ERNST BLOCH AND WALTER BENJAMIN:

REFLECTIONS ON ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

Abstract

In Pierre Bouretz’s book on the Jewish philosophers born at the time of the destruction of reason, in the chapter dedicated to Ernst Bloch, one of the central topics is a question, namely: would Bloch be a survivor brother of Walter Benjamin? The question is interesting to at least to question the existence of elective affinities between Bloch and Benjamin. With this, the pretension of an approach in which the election indicates a previous distance, a sufficiently broad and rich heterogeneity in the writings of the two philosophers, but nevertheless “the Wahlverwandtschaft [...] indicates a precise type of significant relation” (Löwy) to be established. This paper intends to reflect some theoretical links between Bloch and Benjamin and, from these possible links, to clarify a little more about two philosophers whose thought appears as essays, anti- metaphysical, romantic-revolutionary, confluence of multiple at the same time atheistic and religious, and of a messianic/“heretical” Marxism (both receiving the rejection of “official” Marxism) in which one of the central objectives of their writings was a critique of modernity which, however, was intended to save the critical potencial of it.