What *did* Bakunin say?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

> Do you know if an English translation is available?
>


http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/department-of-needed-translations-ernst-blochs-subjectobject/


      Department of Needed Translations: Ernst Bloch's Subject/Object

Filed under: Needed Translations 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/category/needed-translations/>, Texts 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/category/texts/> --- Tags: dialectics 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/tag/dialectics/>, Ernst Bloch 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/tag/ernst-bloch/>, Hegel 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/tag/hegel/>, Marxism 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/tag/marxism/>, Philosophy 
<http://criticismetc.wordpress.com/tag/philosophy/> --- 
contributingeditor @ 3:23 am

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) can be called the outsider of German Marxist 
thought. While the members of the Frankfurt School and its extended 
circle have practically become household names in American academia, 
Bloch's highly individualistic blend of Expressionism, Marxism, "Left" 
Aristotleanism, and messianism remains acknowledged by, but not 
assimilated into, the academic canon of Critical Theory.

There is no dearth of availability of Bloch's work in English. Stanford 
University Press published Traces 
<http://www.worldcat.org/title/traces/oclc/62324742> in 2006, the first 
time this work has appeared in English, and Verso made his Atheism in 
Christianity 
<http://www.worldcat.org/title/atheism-in-christianity-the-religion-of-the-exodus-and-the-kingdom/oclc/286420148> 
available again in a new edition last year.

Even with these welcome efforts, however, Bloch has at least one major 
work that has yet to be translated, a major study of Hegel and 
dialectics originally published in 1951 titled Subjekt-Objekt 
<http://www.worldcat.org/title/subjekt-objekt-erlauterungen-zu-hegel/oclc/16740526>. 
Two chapters of the book have been published in academic journals 
("Dialectics and Hope," translated by Mark Ritter in /New German 
Critique/ in 1976 and "The Dialectical Method," translated by John Lamb 
in /Man and World/ in 1983), but, unfortunately, the work as a whole 
remains unknown to the English-speaking world.

As a contribution towards bringing some much-needed attention to this 
important work, I am providing a brief excerpt (the first paragraph) 
from "The Dialectical Method" below.

***

The idiot never notices that everything has two side. He works with 
wooden ideas, with simple uniform ideas at which he can stop for breath 
and in which nothing happens. If he were to think a thought through to 
its end, he would notice that a struggle is taking place, that 
objections arise within which enrich it and disarrange its content. A is 
not always A, B must also be posited, and it it precisely consistency 
which shows B to be the contradiction. Above the consequent span C 
arises as apex and unity; that is until C splits too, and a new unity of 
contradictions emerges in irresistible dialectical development. Actual 
thought never runs in straight lines, like thought which is fixed, cut 
and dried, in which nothing expands or changes and which is therefore 
incapable of doing justice to transformation. Thought moves in 
triangles. These triangles, consisting of contradiction, unity, new 
contradiction, new unity, and so on, do not need to be schematically 
traced out each time. That would be incompatible with the free agility 
of elastic thought. Indeed, the triangle is not the only possible form, 
more contradictions than just this A and B are possible and they do not 
all have to refer to the same point of unity. But reliable, actual 
thought never takes a straight course, rigid and unchanged, like the 
rhythm of the nodding head of the pagoda or the dreadful, monomaniac, 
thoroughly undialectical thought of the madman. A man who continually 
entangles himself in contradictions is not for that a dialectician. If 
he cannot find his way out of the contradictions, he is much more a 
charlatan and, in the end, a perfect image of chaos. But thought which 
seeks a viable course, set on finding solutions, without going through 
the dialectical turn in which no determination is complete in itself, 
lands in chaos from the other side, namely in the chaos of rigidity. It 
cannot comprehend what is living and on the terrain of 
transformation---there is no other---with its fixed clumsiness, it will 
always stumble.

Translated by John Lamb


> On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 6:59 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>  wrote:
>> A good introduction is Ernst Bloch's "Subjekt-Objekt.
>> Erläuterungen zu Hegel". It's not brief (520 pages), but it contains a whole
>> lot of key quotes from Hegel and is, though more than 60 years old, still
>> the best road to Hegel's Palace. And Bloch frees Hegel's philosophy from the
>> "spell of anamnesis" and leads it into the Open. The instruments of
>> dialectic are for everybody. Ernst Bloch's vivid expressionistic language
>> will definitely prevent you from coma, I promise!
>

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