The politics of metaphysics: Adorno and Bloch on utopia and immortality

Abstract

The hypothesis underlying this article is that any narrative of the emergence of modernity—as the one developed by Blumenberg, for example—that leaves behind the eschatological component is incomplete, since it removes from the tradition of modernity a great deal of the Protestant religious experience which shows deep obsession with the thought of the end of the world. Through a confrontation between Adorno and Bloch, the article argues that the notions of utopia and human liberation imply logically the idea of immortality.

For Adorno and Bloch the dream of immortality is the dream of matter; both of them believe that the act of human transcendence must cling on to the bodily stuff out of which we are made. Yet, whereas Bloch postulates the positive existence of a transcendent space, Adorno eschews any ontological commitment. The article argues in favour of Adorno's negative approach, showing that, after Auschwitz, what both philosophers take as the truth‐content of theology cannot be automatically transferred into dialectical materialism.

Notes

c/o Dr Francesco Trivieri, Universita della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica, Ponte Pietro Bucci, 87036 Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy. Email: [email protected]

See “Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Foundation of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 6.

Ibid., 10.

Ibid., 10.

Ibid., 16.

T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 377–8.

See M. A. Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 104–5.

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. III (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 1169.

Ibid., 1170.

See Ernst Bloch, “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” in Literary Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 339–45.

See Ernst Bloch, “Consciousness as Doom,” in Literary Essays, 51–6.

Adorno, Negative Dialectic, 381.

Ibid., 380.

Ibid., 381.

Ibid., 381.

Ibid., 362.

Ibid., 368–73. For an interpretation of the section of Negative Dialectic “Dying Today,” see J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 423–9.

Adorno, Negative Dialectic, 372.

Ibid., 373.

Ibid., 375.

Ibid., 380.

Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. III, 1175.

Ibid., 1307.

Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. II, 636.

Ibid., 646.

R. H. Roberts, Hope and Its Hieroglyph (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).

Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. III, 1192.

Ibid., 1196.

See Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 191–2.

See W. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982), 150.

Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 235–62.

Ibid., 260.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Tassone

c/o Dr Francesco Trivieri, Universita della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica, Ponte Pietro Bucci, 87036 Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy. Email: [email protected]