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Traces
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.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1930
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About the author
Ernst Bloch
197 books142 followersErnst Bloch 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).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 28, 2026
"Neither illusion nor reality; often the one merges into the other in this seething world"
"Only one who tempts, who is tempted, can be truly pious; he knows the mystical lights through the world, but also the scars from the illusion withstood on the way there"
"The nowadays massive unbelief in things unseen (or rather the still unseen) is certainly as mad as the massive belief in heavenly flesh and blood"
"There is much gold that glitters and has never been dug up"
Bloch's ability to work a cultural/social fragment (fairy tales, news events, reminiscences, dreams, anecdotes, etc.) up to a moment of clarity by mediating across history, philosophy, and of course political economy pays off in spades. While the works of German contemporaries like Benjamin (One-Way Street) and Adorno (Minima Moralia) come to mind, so too should Vallejo (Aphorisms) and Cardenal (Zero Hour and Apocalypse). Many of these passages will seem rather obfuscatory at first, but Bloch's Marxist demand that a fragmented world can somehow be put back together and reveal a path forward steadies things. "Just as there is no true way without a goal, there is no goal without the power of a way toward it, indeed one preserved in the goal itself."
"Only one who tempts, who is tempted, can be truly pious; he knows the mystical lights through the world, but also the scars from the illusion withstood on the way there"
"The nowadays massive unbelief in things unseen (or rather the still unseen) is certainly as mad as the massive belief in heavenly flesh and blood"
"There is much gold that glitters and has never been dug up"
Bloch's ability to work a cultural/social fragment (fairy tales, news events, reminiscences, dreams, anecdotes, etc.) up to a moment of clarity by mediating across history, philosophy, and of course political economy pays off in spades. While the works of German contemporaries like Benjamin (One-Way Street) and Adorno (Minima Moralia) come to mind, so too should Vallejo (Aphorisms) and Cardenal (Zero Hour and Apocalypse). Many of these passages will seem rather obfuscatory at first, but Bloch's Marxist demand that a fragmented world can somehow be put back together and reveal a path forward steadies things. "Just as there is no true way without a goal, there is no goal without the power of a way toward it, indeed one preserved in the goal itself."
April 19, 2017
Bloch'un kullandığı, yaklaştığı "hikmet dili" itibarı ile çeviri epey aksıyor. Peki, tamam. Ancak benzer bir dil kullanan Benjamin'in çevirilerinde bu denli boş sayfalar okumadım. Çok merak ederek okumayı beklediğim biri idi Bloch, bir miktar hayal kırıklığı yaşadım bu eserinde ama "Umut İlkesi" için halen beklentilerim yüksek. Bilemiyorum belki de kişisel sebepler ile zihinsel olarak dünyasına giremedim, mümkün. Olumsuzluklardan ibaret değil pek tabi bende kalan bu eserden, tüm kitabı okumanızı öneremeyeceğim ama not aldığım şu bölümler muhteşemler gerçekten : "Talihin rokokosu", "Henüz oluşum halindeki ruh ","Uzun bakış","Bağlantısız tekrar karşılaşma","Doğrudan doğruya can sıkıntısı","Bunun yanında: Deliler meyhanesi","Bir şubat akşamının montajları","Selam ve görünüş/yanılsama","Ek:Hiç kimsenin lkesi".
Giderek fakirleşen, sadece pratik kullanımları gelişen bir dil kullanıyor olduğumuzu hissettim/düşündüm bu metni okurken. Zihinsel çöküşün ardında dağılan yapbozu gördüm.
Giderek fakirleşen, sadece pratik kullanımları gelişen bir dil kullanıyor olduğumuzu hissettim/düşündüm bu metni okurken. Zihinsel çöküşün ardında dağılan yapbozu gördüm.
July 7, 2015
Die ultimative philosophische Konfekt-Box für Romantiker, Karl-May-Fans, Wagnerianer und allerlei Freunde von leichtem Grusel und einer Ahnung von Bedeutung.
February 13, 2026
If Ernst Simon Bloch weren’t already too smart for his own good, he’s also a German marxist. The romantic stories written about his personal life, before WWII and after, conflate his already complicated social ontology. A stockpile of acquaintances, like György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno are less colleagues than friends when politics are involved. Or so the story goes. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between Bloch and a politician whose job depends on an efficient workers manual. But if there were a story to be told during WWII you’d think folks like Bloch would be at the front of the line for interrogation.
You have to read between the lines. And yet as he will tell you, don’t actually read too hard between the lines. Bloch is like one of those retired contemplatives from the east who read all the necessary literature and now condemns the tracing as mostly immaterial. He, however, practices the art with virtuosity, sans the decadent restraints. Kafka might have been able to attest to how someone like this is an “aesthetic” par excellence.
