we look, everything in the world becomes a version of some primal figure, a manifestation of that primordial movement toward the future and toward ultimate identity with a transfigured world which is Utopia, and whose vital presence, behind whatever distortions, beneath whatever layers of repression, may always be detected, no matter how faintly, by the instruments and apparatus of hope itself. Hence the truly encyclopedic character of Bloch’s major work, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, which is less an ascending ladder of forms like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit than it is a vast and disorderly exploration of the manifestations of hope on all levels of reality.9

What is most significant in Jameson’s analysis of Bloch’s concept of hope is his focus on its ontological aspect that is key to understanding how and why we act upon what we lack—and how what we lack is at the core of daydreams and our hopes. As Jameson explains, “From the point of view of temporality, the experience of hope consists in a coming to consciousness of that relationship to the as yet inexistent implicit in all these emotions, and may therefore stand as their structural archetype and at the same time as their most concrete affective manifestation.”10

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Jameson was not the only pioneer of Bloch’s works in Englishspeaking countries. Mention should be made of two excellent early monographs, Wayne Hudson’s The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (1982) and Vincent Geoghegan’s Ernst Bloch (1996) as well as the first annotated translation of The Principle of Hope (1986) by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight that enabled scholars throughout the world to engage with Bloch, to form groups such as the Utopian Studies Society, and to endeavor to seek ways to put Bloch’s ideas into practice. All this has occurred while hope for change has underlined the protest and resistance movements against injustice and inequality by millions of people who have become conscious of the lack of genuine democracy in their respective countries. Their longing and dreams for a better life have been reflected in recent studies of Bloch’s works. Two books come immediately to mind: The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (2013), edited by Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek and Theories of Hope: Exploring Alternative Affective Dimensions of Human Experience (2019), edited by Rochelle Green. In the introduction to The Privatization of Hope, Thompson poignantly sets the framework for the diverse essays in his book: “The question now – half a century after the first full publication of The Principle of Hope and long after the apparent death of the grand narrative of progress – is whether hope can still exist in anything other than an atomized, desocialized, and privatized form. … It could be argued that hope generally resides now in individual liberation through money or fame or both. The dreams of a better world are dreams of a better world for oneself or one’s family. It is not just socialism which appears to have died but the very concept of the social itself.”11 Most of the essays in Thompson’s book respond to his question in original ways based on the hope to see the social aspect of Bloch’s thinking developed in the lives we lead. Since it would take a good deal of time to summarize and analyze all the essays, I want to focus on a few key “responses” to demonstrate how Bloch’s hope is still pivotal for elaborating existential and practical ways to counter privatization and the perversion of the civilizing process in countries throughout the world. It is, of course, no surprise that Wayne Hudson and Vincent Geoghegan were asked to contribute to Thompson’s anthology. Hudson’s essay, “Bloch and a Philosophy of the Proterior” is an original rethinking of Bloch’s philosophy to counter totalitarianism. He purports that Bloch’s philosophy needs a reorientation: “A new edition of Bloch’s

