Ernst Bloch

Räume sind keine natürlichen Gegebenheiten, sondern müssen in ihrer »Gemachtheit« und Veränderbarkeit betrachtet, und damit als Dispositive verstanden werden, mit denen sich Fragen von Macht und Hierarchie, Gleichheit und Gerechtigkeit oder Teilhabe und Ausgrenzung stellen lassen. Damit ist die Frage des Raumes im Grundsatz offen für die Diskussion, ob Räume so sind, wie sie sein sollten – und wem sie dienen? Ermöglichen sie ein lebenswertes Leben oder übersetzen sie Besitz- und Machtverhältnisse, Ungleichheiten und Ungerechtigkeiten bloß in eine spatiale Aufteilung? Normativer Referenzpunkt dieser Fragen kann gleichwohl nur die Menschenwürde sein. Mit den neueren Raumdebatten ergibt sich damit die Möglichkeit einer weitgreifenden Aktualisierung und Kontextualisierung des Würdebegriffs, die bisher nicht versucht worden ist.

Klugheit sorgt für Können. Auf diesen Verdacht aufbauend, untersucht Emanuel Seitz das Wesen der Klugheit von ihren Anfängen in der antiken Philosophie bis zu den Neuinterpretationen Heideggers. Er befreit Klugheit von ihrem schlechten Ruf, bloß ein instrumentelles Kalkül zu sein. Ihre eigentliche Aufgabe ist die Beratung über die Form des Lebens und den geschickten Umgang mit der Welt. Der Versuch, menschliches Handeln klug zu denken, bringt die blinden Flecken in den modernen Theorien über Moral, Politik und Gesellschaft ans Licht: Er beleuchtet das Rätsel des Übens, erforscht den Hintersinn der List und erkundet, was den Menschen jenseits des Notwendigen möglich ist.

https://www.klostermann.de/Seitz-Emanuel-List-und-Form

This book offers a new systematic interpretation of Ernst Bloch's philosophy via a historically contextualised close reading of his book Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). It demonstrates how understanding Bloch as a speculative materialist in the specific sense outlined in that work addresses three common misconceptions of his work as ontologically anti-Hegelian, epistemologically pre-critical, and politically totalitarian. This image of Bloch originates with Jürgen Habermas' 1961 review of Das Prinzip Hoffnung, which was published a decade before Das Materialismusproblem appeared. Engaging critically with Habermas' account and its subsequent reception, the book radically revises the scholarly narrative surrounding his work.

In the German-speaking world, the memory of the Reformation has often been closely connected to the theory of German historical exceptionalism, the idea that Germany's historical development took a 'special path' (Sonderweg) to modernity. Yet considering how much attention has been paid to the question of a German Sonderweg and the significance of Weimar as a turning point in the story, scholars have paid little attention to the ideology of exceptionalism in the Weimar Republic itself. This article contributes to the historiography of the Sonderweg debate by examining the complex ways in which the poet Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) traced a narrative of German exceptionalism back to the Reformation era. It argues that these writers appealed to the intellectual and political legacies of the Reformation in an attempt to explain the formative events of their own time: the First World War, and the Russian and German Revolutions. The divergent ideological conclusions they drew reveals much about the conflicted atmosphere of Weimar thought, in which German intellectuals struggled to bridge the gap between crisis and tradition.

This article explores the relationship between Bloch’s putative status as an expressionist writer, his Nietzsche reception, and the philosophy of language that I argue is implicit in his work. The first part of the paper claims that the central impulse at the heart of the expressionist enterprise—the ‘spirit of expressionism’—was the Nietzschean insight that language, whether verbal or visual, does not transparently represent a given or immutable external truth, but rather thought and meaning are deeply dependent on the form of the material expressions they receive. I argue that this idea both underpinned Nietzsche’s philosophy of language and animated the generation of artists and thinkers to which Bloch belonged. The second part of the paper then situates Bloch’s early reception of Nietzsche in the broader context of his attempt to create a materialist metaphysics. It argues that Bloch’s materialism was in important respects born out of his interpretation of Nietzsche’s insight into the ultimately constructed nature of meaning, which Bloch interpreted through a Marxian lens as a call to construct meaning subjectively and collectively through social action. Based on these insights, in the final part of the paper, I reconstruct Bloch’s philosophy of language as he develops it initially in Geist der Utopie, and more expansively in his late work Experimentum Mundi.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image, this paper reads Ernst Bloch's utopian Heimat figure as poetically staging the temporal dialectics of materialist history. Bloch combines romantic, messianic and materialist temporalities in a critique of the modern progress narrative, which inscribes historicity in the mere next-ness of each now. The continued oppression, exploitation and alienation of human beings under conditions of modern capitalism stands as testimony to the falseness of this assumption. Far from the simplistic teleology with which materialist theories of history in general, and Bloch's in particular, have so often been identified, utopia as Heimat sets up a complex spatiotemporal matrix which fixes the present as the locus of possibility of transformative action. Only by activating the unfulfilled claims of the past in the interest of a more just future can human beings occupy utopia: that is the meaning which I argue Bloch's Heimat image brings to bear on contemporary materialist thought and practice. 2