I can certainly relate. I love how the book is different than his other more academically focused work. It’s written in a style comparable in a contemporary way with Baudrillard’s Cool Memories. It’s essentially story telling, but methodically tracing and untracing the harbingers of grandeur. For better or worse he waxes on and off the beyond your ken moments. His tone can betray the content if you’re not quite on his level yet. Which is most of us most of the time.
As a reader I don’t actually want to be weary of the “mountain” and “forrest” like he says, after seeing such horrible times from humanity. I rather do, as a naive American on a different empirical trajectory, want to see for myself. I want to be him as a younger reader, and explore the political mess into temporal oblivion making my own mistakes. I realize this book is not written for everyone. His somber writing says, in not as many words, that the journey begins in wasting time, and not realizing when temporal power owns the natural landmarks.
In the end there is no one like Bloch to both convolute and enlighten us about the prior age of totalitarian rule. Back when power was so lopsided that political meanings would jump right out at you from places you never wanted to expect. When so many people were ruled by so few, figure heads would spin on the pick of titles. Bloch’s story is carved into a small place in history but it’s also a center of gravity we can pick up today. And maybe that’s why he knows he has no real borders or boundaries to speak of. Although this book was hard to read I will likely read it again and more from the Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series.
“Over the trivial special effects operated a deeper stage management that, with its simultaneity of exit and entry, brought the lethal archetype of the portal to awareness.”
“Here is no technology in some quantifiable sense, but also no old magic, into which technology otherwise often extends. When the rabbi, awkward and quite instructively nervous, reaches into the things of this world in order to break off a talisman, he is hardly trusting in cosmic powers and laws that already inhere in the world. Instead he is testing a strange, almost messianically selective hand so as to bring things out of their dispersion, and briefly make them Edenic, as it were. Then of course the candle must serve us; it always fits the needs of the situation, whatever it may be, in a reversed, fortunate irony of fate—so the candle would have burned in Paradise, not as a thing but as a good.' …Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things must only be shifted a little. Because this "a little" is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying, spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap of che lucky glimpse and the invisible hand.”
“The Indians saw horses for the first time with the white man, about which Johannes V. Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it, we would know how a horse looks. In the preacher's madness we see how one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the bang of explosions, the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civilized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish aspect of the first locomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of accidents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).”
“Once the laborious descent, alone and without magic, was behind him—marveled for a long time at "his" power. He had certainly proven himself as a magician, but how does enlightenment become superstition, the times table a hocus pocus? It laughs at it, and finally looks just like it. The calculated spark jumped just as the conjured one perhaps once did, this time "good," another time "bad," for neither concerns the spark.”
“Even Andersen's tale of the ugly duckling swims somewhere in that water, however profound its motion otherwise: the common birds part and a swan describes its proud circles, definitely a swan; perhaps it did not know that it was one, and so dazzles more consolingly.”
“Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly a famous man, and we owe him much; he is known for the most enjoyable ingenuity, and recently almost as much for his legal courage in the struggle for justice. For the sacrifice, effort, public appeals, spirit voices of all kinds he dedicated to the unfortunate Oscar Slater, who had sat in prison innocent for twenty years or more. Here humanity appeared spontaneously, quite without political motivations or even such motivations as in the Dreyfus affair; here was the rescuer, here the victim, both ready for myth, or as though embodying it. But no sooner was Slater freed, rehabilitated, compensated, than his complexion improved beyond recognition; with a great cigar in his mouth he appeared in illustrated weeklies, and he invested his compensation in very successful ventures. Conan Doyle, however, was either bored with morality or disgusted at having entered battle for ecce homo and won it for a businessman; in short, he added up the money that the appeal had cost him and sent Slater the bill. Yet Slater was even further beyond idealism (which he had had, as victim), and replied that he had not appointed Doyle, and did not owe him the money.“
You have to read between the lines. And yet as he will tell you, don’t actually read too hard between the lines. Bloch is like one of those retired contemplatives from the east who read all the necessary literature and now condemns the tracing as mostly immaterial. He, however, practices the art with virtuosity, sans the decadent restraints. Kafka might have been able to attest to how someone like this is an “aesthetic” par excellence.
I can certainly relate. I love how the book is different than his other more academically focused work. It’s written in a style comparable in a contemporary way with Baudrillard’s Cool Memories. It’s essentially story telling, but methodically tracing and untracing the harbingers of grandeur. For better or worse he waxes on and off the beyond your ken moments. His tone can betray the content if you’re not quite on his level yet. Which is most of us most of the time.
As a reader I don’t actually want to be weary of the “mountain” and “forrest” like he says, after seeing such horrible times from humanity. I rather do, as a naive American on a different empirical trajectory, want to see for myself. I want to be him as a younger reader, and explore the political mess into temporal oblivion making my own mistakes. I realize this book is not written for everyone. His somber writing says, in not as many words, that the journey begins in wasting time, and not realizing when temporal power owns the natural landmarks.