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philosophy would need to be less prone to totalist illusions and more carefully integrated with a contemporary philosophy of nature. It would involve a bio-historical naturalism driven by formative concerns for the future of human beings and the worlds of nature. Indeed, it would take the historical formation of both human beings and natural environs as central to a new social and economic thought. A philosophy of the proterior would further elaborate Bloch’s insight into an unfinished world, but it would do so with less sympathy for Romanticism and other forms of culture-driven activism.”12 Geoghgan’s essay, “An Anti-humanist Utopia?” takes a completely different Hegelian approach to the reorientation of Bloch’s philosophy in the twenty-first century. Instead of proposing an environmental approach, he depicts an anti-humanist world, hoping through estrangement (Entfremdung) we can realize how important humanism is to all the work we humans have accomplished on this earth. Two other essays in Thompson’s collection struck my attention: Catherine Moir’s “The Education of Hope: On the Dialectical Potential of Speculative Materialism” and Francesca Vidal and Welf Schröter’s “Can We Hope to Walk Tall in a Computerized World?” Moir argues in her complex and profound essay that Bloch needs to be reconsidered as a speculative materialist. She explains: “As that mode of thought which goes beyond ‘what is the case’ – indeed, which conceives of the material itself as going beyond what is the case – speculative philosophy thus cannot rely on complete knowledge, however, nor can it rely on faith that there is anything beyond the material world. It can, however, hope for a better world the possibility of which is immanent in matter itself. Hope that grasps the latent tendency of the objectively real possible is what Bloch calls docta spes, educated hope.”13 Though Moir does not discuss the significance of Bloch’s speculative philosophy and educated hope for the rise of fantasy and utopian and dystopian literature in the twenty-first century, there is a strong connection that could be made. At any event, she closes by arguing that speculative materialism must have a strong ideological critique in its projection of the material possibility of another world, otherwise it has nothing to offer, and certainly, Bloch has incorporated such a critique in his educated hope. Connected to educated hope are the daydreams, wishes, and longings people have, especially to overcome alienation and reification in the workplace. In Vidal’s and Schröter’s essay, they discuss the Bloch

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Academy’s14 founding of a project called “Working Environment Meets Philosophy – Philosophy Meets Working Environment.” To explore whether and how alienation can be overcome in the twenty-first century, Vidal and Schröter maintain that we must use Bloch’s concepts to go beyond him and envision new ways to overcome the conversion of leisure time into consumerist time and eliminate the alienation and reification in the structural configuration in corporations, institutions, institutes, and government. They argue that in the era of globalization, the concrete utopia that works for the liberation of labor, which Ernst Bloch himself envisaged in the workers liberating themselves from wage labor, no longer describes the process of social hope. Nevertheless, they support the “Blochian idea that it is in our [day] dreams that the hope for a better world shines forth. The desire/hope for a better world for all arises from the dissatisfaction with existence as well as the uncertainties in individual lives. In this sense, Bloch teaches us to look at the social figurations that determine the lives of individuals. It is quite possible that this may result in kitschy (sentimental) dreams that aspire to and are intended to pander to an entirely personal happiness and that can be readily realized through adjustment to the ‘given.’ This danger is especially prevalent in the working environment. But it is also the evolving working environment that makes it clear that only the democratized empowerment of work processes can lead to the improvements that we dream of, that are developed and shared in the workplace, and that serve as a basis for the promotion of the active participation of those involved.”15 Almost all the essays in The Privatization of Hope suggest that Bloch laid the foundations of a political hope that needs to be reutilized. This is also the case in two major essays in Theories of Hope. For instance, in his thorough critical review of Bloch’s secular hope, Akiba Lerner states: “Bloch’s work on synthesizing religious and secular redemptive hope narratives helped change the conversation amongst both theologians and secular critical theorists over the need for new redemptive narratives to help the West rise from the cultural ashes after World War II. It remains debatable, however, if Bloch’s account of the principle of hope translates into the type of convictions and motivations needed to confront the rise of religious fundamentalism and ecological catastrophe. In sum, it is very hard to know how Bloch’s celebration of the ‘not-yet’ and ‘becoming’ translates into hope for everyday real-life challenges.”16 While Lerner wants to ground Bloch’s notion of hope through concrete resolutions,

