Status Updates From Erbschaft dieser Zeit

His writing doesn't hold up like Benjamin's or Adorno's, and maybe it didn't hold up to theirs at the time of publication, either. Often for Adorno you need footnotes for the Schiller references and so on, but with Bloch, even after the footnote, his meaning is still obscure. He's like a very sophisticated lefty feuilletonist from a vanished world.

I want to like it more than I do.

Aphoristic style without Adorno's relentless dialectical logic of the coming administered world, and without Benjamin's... uh, whatever is the thing he has, it's very hard to describe Benjamin. I'm excited when I read about Bloch, that he thought one should take utopia seriously and not leave its cultural expression in myths and fairy tales to become instrumentalized by fascists. But this book is hard going.