Adorno prized Bloch’s Utopian Spirit for fusing philosophy with advanced literature

Evidence

In the same year, Adorno, having heard that Bloch was close to Lukács, read Bloch’s Utopian Spirit. Looking back, he wrote: The dark brown book, four hundred pages long, printed on heavy paper, promised something of what one had hoped for from medieval books and of what I sensed as a child in the pigskin-bound Heldenschatz, a late work on magic from the eighteenth century … It was a philosophy which could stand shoulder to shoulder with the most advanced literature, which had not been schooled into the despicable resignation of method. Ideas like the inward journey' [Abfahrt nach innen], which lay on the narrow boundary between a magic formula and a theoretical proposition, were evidence of this. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 264</cite> (#expands`, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bloch’s Utopian Spirit offered Adorno a magic-inflected philosophy beyond method — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 264; Adorno read avant-garde literary form as anticipating a free, reconciled society; Adorno rejected Bloch for elevating hope to a philosophical principle (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Bloch’s Utopian Spirit offered Adorno a magic-inflected philosophy beyond method #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 264
• Adorno rejected Bloch for elevating hope to a philosophical principle #contradicts (0.78)
• Adorno read avant-garde literary form as anticipating a free, reconciled society #expands (0.75)
• Artistic categories for Bloch become modes of Utopian realization at the ontological level #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 290