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Rochelle Green depicts just how fundamental it already is in her essay, “Cultivating Hope in Feminist Praxis.” Her evaluation of Bloch’s importance to feminism continues the work that Caitriona Ní Dhúill has accomplished in her fine exploration, “Engendering the Future: Bloch’s Utopian Philosophy in Dialogue with Gender Theory.”17 In Green’s case, she draws parallels between Bloch’s notion of concrete utopia and Gabriel Marcel’s work on the phenomenology of hope.18 She demonstrates how both philosophers contribute to a hopeful feminist praxis and concludes her essay by stating: “Coupled with the Blochian insight that historical sense is integral to political hope, the Marcelian invitation to reconsider social ‘techniques of degradation’ facilitates insights for feminist politics. Bloch’s approach to political hope requires agents to see themselves as standing in relation to previous generations of political actors and their respective hopeful dreams or the future. Accordingly Bloch suggests concrete utopias be culled and separated from abstract utopias. … Once standing in relation to a history of struggle, it is increasingly difficult to disregard the need for struggle and also to feel utterly isolated. Bloch’s conception of hope requires political agents to find themselves rooted in a tradition of overcoming ideology and alienation.”19 All of the works I have cited to this point are just the tip of an iceberg of studies of hope as well as cries for hope. Without naming Bloch, hundreds of essays and books have appeared in the last ten years that deal with hope, often in relation to minority and human rights. Here, I am thinking of Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope (2006), Cornel West’s Hope on a Tightrope (2008), and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). It is Stevenson, a remarkable trial lawyer, who has argued that hope is the enemy of injustice, and justice is the enemy of hopelessness. In a very recent work, Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (2017), Kathryn Sikkink argues against pessimist critics and claims that hope has been successful in the work of human rights activists. Citing Albert Hirschman’s A Bias for Hope, in which he outlined possibilities for extending human rights, she remarks: “In the history of human rights, norm entrepreneurs both within the state and outside of it have moved ahead human rights agendas. Without the belief and the untiring activity of such reformongers, change won’t occur. If people around the world come to believe that their efforts on behalf of human rights are suspect or even counterproductive and retreat to inactivity, human rights’ progress could indeed

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stall or move backward. Hope sustains human rights work. But while hope is necessary, it is certainly not sufficient. Reasoned, well-informed patient hope is the goal.”20 Hope, as we all know, is not a commodity or even a quality. For Bloch, it was an inner force that we all have and that drives us to seek better working and living conditions. We hope because we are discontent and because we lack what is necessary to endow our lives with meaning. Since most of us cannot control our lives, we must live in hope or use hope to discover what it is that will benefit us and others. Bloch talks about both speculative and educated hope. By speculating, we can go beyond limits set for us by civilizing processes that impede our search and curtail our curiosity. Hope spurs us on. By educating or enlightening our hope, we can become conscious of how we must work with other people to obtain our wishes. We are dependent on other people, and consequently, our hope must be social, just, and ethical. Given tyrannical and corrupt governments all over the world, we cannot simply hope to live with present conditions that demand we acclimate to them and enjoy the benefits of whatever limited power that we have. To walk with an upright gait in the traces of Ernst Bloch or to walk with Bloch’s hope is not a bad idea to consider for the remainder of the twenty-first century, if we want to avoid catastrophes.

Notes







1. This is Chapter 3, “The Philosopher of Hope,” in Hope Without Optimism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 90–111. 2. Ibid., 93. 3.  William Deresiewicz, “The Business of Theory,” The Nation (January 29, 2004). https://www.thenation.com/article/business-theory/ (Consulted April 14, 2019). 4. It is clear that Eagleton does not know how to read German or French. There is not one reference to Bloch’s books or German essays on Bloch in German or French. He also lacks knowledge of Bloch’s earlier works such as The Spirit of Utopia and Heritage of Our Times. Eagleton tends to filter ideas that are not his own. To say the least, an elementary knowledge of German is necessary to grasp Bloch’s philosophy. 5. Ibid. 6.  Beat Dietschy, Doris Zeilinger, and Rainer Zimmermann, eds., BlochWörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Blochs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).