In the end there is no one like Bloch to both convolute and enlighten us about the prior age of totalitarian rule. Back when power was so lopsided that political meanings would jump right out at you from places you never wanted to expect. When so many people were ruled by so few, figure heads would spin on the pick of titles. Bloch’s story is carved into a small place in history but it’s also a center of gravity we can pick up today. And maybe that’s why he knows he has no real borders or boundaries to speak of. Although this book was hard to read I will likely read it again and more from the Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series.
“Over the trivial special effects operated a deeper stage management that, with its simultaneity of exit and entry, brought the lethal archetype of the portal to awareness.”
“Here is no technology in some quantifiable sense, but also no old magic, into which technology otherwise often extends. When the rabbi, awkward and quite instructively nervous, reaches into the things of this world in order to break off a talisman, he is hardly trusting in cosmic powers and laws that already inhere in the world. Instead he is testing a strange, almost messianically selective hand so as to bring things out of their dispersion, and briefly make them Edenic, as it were. Then of course the candle must serve us; it always fits the needs of the situation, whatever it may be, in a reversed, fortunate irony of fate—so the candle would have burned in Paradise, not as a thing but as a good.' …Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things must only be shifted a little. Because this "a little" is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying, spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap of che lucky glimpse and the invisible hand.”
“The Indians saw horses for the first time with the white man, about which Johannes V. Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it, we would know how a horse looks. In the preacher's madness we see how one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the bang of explosions, the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civilized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish aspect of the first locomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of accidents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).”
“Once the laborious descent, alone and without magic, was behind him—marveled for a long time at "his" power. He had certainly proven himself as a magician, but how does enlightenment become superstition, the times table a hocus pocus? It laughs at it, and finally looks just like it. The calculated spark jumped just as the conjured one perhaps once did, this time "good," another time "bad," for neither concerns the spark.”
“Even Andersen's tale of the ugly duckling swims somewhere in that water, however profound its motion otherwise: the common birds part and a swan describes its proud circles, definitely a swan; perhaps it did not know that it was one, and so dazzles more consolingly.”
“Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly a famous man, and we owe him much; he is known for the most enjoyable ingenuity, and recently almost as much for his legal courage in the struggle for justice. For the sacrifice, effort, public appeals, spirit voices of all kinds he dedicated to the unfortunate Oscar Slater, who had sat in prison innocent for twenty years or more. Here humanity appeared spontaneously, quite without political motivations or even such motivations as in the Dreyfus affair; here was the rescuer, here the victim, both ready for myth, or as though embodying it. But no sooner was Slater freed, rehabilitated, compensated, than his complexion improved beyond recognition; with a great cigar in his mouth he appeared in illustrated weeklies, and he invested his compensation in very successful ventures. Conan Doyle, however, was either bored with morality or disgusted at having entered battle for ecce homo and won it for a businessman; in short, he added up the money that the appeal had cost him and sent Slater the bill. Yet Slater was even further beyond idealism (which he had had, as victim), and replied that he had not appointed Doyle, and did not owe him the money.“
March 25, 2020
Tanıl Bora'nın çevirisi ve dipnotlar için bile okunmalı.
January 14, 2023
It was one of the books that is one of the best examples of politicized philosophy and that I personally like very much. In particular, the author has created a more aggressive form of philosophy by politicizing the philosophical stance, which we can call a kind of blend of the philosophy of being and existentialist philosophy.
"Man is something that has yet to be found."by saying that, he has put people in a utopian point. He argued that this utopian identity opens the way for a person and humanity to surpass themselves with the accumulations they have acquired at the point of knowledge and experience. Therefore, when we look at the titles of art, ideology and religion, which he often opens up about in the book, we can see that there is a constant state of development and change because people are always looking for the better in these areas.
The author's views on existence form the most shocking points of the book. Especially the examples given from everyday life caught me quite a lot. A very effective* book. I recommend that you read it.
"Man is something that has yet to be found."by saying that, he has put people in a utopian point. He argued that this utopian identity opens the way for a person and humanity to surpass themselves with the accumulations they have acquired at the point of knowledge and experience. Therefore, when we look at the titles of art, ideology and religion, which he often opens up about in the book, we can see that there is a constant state of development and change because people are always looking for the better in these areas.
The author's views on existence form the most shocking points of the book. Especially the examples given from everyday life caught me quite a lot. A very effective* book. I recommend that you read it.
December 12, 2023
"Artık selamlaşmayan dostlar, tâ en baştaki konumları itibariyle birbirlerine yabancı değil, aksine düşman olmuşlardır, çürümüş aşk da fevkalade zehirlidir. Dostlarınla münasebetinde birgün düşmanların olabileceklermişcesine davran, onları asla düşman haline getirtmemek için pek zarif bir tedbir." diyor Block bize İzler'de, yaşamımızda iz bırakan birçok şeye ithafen.
May 4, 2025
Feine Beobachtungen. Mir war zu viel Schwadronieren dabei
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews