Traces / Ernst Bloch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bloch, Ernst, Author.

Series:

Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (200 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Written between 1910 and 1929, Traces is considered Ernst Bloch's most important work next to The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia. This book, which collects aphorisms, essays, stories, and anecdotes, enacts Bloch's interest in showing how attention to "traces"—to the marks people make or to natural marks—can serve as a mode of philosophizing. In an elegant example of how the literary can become a privileged medium for philosophy, Bloch's chief philosophical invention is to begin with what gives an observer pause—what seems strange and astonishing. He then follows such traces into an awareness of the individual's relations to himself or herself and to history, conceived as a thinking into the unknown, the "not yet," and thus as utopian in essence. Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar, and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Not Enough

Sleeping

Drawn Out

Always in It

Mingling

Sing-Song

Slight Change

Lamp and Closet

Learning Good Habits

The “Mark!”

Situation

The Poor

Filth

The Gift

Different Needs

Games, Regrettably

The Useful Member

Shaker of Strawberries

Bread and Games

Narrow-Minded Comrades

Disturbing Whim

Fate

Passing It Forward

The Negro

The Watershed

No Face

Comte de Mirabeau

Rich Devil, Poor Devil

The Kitten as David

Triumphs of Misrecognition

Scribe at the Mairie

The Beautiful Appearance

The Rococo of Fate

Spirit Still Taking Shape

The Motif of Parting

Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile

Pippa Passes

The Long Gaze

Reunion Without Connection

The Muse of Restitution

Raphael Without Hands

Existence

Just Now

Dark by Us

The Fall into the Now

The Spur of Work

No Free Lunch

Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train

Silence and Mirrors

Ways Not to Be Seen

Imminent Boredom

Moment and Image

Potemkin’s Signature

Incognito to Oneself

Motifs of Concealment

Just Knock

The Corner of the Blanket

Short Excursion

Terror and Hope

Excursus: Human and Wax Figure

Nearby: Inn of the Insane

Tableau with Curve

Some Patterns from the Left Side

The Twice-Disappearing Frame

The Motif of the Door

Things

Half Good

The Next Tree

Flower and Unflower

The Leyden Jar

The First Locomotive

The Urban Peasant

The House of Day

Montages of a February Evening

An Odd Flâneur

Eating Olives Precisely

Making a Point

The Reverse of Things

Greeting and Appearance

Motifs of Temptation

Appendix: No Man’s Land

A Russian Fairy Tale?

The Clever Way Out

Disappointment with Amusement

The Invisible Hand

Tales of White Magic

Wonder

The Mountain

Dead and Usable

The Pearl

Notes

Crossing Aesthetics

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-1932-X

OCLC:

1294424469