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7. See Ivan Boldyrev, Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 8. See Fredric Jameson, “Ernst Bloch and the Future,” in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 116–59. 9. Ibid., 120. 10. Ibid., 127. 11.  Peter Thompson, “Introduction,” in The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 5. 12.  Wayne Hudson, “Bloch and a Philosophy of the Proterior,” in The Privatization of Hope, 33. 13. Catherine Moir, “The Education of Hope,” in The Privatization of Hope, 157–58. 14. See www.bloch-akademie.de and www.talheimer.de/presse/200050729. html. 15. Franesca Vidal and Welf Schröter, “Can We Hope to Walk Tall?” in The Privatization of Hope. 297. 16.  Akiba Lerner, “Redemptive Transgressions: The Dialectical Evolution of Hope and Freedom in the West,” in Rachelle Green, ed., Theories of Hope: Exploring Alternative Affective Dimensions of Human Experience (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 86. 17. See Ní Dhúill, “Engendering the Future,” in The Privatization of Hope, 144–63. 18. See Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951). 19. Green, “Cultivating Hope in Feminist Praxis,” in Theories of Hope, 124. 20. Kathryn Sikkink, Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 20.

Bibliography

Primary Sources I. Bloch’s Works in German Gesamtausgabe, 16 Bde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. This collection of 16 volumes is also known as the Werkausgabe and includes the following: 1. Spuren. 2. Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution. 3. Geist der Utopie (1923). 4. Erbschaft dieser Zeit. 5. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 6. Naturrecht und menschliche Würde. 7. Das Materialismusproblem—seine Geschichte und Substanz. 8. Subjekt-Objekt—Erläuterungen zu Hegel. 9. Literarische Aufsätze. 10. Philosophische Aufsätze zur objektiven Phantasie. 11. Politische Messungen—Pestzeit Vormärz. 12. Zwischenwelten in der Philosophiegeschichte (Aus Leipziger Vorlesungen). 13. Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie. 14. Atheismus im Christentum. 15. Experimentum Mundi—Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis. 16. Geist der Utopie (facsimilie of 1918 edition).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5

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190  Bibliography There is also an Ergänzungsband (additional volume) containing Tendenz—Latenz—Utopie. Individual Volumes of Bloch’s Works Were Published as Follows: Geist der Utopie. Munich, 1918. Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution. Munich, 1921. Durch die Wüste. Kritische Aufsätze. Berlin, 1923. Spuren. Berlin, 1930. Erbschaft dieser Zeit. Zurich, 1935. Freiheit und Ordnung. Abriß der Sozialutopien. New York, 1946. Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel. East Berlin, 1949. Expanded edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1962. Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke. East Berlin, 1952. Christian Thomasius. Ein deutschter Gelehrte ohne Misere. East Berlin, 1953. vol. I, East Berlin, 1954; vol. II, East Berlin, 1955; vol. III, East Berlin, 1959. Differenzierungen im Begriff Fortschritt. East Berlin, 1956. Naturrecht und menschliche Würde. Frankfurt am Main, 1961. Philosophische Grundfragen. Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins. Frankfurt am Main, 1961. Verfremdungen I. Frankfurt am Main, 1962. Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie. vol. I, Frankfurt am Main, 1963; vol. II, Frankfurt am Main, 1964. Verfremdungen II. Frankfurt am Main, 1964. Literarische Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main, 1965. Auswahl aus seinen Schriften. Ed. Hans Heinz Holz. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1967. Atheismus im Christentum. Frankfurt am Main, 1968. Philosophische Aufsätze zur objektiven Phantasie. Frankfurt am Main, 1969. Freiheit und Ordnung: Abriß der Sozialutopien. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969. Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz. Frankfurt am Main, 1970. Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz. Frankfurt am Main, 1972. Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Renaissance. Frankfurt am Main, 1972. Experimentum Mundi. Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. Zwischenwelten in der Philosophiegeschichte. Frankfurt am Main, 1977. Tendenz-Latenz-Utopie. Frankfurt am Main, 1978. Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang. Sechs Interviews mit Ernst Bloch. Ed. Arno Münster. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. Abschied von der Utopie?Vorträge. Ed. Hanna Gekle. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980.

