Bloch’s Utopian Spirit offered Adorno a magic-inflected philosophy beyond method
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. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 264
Categorization
- XREF: Links to the Frankfurt School’s lifelong ambivalence about method — from this early resistance to ‘the resignation of method’ through Adorno’s later aphoristic writing. — connects to: Adorno valued Bloch’s philosophy for resisting method’s resignation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 264; Adorno’s micrological-Messianic thought linked him to Benjamin, Kracauer, and Bloch — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 12; Bloch proposed superseding fascist euphoria rather than condemning or exploiting it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 768 (+9 more)
Broader Connections
- Artistic categories for Bloch become modes of Utopian realization at the ontological level
#expands(0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 290 - Adorno’s essayistic free thought was a utopia that avoided empirical engagement
#expands(0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2287 - Music represents Adorno’s utopia of reconciled mind and nature
#expands(0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1263 - Adorno holds that eliminating death is the crucial test of utopian consciousness
#expands(0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1518 - Adorno’s weak utopia dissolves fixed social roles rather than institutionalizing them
#expands(0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2559 - Adorno framed Negative Dialectics as philosophy extending itself from within
#expands(0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2520 - Adorno reconceived philosophy as the teaching of the correct life rather than epistemology
#expands(0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 835 - Adorno reframes philosophy as reflecting on missed revolutionary practice
#expands(0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1210