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Ernst Bloch

'Bloch is one of the rare figures apropos of whom we can say: fundamentally, with regard to what really matters, he was right, he remains our contemporary, he may be belongs even more to our time than to his own.'
(Slavoj Žižek, The Privatization of Hope, 2013)

Born in 1885 in Ludwigshafen, by the time of his death in 1977, Ernst Bloch’s life had spanned the major events of the 20th century. Brought up as an assimilated Jew, he was confirmed as a Christian at the end of the 19th century but on the same day declared his lifelong commitment to atheism.

Intellectually precocious, Bloch was already publishing philosophical essays as a teenager. He studied at the Universities of Munich and Würzburg and later became a member of the Simmel and Weber circles. An engaged opponent of the First World War, he spent the period from 1914 to 1919 in exile in Switzerland. During the Weimar Republic, his commitment to Marxism and revolution placed him very high on the Nazi death list and in 1933, he was forced to emigrate to the USA where in 1959, he published Das Prinzip Hoffnung.

Bloch returned to East Germany in 1949 intending to help create the first socialist country on German soil, but soon found himself on the wrong side of the Communist authorities, for whom his unorthodox Hegelian and utopian views as well as his intellectual influence on the oppositional Harich group undermined the dogmatic orthodoxy of Stalinism. Finding himself on a lecture tour when the Berlin Wall went up, he gave up all hope for the GDR and stayed in the west. He was awarded an honorary chair in philosophy at Tübingen, where, in the 1960s and as a great friend of Rudi Dutschke, he had an influence on the radical student movement, which was attracted to his unorthodoxy and belief in the continuing relevance of hope, utopia, and the practice and theory of liberation.

In the period immediately following his death, Bloch sunk into obscurity, though his influence remained: Theodor Adorno, for example, cited the impact of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1918) on all his own writing. Recent years have seen a growing interest in Bloch as questions of liberation and emancipation, hope, alternative futures and social, economic and cultural transformation have resurfaced and as, in European thought and beyond, postmodern descriptives are being rethought in a changed global cultural, intellectual, religious and political landscape.

The Centre

Founded in 2007, the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies has played an important role in the renaissance of interest in Bloch’s philosophy. Part-funded by a British Academy Research Development Award, the Centre has demonstrated the undisputed contribution Ernst Bloch made to continental, radical and Marxist philosophy in the 20th century and has acted as a catalyst for the noticeable growth in interest in his thought. 

The Centre has hosted international conferences in 2009 and 2010, organised the AHRC research network 'The Return of Religion', lectures, talks and seminars in conjunction with the German department at Sheffield University, where the Centre was based until transferring in 2016 to the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies. 

The Centre’s members collectively head the 'Bloch Bibliothek' project, which aims to provide a translation and commentary on Bloch’s collected work, and which involves a growing group of translators and scholars nationally and internationally. 

The Centre is a partner of the Prokhorov Centre for the Study of Central and Eastern European Intellectual and Cultural History at Sheffield University, and has links with universities and research centres abroad (Bochum, Landau, Sydney, Tübingen) as well as the Ernst Bloch Archive in Ludwigshafen.

To find out more, contact Professor Johan Siebers.


Useful links:  Ernst Bloch Zentrum & Archiv | Ernst-Bloch-Gesellschaft | Ernst-Bloch-Assoziation

 

People

Cat Moir

Cat Moir is Lecturer in German at the University of Sydney. She completed her doctorate on materialism in the context of the contemporary revival of materialisms in the humanities in 2013, which was published in 2020 as Ernst Bloch's Speculative Materialism in the 'Bloch Bibliothek' series, published by Brill. Rethinking Ernst Bloch, edited with Henk de Berg (Sheffield) appeared in 2023 as part of the Brill ‘Historical Materialism’ series.

Johan Siebers

Johan Siebers is Professor of Philosophy of Language and Communication at Middlesex University, an Associate Fellow at the ILCS, and General Editor of the 'Bloch Bibliothek' (Brill). His work on Bloch, in the form of a range of externally funded interdisciplinary research projects, has also made significant contributions to Connected Communities, the RCUK’s research programme.

Profile

Peter Thompson

Peter Thompson is the initiator of the Bloch Centre. He co-edited The Privatization of Hope, published by Duke University Press in 2013, with Slavoj Žižek. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian and commentator for other media outlets on issues of religion, Marxism, Bloch and contemporary critical theory.

Visiting Fellows and Scholars

2023-2024

Byron Byrne-Taylor received his doctorate in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at University College London in 2023, having spent time at the Institute of World Literature at Harvard University in 2019, and at Yale University in 2021 as part of the Yale-UCL Collaborative Program. His thesis was entitled: 'Resituating the Untranslatable: Modernism from Moscow to Rio to Berlin'. Recognising them simultaneously as objects of cultural mediation, works of world literature and as cultural objects determined by capital, Byron is predominantly interested in literature, philosophy, cinema and other forms of dialogue, cultural and political collaboration, translation and exchange between Brazil, Russia and Europe. He has published in Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Journal of World Literature, Translation and Literature, and an essay has been republished in World Literature and Postcolonial Studies, edited by David Damrosch and Bhavya Tiwari (2023). Byrne-Taylor arrived at these interests from a thoroughly rounded humanist education, fortified by a willingness to learn languages independently. He studied for a BA in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge, Philosophy & History at the Central European University in Budapest. As a Visiting Fellow at the Ernst Bloch Centre, he is working with Professor Johan Siebers on a project provisionally entitled ‘The Role of Stimmung in Martin Heidegger’s Aesthetics’, which attempts to bring the theme of untranslatability into a philosophical analysis of Heidegger’s writings on art, etymologising the history of the word Stimmung across a range of German Romantic poetry and thought while resituating Heidegger’s aesthetic positions within the broader context of contemporary German and Austrian aesthetic debates. [October-December 2023]