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Logos der Materie: Eine Logik in Werden. Aus dem Nachlass 1923–1949. Ed. Gerardo Cunico. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Der unbemerkte Augenblick: Feuilletons für die Frankfurter Zeitung, 1916–1934. Ed. Ralf Becker. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007.

II. Books in English Chronologically Ordered Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. A Philosophy of the Future. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. On Karl Marx. Trans. John Maxwell. New York: Herder and Herder, 1971. Atheism in Christianity. Trans. J.T. Swann. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Trans. Peter Palmer. Intro. David Drew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Trans. and Ed. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Trans. Dennis J. Schmidt. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Heritage of Our Times. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Literary Essays. Trans. Andrew Joron and Others. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. The Spirit of Utopia. Trans. Anthony Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Traces. Trans. Anthony Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Atheism in Christianity. Trans. J.T. Swann. Intro. Peter Thompson. London: Verso, 2009. Avicenna and the Aristotellian Left. Trans. Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson. New York: Columbia University press, 2019.

Essays “Odysseus Did Not Die in Ithaca.” Trans. H. Loewy and G. Steiner, in: G. Steiner and R. Fagles, eds. Homer—A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1962. 81–85. “Man as Possibility.” Trans. W.R. White, Cross Currents 18 (Summer 1968): 273–83.

192  Bibliography “On the Threepenny Opera.” Trans. Sophie Wilkins, in: Maynard Solomon, ed. Marxism and Art. New York: Knopf, 1973. 576–78. “Causality and Finality as Active Objectifying Categories.” Trans. G. Ellard, Telos 21 (Fall 1974): 96–107. “A Jubilee for Renegades.” Trans. Nancy Vedder Shults, New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 17–25. “Dialectics and Hope.” Trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 9 (Fall 1976): 3–10. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” Trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22–38. Bloch, Ernst. “Discussing Expressionism.” Trans. Rodney Livingstone, in: Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism. London: Verso, 1977. 16–27. “Philosophy as Cabaret.” New Left Review 116 (July–August 1979): 94–96. “Theory-Praxis in the Long Run.” Trans. Wayne Hudson, in: R. Fitzgerald, ed. The Sources of Hope. London: Pergamon, 1979. 153–57. “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel.” Trans. Roswitha Mueller and Stephen Thaman, Discourse 2 (1980): 32–51.

Reference Works Adorno, Theodor W. “Bloch’s Spuren” in: Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, eds. Noten zur Literatur. Gesammelte Schriften. vol. 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. 233–50. ———. “Bloch’s ‘Traces’: The Philosophy of Kitsch.” New Left Review I/121 (1980): 49–62. Alter, Robert. “Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical Narrative” in: Regina Schwartz, ed. The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. ———. The World of Biblical Literature. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Anderson, Elizabeth. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Bal, Mieke. “The Bible as Literature: A Critical Escape.” Diacritics 16 (1986): 71–79. ———. “Dealing/With Women: Daughters in the Book of Judges” in: Regina Schwartz, ed. The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 16–39. Bahr, Hans Dieter, ed. Ernst Blochs Wirkung. Ein Arbeitsbuch zum 90.Geburtstag. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. ———. “The Literature of Hope: Ernst Bloch’s Philosophy and Its Impact on the Literature of the German Democratic Republic.” Acta neophilologica (1980): 11–26.

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Author Index

A Adams, Richard, 166 Adorno, Theodor, ix, 5–6, 10, 12, 22, 47, 103–105, 109, 110, 181 Alter, Robert, 101 Andersen, Hans Christian, 105, 124, 125, 150, 160, 170 Anderson, Elizabeth, 56–58 Andrevon, Jean-Pierre, 165, 166 B Bal, Mieke, 101 Bauman, Zygmunt, 56 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 92, 108, 111 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 22, 24, 47, 62, 181 Berghahn, Klaus, 179, 180 Bloch, Jan, viii, 12, 44 Bloch, Karola, viii, ix, 7, 9, 11, 12, 65, 76 Boella, Laura, 50 Boldyrev, Ivan, xiv, 180, 181 Brecht, Bertolt, 6, 12, 18, 25, 28

