Traces / Edition 1

by Ernst Bloch, Anthony A. Nassar

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804741194
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2006
Series:	Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) was one of the great philosophers and political intellectuals of twentieth-century Germany. Among his works to have appeared in English are The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford UniversityPress, 2000), Literary Essays (Stanford UniversityPress, 1998), The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (1987), and The Principle of Hope (1986).

Table of Contents

	Not Enough	1
	Sleeping	1
	Drawn Out	1
	Always in It	2
	Mingling	2
	Sing-Song	2
	Slight Change	3
	Lamp and Closet	4
	Learning Good Habits	5
	The "Mark!"	5
	Situation
	The Poor	9
	Filth	9
	The Gift	9
	Different Needs	10
	Games, Regrettably	10
	The Useful Member	14
	Shaker of Strawberries	15
	Bread and Games	15
	Narrow-Minded Comrades	16
	Disturbing Whim	17
	Fate
	Passing It Forward	21
	The Negro	21
	The Watershed	22
	No Face	24
	Comte de Mirabeau	25
	Rich Devil, Poor Devil	29
	The Kitten as David	30
	Triumphs of Misrecognition	31
	Scribe at the Mairie	36
	The Beautiful Appearance	37
	The Rococo of Fate	39
	Spirit Still Taking Shape	42
	The Motif of Parting	51
	Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved	56
	Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile	58
	Pippa Passes	59
	The Long Gaze	61
	Reunion Without Connection	62
	The Muse of Restitution	64
	Raphael Without Hands	66
	Existence
	Just Now	71
	Dark by Us	71
	The Fall into the Now	72
	The Spur of Work	73
	No Free Lunch	76
	Ten Years' Jail, Seven-Meter Train	79
	Silence and Mirrors	80
	Ways Not to Be Seen	82
	Imminent Boredom	83
	Moment and Image	87
	Potemkin's Signature	88
	Incognito to Oneself	89
	Motifs of Concealment	91
	Just Knock	97
	The Corner of the Blanket	97
	Short Excursion	98
	Terror and Hope	99
	Excursus: Human and Wax Figure	101
	Nearby: Inn of the Insane	105
	Tableau with Curve	106
	Some Patterns from the Left Side	108
	The Twice-Disappearing Frame	113
	The Motif of the Door	116
	Things
	Half Good	123
	The Next Tree	123
	Flower and Unflower	124
	The Leyden Jar	124
	The First Locomotive	124
	The Urban Peasant	125
	The House of Day	126
	Montages of a February Evening	128
	An Odd Flaneur	130
	Eating Olives Precisely	132
	Making a Point	133
	The Reverse of Things	134
	Greeting and Appearance	136
	Motifs of Temptation	140
Appendix	No Man's Land	147
	A Russian Fairy Tale?	149
	The Clever Way Out	151
	Disappointment with Amusement	154
	The Invisible Hand	155
	Tales of White Magic	159
	Wonder	169
	The Mountain	171
	Dead and Usable	171
	The Pearl	172
	Notes	175

Editorial Reviews

"...this is a literary masterpiece. Overall, it is a must for anyone interested in Bloch's work."—CHOICE

"This is an important addition to the corpus of Bloch's writings in English." —Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus Philosophiques

From the Publisher

"This is an important addition to the corpus of Bloch's writings in English."

Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus Philosophiques

"...this is a literary masterpiece. Overall, it is a must for anyone interested in Bloch's work."

CHOICE