Ernst Bloch’s collection of discussions with the greats of his time

Where is the ardor that animated the great utopias of thought and history, while, instead, we are witnessing the horror of a Soviet-style frustration, also rooted in the failure of the Bolshevik dream and the utopia of real socialism? What pushes Plato already in the fourth century. to. C. to outline the ideal State in the Republic? Or Tommaso Moro, twenty centuries later, to envisage his Utopia, or, again, Campanella to shape the City of the Sun? Is it just a desire to escape, or rather a desire to fulfill and, likewise, to return to that ideal homeland that never was?

The answers to these questions are disseminated throughout the entire work of Ernst Bloch, of which Speranza e utopia, Conversazioni 1964-1975 (Mimesis, 2022, 142 pp.) is in the bookshop, which collects discussions, hitherto unpublished in Italy, between the German thinker of Jewish origins and contemporary philosophers, such as Lukács and Adorno. Bloch was a Marxist, not an epigone, only in debt of gratitude to Marxism. He denounces positivism and exacerbated technicalism as anti-revolutionary; examines the relationship between structure and superstructure, as well as traces the meaning of his utopia: it must be vigilant, since it is “the dream of a thing” that is transfused into the warm current of Marxism, inhabits the intimacy of matter and dialectically opens it up to a future that has not yet become: it is the hope of fulfillment and the possibility of redemption from the “opacity of reality”. If then the escape does not flee, but investigates a subjective and obscure path, intimate and at the same time unknown, what have we lost together with utopia, and what binds utopia and escape? Where has the “anticipating consciousness” gone, or rather the ability to see, beyond the fact, that ambiguous background in which the possibilities of the “best” whisper and in whose clairvoyant womb a “new life” could germinate?

The philosopher of the Principle of Hope and of the Spirit of Utopia sees far precisely because he is already far away, he walks in the desert, in the marginal, as Micaela Latini argues in The Possible and the Marginal (Mimesis, 2005). He is looked upon with suspicion by his friends. The numerous similarities between Benjamin’s Berlin childhood, with whom he lives a symbiotic relationship, and Spuren (Traces) lead the scholar of the Kabbalah and Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem, as well as his friend, to think of plagiarism. However, his work, still too neglected, redeems itself.

Son of the Germany of the Jugendstil (of which he rejects the decoratorism) and of German Expressionism, Bloch dreams with his eyes wide open and warns us: the unconscious is not only the repressed, nor is it necessarily collective, but it is the latency of what will be surrounded by danger. In 1933, with the advent of Nazism, he emigrated to Switzerland, where, in 1935, Legacy of this time was published.

The author’s mystical messianism, which affirms that only the atheist can be a good Christian, teaches us to sing and to tell tales, leaning over the edge of a sparkling well, where the figures of dreams come out. From that dark glow, the song expands through the porosity of the material, blown in by a telluric resonance. As the soul seeks itself in its dawning, so Orpheus drives away the shadows and “has only this very intimate Eurydice as his goal” (Spirit of Utopia). But is music a myth? Indeed, there is a “music within music”. What was once what is now music? What dream lives behind dreams? As the counterpoint orchestrates the notes, so the utopian quality of time stratifies and superimposes the eras in the vortex of a music that veils his childhood, and a Christ of morals veils the Christ of knowledge.