C Calvino, Italo, 114 Chase, Richard, 113 Cole, David, 77 D Derrida, Jacques, 40 Dietschy, Beat, 55, 75 Dumas, Philippe, 161 E Ende, Michael, 163–166 F Fetscher, Iring, 48, 161 Freud, Siegfried, 6, 30, 33, 127, 153 G Gelberg, Hans-Joachim, 161 Geoghegan, Vincent, 70, 182

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5

207

208  Author Index Grimm, Jacob, 25, 81, 92, 105, 106, 123, 170 Grimm, Wilhelm, 25, 81, 92, 105, 106, 123, 170 Gross, David, 62, 146 H Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 29, 48 Harich, Walter, 14, 15 Hartmann, Eduard von, 20, 74 Hegel, Georg Wilhlem Friedrich, 33, 34, 46, 57, 70, 125, 181 Heidegger, Martin, viii, 43–45, 48 Herman, Harriet, 158, 159 Hesse, Hermann, 46 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 25, 92, 105, 107, 150 Horkheimer, Max, ix, 12, 47 Hudson, Wayne, 88, 182 J Jameson, Fredric, 40, 181, 182 Jean, Georges, 151, 152, 170 K Kant, Immanuel, 33, 34 Kellner, Douglas, 146 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6 Krauss, Werner, 12, 13 Kushner, Tony, 171, 172 L Laboulaye, Édouard, 78, 80 Landmann, Michael, 18, 28, 47 Larrabeiti, Michael, 166–168 Lewis, C.S., 133, 150, 166 Löwy, Michael, 60, 61 Lukács,Georg, 2, 3, 5, 10, 14, 43, 46, 67, 76, 181

M Manlove, C.N., 143, 144 Marcuse, Herbert, 27, 47 Marx, Karl, 5, 6, 26, 39, 58, 70, 135 May, Karl, 25, 92, 156 Mayer, Hans, viii, 13 Moissard, Boris, 161 Münster, Arno, 45 N Nardo, Anna, 133 Negt, Oskar, viii, 48 P Piketty, Thomas, 57–59 Propp, Vladimir, 112 R Rabinbach, Anson, 46 Raulet, Gérard, 22, 48 Rehmann, Jan, 56 Rodari, Gianni, 170 Rosenfeld, Sophia, 81, 82 S Schiller, Friedrich, 25, 108 Schmidt, Burghart, 34, 48, 75 Scholem, Gerschom, 6 Sendak, Maurice, 171, 172 Simmel, Georg, 2, 3 Storr, Catherine, 161 Stritzky, Else von, 3, 50 T Thompson, Peter, 182, 183 Tolkien, J.R.R., 119–122, 129–136, 138–145, 166 Traub, Rainer, 118

Author Index

U Ueding, Gert, 31, 33, 76, 91, 125, 126, 156 Ungerer, Tomi, 160 V Vidal, Francesca, 183, 184 Vogt, Jochen, 62 W Weber, Max, 3, 25 Wieseltier, Leon, 43, 48 Wieser, Harald, 118

  209

Wild, Francesca, 71 Wilde, Oscar, 117, 150 Williams, Jay, 161 Y Yolen, Jane, 161, 171 Z Zeilinger, Doris, 61, 63, 83, 186 Zizek, Slavoj, 182 Zudeick, Peter, 23, 24, 61, 146