This article challenges the restrictive association of critical theory with the Frankfurt School by exploring the differential reception of Hegel by German critical thinkers on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. In the West, Theodor Adorno held Hegelian 'identity thinking' partly responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism. Meanwhile in the East, Ernst Bloch turned Hegel into a weapon against the communist regime. The difference between Adorno and Bloch's positions is shown to turn on the relationship between speculation, dialectics and critique. Whereas for Adorno Hegelian speculation was the root of dangerous identity thinking, Bloch saw the repression of speculative thought as a cornerstone of totalitarianism. However, it is argued that ultimately Bloch and Adorno were united in their reception of Hegel by a shared understanding that the goal of critical theory, namely the transformation of the social totality, could not be achieved without utopian speculation.

This chapter provides an overview of Ernst Bloch's intellectual development and that of his key concept, the principle of hope. Situating Bloch's ideas among those of his Frankfurt School contemporaries, it makes a case for considering his utopian Marxism as a form of critical theory.

Ernst Bloch's recourse to speculative philosophy has guaranteed him the position of a perpetual outsider in the history of Western Marxism. When Jürgen Habermas described Bloch's philosophy in 1960 as a 'speculative materialism' , it was to denounce him for crossing the boundaries of critical thought set down as much by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as by Marx's critique of political economy. This article argues that Bloch's speculative materialism deserves to be reassessed. Contrary to Habermas's assertion that speculation is divorced from critique, I argue with Bloch that (1) the speculative hypotheses we unavoidably use to interpret the world around us inform our political beliefs and actions, and (2) to stifle speculative thinking as that creative and inquisitive enterprise which questions and transgresses the given is not only a 'crime against reason' , as Hilary Putnam once claimed, but also a crime against freedom.

This article contributes to the debate about the 'speculative turn' in continental philosophy by comparing the speculative materialisms of Ernst Bloch and contemporary French thinker Quentin Meillassoux. Tracing divergent genealogies in their concepts of both 'speculation' and 'materialism', it makes a case for incorporating Bloch into these contemporary discussions in order to enrich the potential of speculative materialism as a tool for theorising social and political action.

EDITION 19-2 Schriften aus dem Nachlass Wolfgang Harichs / mit weiteren Dokumenten und Materialien hrsg. von Andreas Heyer.-Ba-den-Baden : Tectum-Verlag.-22 cm.-Aufnahme nach Bd. 9 [#3641] [#5862] Bd. 1. Frühe Schriften Teilbd. 3. Der Weg zu einem modernen Marxismus.-2018.-S. 1243-2204 : Ill.-ISBN 978-3-8288-4125-3 : EUR 59.95 Aus der Reihe der nachgelassenen Schriften Wolfgang Harichs 1 bietet die-ser dritte Teilband der frühen Schriften 2 sehr viel heterogenes Material, auf das hier im wesentlichen summarisch verwiesen werden muß, um einen groben Überblick zu erhalten. Auf fast 1000 Seiten werden journalistische Artikel, Verlagsgutachten und Briefe Harichs mitgeteilt, die insgesamt ein sehr umfassendes Bild seines Schaffen in der zweiten Hälfte der 1940er und der ersten Hälfte der 1950er Jahre bieten. 3 Der Weg zu einem moder-nen Marxismus, wie es der Herausgeber Andreas Heyer den Band betitelt, wird hier nicht systematisch entwickelt oder in grundlegenden Texten dar-gestellt, sondern ergibt sich aus vielen kleinteiligen Auseinandersetzungen. Was bringt der Band? Hier finden sich die Teile VIII bis XVIII, die wie folgt aufgefüllt wurden: Der Band beginnt mit den naturgemäß kritischen Texten Harichs über Ernst 1 Zuletzt erschien: Schriften aus dem Nachlass Wolfgang Harichs / mit weiteren Dokumenten und Materialien hrsg. von Andreas Heyer.-Baden-Baden : Tectum-Verlag.-22 cm.-Aufnahme nach Bd. 9 [3641] [#5862] [#6240] Bd. 10. Nicolai Hartmann : der erste Lehrer.-2018.-994 S. : Ill.-ISBN 978-3-8288-4124-6 : EUR 64.95.-Rez.: IFB 19-2 http://www.informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=9783 2 Der zweite Teilband von Band 1 wurde bereits besprochen: Schriften aus dem Nachlass Wolfgang Harichs / mit weiteren Dokumenten und Materialien hrsg.

