Traces: (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

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.

Table of Contents:
@fmct:Contents* @toc2:Not Enough* 000 Sleeping 000 Drawn out 000 Always in It 000 Mingling 000 Sing-Song 000 Slight Change 000 Lamp and Closet 000 Learning Good Habits 000 The "Mark!" 000 @toc1:Situation @toc2:The Poor 000 Filth 000 The Gift 000 Different Needs* 000 Games, Regrettably 000 The Useful Member 000 Shaker of Strawberries* 000 Bread and Games 000 Narrow-Minded Comrades* 000 Disturbing Whim 000 @toc1:Fate @toc2:Passing It Forward 000 The Negro 000 The Watershed 000 No Face 000 Comte de Mirabeau 000 Rich Devil, Poor Devil 000 The Kitten as David* 000 Triumphs of Misrecognition 000 Scribe at the Mairie* 000 The Beautiful Appearance 000 The Rococo of Fate 000 Spirit Still Taking Shape 000 The Motif of Parting 000 Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved* 000 Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile* 000 Pippa Passes 000 The Long Gaze 000 Reunion Without Connection 000 The Muse of Restitution 000 Raphael Without Hands 000 @toc1:Existence @toc2:Just Now 000 Dark by Us 000 The Fall into the Now 000 The Spur of Work 000 No Free Lunch* 000 Ten Years' Jail, Seven-Meter Train* 000 Silence and Mirrors 000 Ways Not to Be Seen 000 Imminent Boredom 000 Moment and Image 000 Potemkin's Signature 000 Incognito to Oneself* 000 Motifs of Concealment 000 Just Knock 000 The Corner of the Blanket 000 Short Excursion 000 Terror and Hope 000 Excursus: Human and Wax Figure 000 Nearby: Inn of the Insane 000 Tableau with Curve* 000 Some Patterns from the Left Side 000 The Twice-Disappearing Frame 000 The Motif of the Door 000 @toc1:Things @toc2:Half Good 000 The Next Tree 000 Flower and Unflower* 000 The Leyden Jar 000 The First Locomotive 000 The Urban Peasant 000 The House of Day 000 Montages of a February Evening* 000 An Odd Fl'neur 000 Eating Olives Precisely* 000 Making a Point* 000 The Reverse of Things 000 Greeting and Appearance 000 Motifs of Temptation 000 Appendix: No Man's Land 000 A Russian Fairy Tale?* 000 The Clever Way out 000 Disappointment with Amusement* 000 The Invisible Hand 000 Tales of White Magic 000 Wonder 000 The Mountain 000 Dead and Usable* 000 The Pearl* 000 @toc4:Notes 000

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 University Press, 2000), Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998), The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (1987), and The Principle of Hope (1986).

Review :
"...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