Subject Index

A American Revolution, 111 anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein), 6, 9, 14, 21, 25, 30, 32–35, 37, 39, 40, 54, 68, 77, 86, 88, 89, 91–95, 97, 98, 109, 110, 149–152, 174, 177 Arabian Nights, 25, 104 atheism, 97, 100, 134, 135 B Bible, 26, 85–89, 91, 93, 95–99, 101, 147, 170 Bildungsbürgertum, 25 C civilizing process, vii, 49, 50, 72, 151, 152, 157, 161, 169, 171, 172, 182, 186 Colportage, 36, 37, 68, 92, 105, 107, 108, 123, 146, 151, 154–156 community (Gemeinschaft), 2, 52, 78, 144, 146, 161, 170

concrete utopia, 19, 29, 32, 45, 46, 53, 73, 77, 83, 90, 111, 127, 136, 146, 158, 169, 184, 185 critical theory, ix D Dada movement, 4 detective story, 37 dialectics, 13, 23, 34, 71, 110, 135, 146, 158 Disney, 109, 143 E empty space (hohlraum), 19, 20 estrangement (Verfremdung), 6, 93, 127, 128, 130, 152, 183 F falsehood, 56, 78–82 fantasy, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 95–99, 107, 109, 122–124, 126,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 J. Zipes, Ernst Bloch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21174-5

211

212  Subject Index 129–134, 136, 141–145, 153, 160, 166, 168, 170, 183 Frankfurt School, ix, 10, 12, 25, 67, 156 French Revolution, 28, 47, 111 H heimlich, 152 Heritage of Our Times (Erbschaft dieser Zeit), 6, 7, 20, 48–52, 55, 56, 59, 120, 155 Hobbit, The, 129, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141–144 Home (Heimat), 18, 29, 45, 90, 97, 152 I inequality, xiv, xv, 2, 7, 52–54, 57–59, 69, 127, 128, 142, 182 J Jewish Messianism, 46 K Kitsch (jumk, delusion), 37, 90, 91, 95, 151, 156 L Land of Cockaigne, 115 Latency (Latenz), 9, 17, 20, 29, 39, 66, 71, 78, 125 M Marxism, 5, 9, 14, 16, 21, 22, 26, 30, 40, 44, 46, 47, 55, 67, 88, 97, 98, 135, 178, 179, 181

Merseyside Women’s Liberation Movement, 159 Messianism, 21, 29, 89, 93, 94, 98 N Nazism, 43, 45, 52, 53, 55, 120 non-egalitarian, xiv non-synonymous, xiv not-yet-become (noch-nicht-geworden), 3, 12, 31, 33, 90, 91, 122 not-yet-conscious (noch-nicht-Bewußt), 3, 12, 14, 21, 30, 31, 33, 90, 91 Novum, 22, 36, 46, 91, 93 O obscenity, 48, 56 P praxis, 19, 71, 74–76, 78, 88, 89, 139, 177, 185 pugnacious, pugnacity, xv, 6, 17, 25, 44, 48, 49, 60, 66, 67, 69, 71–73, 75–77, 81, 82, 99, 150, 179 R reification, 5, 22, 49, 72, 134, 183, 184 reutilization (Umfunktionierung), 20, 36, 38 reutilized (umfunktioniert), 20, 49, 53, 184 Russian Revolution (October Revolution), 19, 46, 50, 67, 69, 111

Subject Index

S Schlaraffenland, 114, 115 Spuren (traces), 6, 50, 88, 179 Stalin, Stalinism, vii, ix, 9, 11, 13–18, 25, 43–47, 56, 66, 136, 178, 179 Staunen, 22, 23 Stifter, 93, 94 T truth, 9, 33, 36, 38, 40, 49, 71, 77–82, 97, 98, 125, 151 U Überschuss (surplus), 36 Ungleichzeitigkeit, xiv, 2, 52–54, 57, 81

  213

unheimlich, 152 upright gait (aufrechter Gang), 18, 19, 28, 29, 44, 56, 60, 67, 73, 93, 119, 135, 142, 186 utopia, viii, 4, 5, 8, 12, 22, 32, 33, 37, 51, 66, 68, 93, 94, 103–105, 109–111, 113, 114, 117, 122, 135, 142, 144–146, 153, 178, 180, 181 W Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 162