2021-2022

Artemis Ignatidou is an interdisciplinary researcher borrowing methodologies from musicology, music & art history, philosophy, and performance practice to write European cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She holds a PhD in History, is a piano tutor (DipABRSM) and occasionally performer. As a Visiting Fellow at the Bloch Centre, Artemis will be testing Martin Buber’s philosophy of art against his philosophical influences, his personal relationship to interdisciplinary artistic practice, and his political objectives.  [October 2021-June 2022] 

2019-2020

Nathaniel J. P. Barron is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute’s Ernst Bloch Centre and an early-career researcher and adult education lecturer specialising in German philosophy. He received a PhD in 2017 from the University of Central Lancashire, in a funded project that explores the nature of language in Ernst Bloch's speculative materialism. He has been a visiting researcher at the Hegel-Archiv, Bochum, the Ernst Bloch Zentrum, Ludwigshafen, and the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin. He is currently re-working his thesis for publication  entitled Language in Ernst Bloch's Speculative Materialism: A Reading of Anacoluthon (2024). The work situates the importance of Bloch's language-speculation in the Continental tradition via a sustained reading of anacoluthon, a rhetorical figure which denotes a break in the flow of syntax. He is also writing a book-chapter on Bloch and creativity for the Routledge series Anticipation, Creativity, Ontology (2020). [September 2019-May 2020]

2018-2019

Federico Filauri studied philosophy at the University of Padua, graduating with a thesis on the relationship between aísthesis and alétheia in Martin Heidegger. His MA thesis, also written at the University of Padua, was on the 'Wir-Problem' in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. He is currently registered as a research student at the IMLR, where he is working on a historical-philosophical study of German-Jewish thought in the 20th century, with the emphasis on theological-political aspects.

Artemis Ignatidou is an early-career cultural historian working on 19th-century European history, with a special interest in western art music, musical exchange in the continent, and the construction of reciprocal musical and national identities through the arts. She holds a PhD in modern European history (2018), an MA in Modern World History (2013), and a BA in Media & Communications (2011). She enjoys writing literature, plays the piano and starts learning to play a new instrument every month; she performs and is a proficient kazoo player. Her work on 19th- and 20th-century musical exchange is currently under publication. In 2016 and 2018 she was awarded fully-funded residencies at the prestigious Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in Canada. At the Ernst Bloch Centre she will be working on music and ideology in the 19th century, gender representation in the opera, and contemporary musical practice. [September 2018-June 2019]

Cat Moir is Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Sydney, where she also contributes to the European Studies programme. Her research is broadly concerned with the history of ideas in Europe from the late 18th to the late 20th century. A particular focus has been 20th-century critical theory and its intellectual roots in German idealism and romanticism, historical materialism, (neo-)Kantianism, and psychoanalysis. Her book, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, published by Brill in 2019, provides a new interpretation of Bloch’s philosophy that situates it in the context of historical debates about the relationship between natural science and materialist philosophy. Moir's current project, 'Biological Thought and the European Left, 1800-1933', examines how progressive social and political thought in Europe was influenced by scientific biology from its emergence as a distinct discipline around 1800, to 1933 when the rise of the Nazi biological state fundamentally changed the European intellectual and political landscape. [January-March 2019]

Bodi Wang is a PhD student and Research Assistant at the Technische Universität Dortmund. For her undergraduate degree, she studied philosophy at the Renmin University of China and completed her Masters' degree at the University of Heidelberg. In 2016, she started her PhD research under the supervision of Professor Christian Neuhäuser focusing on the epistemic problem of social integration. The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung has supported her research with a doctoral scholarship since 2017. Her research interests include philosophy of history, social philosophy (especially critical theory) and analytical philosophy with particular focus on ethics/politics of knowledge. She will conduct her research project under the supervision of Dr Johan Siebers at the Bloch Centre for German Thought. [September 2018-February 2019]

2017-2018

Jeremy Coleman is a Teaching Assistant in the Music Department, University of Aberdeen, and a Visiting Fellow at the Ernst Bloch Centre for German Thought. He received his PhD in Musicology from King’s College London for research on Wagner, supervised by Michael Fend and John Deathridge (2016). Prior to that, he read Music at Clare College, Cambridge, and continued studies there at graduate level. His various research interests centre on social and material approaches to 19th-century music history, with particular focus on French and German composer-critics. He is pursuing two main projects: a study of musical production and criticism during the Vormärz and July Monarchy, and a more theoretical contribution to Marxist music historiography.  In general, he seeks to use critical theory and philosophy, especially Marxist thought, in order to shed new light on the more traditional concerns and materials of music history. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Musical Association and Music & Letters, and he has presented on various topics to international conferences in UK, USA, Belgium, Italy and Poland. He is also in demand as a pianist and accompanist, specialising in song accompaniment and opera repetiteurship. [September 2017-June 2018]