Resumen: El objetivo del presente artículo es el estudio de las interpretaciones del Kitsch en las obras de Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer y Walter Benjamin durante la República de Weimar y los primeros años del régimen nacionalsocialista. Se analizan también las críticas filosófico-políticas de estos autores a las representaciones burguesas del sentimiento en tanto elementos determinantes de la construcción ideológica burguesa.

What we call here the 'Marrano phenomenon' is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution, but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities. Our aim, however, is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), i.e., the mostly Spanish and Portguese Jews of the 15th and 16th centuries, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism 'undercover': such an approach already exists and has been developed within the field of historical research. We rather want to apply the 'Marrano metaphor' to explore the fruitful area of mixture and crossover which allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication-without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, which they subsequently developed as a 'hidden tradition'. What is of special interest to us is the modern development of the non-normative forms of religious thinking located on the borderline between Christianity and Judaism, from Spinoza to Derrida.

Wie manifestiert sich der abstrakte und oftmals unterbestimmte Begriff der menschlichen Würde in konkreten räumlichen Konstellationen – etwa öffentlichen Gebäuden oder in einem Hospiz?
Die Beiträge des Bandes beleuchten interdisziplinär und dialogisch die unterschiedliche Auflösung dieses Spannungsverhältnisses zwischen Räumen und Würde. Dabei werden bewusst die formalen Schranken wissenschaftlichen Publizierens überwunden und in Form und Inhalt ein Publikum auch jenseits des universitären Umfeldes für den Themenbereich angesprochen.

“Dreams of Matter. Ernst Bloch on Religion as Organized Fantasy,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie nr 3/2019, Vol. 73, pp. 333-361 (forthcoming in September 2019).
The aim of this essay will be to reconstruct Bloch’s philosophy of religion as the defense of fantasy. For Bloch, religious systems, centered around fantastical images, constitute unique forms in which matter itself can express the most intimate dreams about its utopian, not yet realized possibilities. By creating religious imagery, the human mind, itself being a part of the material world, allows matter to become aware of its own latent tendency which so far can only come to the fore as a fantastical image. This day-dreaming, therefore, is not just an opium of the matter, creating merely an escapist illusion of freedom. It is also and foremost – as Marx stated in the introduction to his
famous essay on Hegel – the only protest against the oppressiveness of reality principle which still rules the material universe.

Dinerstein re-evaluates the place of the theoretical and of critical theory in today's praxis. By pointing to the sphere of social reproduction as the 'site' of both new forms of class struggle and the renewal of critical theory, Dinerstein argues that critical theory today should be based on Bloch's philosophy of hope. Despite the critical theorist's fear of the positivisation of social struggles, Dinerstein argues that the fight against Barbarism is not only possible but already exists in the form of struggles for alternative forms of life. In a context of crisis of the social reproduction, these struggles cannot not be regarded as positive: they are critical affirmations that affirm life as a form of negating a totality of destruction in a 'contradictory' manner (see Gun 1994). To her, while Adorno's negative dialectics remarkably prevents dialectical closure of the capitalist totality from taking place theoretically, negative dialectics cannot open onto a 'world with Front' in practice. And this is what is needed today.