Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries Locating Utopian Messianism [Hardcover]

Ernst Bloch and His Contemporariesis a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst Bloch's early and later thought. It fills an important gap in research on the history of German thought in the 20th century by reconstructing the contexts of Bloch's philosophy, while focusing on his contemporaries - Georg Luk?cs, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ernst Bloch's influential ideas include his theory of utopian consciousness, his resolute inclination to merge aesthetics and politics, rehabilitation of hope, and atheistic conception of Christianity. Although Bloch's major early texts,Spirit of UtopiaandTraces, have recently been translated into English, and there has been renewed interest in Bloch over the last 15 years, he is still relatively unknown compared to other left German-Jewish intellectuals. Ivan Boldyrev places Bloch's often enigmatic prose within contexts more familiar to English-speaking readers, and outlines the most important messages in Bloch's legacy still relevant today to European intellectual discourse, in particular aesthetics and philosophy of history.

Introduction
1. Ernst Bloch's Philosophical Prose
2. Heidelberg's Apostles: Bloch Reading Luk?cs Reading Bloch
3. Eschatology and Messianism: Bloch with Buber, Landauer, and Rosenzweig
4. The Form of the Messianic: Bloch and Benjamin
5. The Void of Utopia and the Violence of the System: Bloch contra Adorno
Conclusion: Drawing the Utopian Line
Bibliography
Index

Ivan Boldyrevis Associate Professor at Higher School of Economics, Russia and Visiting Scholar at Humboldt University, Germany.