Bloch and Benjamin on The New and the Old

[WARREN GOLDSTEIN]

Dear Jeffrey,

	You interest in the "New" led me to reexamine some of the
passages in which Bloch uses this term.  I have found that the term
appears much more frequently in his sociology of religion than his
aesthetic theory.  Below are some passages, where he clearly uses the
"New" as an a noun (and therefore as a concept unto itself) rather than
as an adjective:

"Jesus as Return, according to the images of the Daniel apocalypse
(Dan. 17,13f.) represented by himself takes part in the leap into the
Novum."(The Principle of Hope, p. 1273)

"But the Novum, with quite different values, consists in the claim to be
the Messiah and in the apocalyptic background: `Behold, I make all things
new'; it is from this and from this alone that Christ's miracles live." (The
Principle of Hope, p. 1305)

"Therefore a good substance is in fact not weakened when it is
corrected, and even more obvious it is not secularized when, once set
on its feet, it is realized.  It is unnecessary here to stress completely
New which Marx- with a proletarian-revolutionary mandate behind him-
had to find in order to carry through the good ideas of the past at all."
(The Principle of Hope, p. 1363)

"The corner-stone of apocalyptic thought is presupposed here: that the
last days are a repetition of the first days in reverse.  They are
apokatastasis, restitution.  But (and this is, for Messianism, decisive),
they are imbued with the pathos of the new and the unknown.: (Atheism
in Christianity, p. 151)

In all of these passages, the New clearly is tied to something old.  In the
first passage, it is with "the return" of Jesus that the leap into the New
takes place.  In the second passage, Bloch argues that with Christ new
elements were added to an already existent Messianism.  Likewise, Marx
(in the third passage)  inherited good ideas of the past in a secularized
form from Judeo-Christian Messianism.  However, it is not simply
secularization since he not only made qualitatively new contributions but
altered this existing tradition.  Lastly, with the fourth passage,
Messianism takes a paradise which is said to have existed in the past
and projects it into the future.  The last days are a restitution of the first. 
In Bloch, what is new is based on its inheritance from the past which it
alters.  The new represents a break from the past so long as it
transforms or alters it.

As for Benjamin, I have not noticed any systematic use of the New.  But I
may have overlooked it (but I could check if you would like).  His
conception of allegory is based on the fall of language from a original
pure language (Ursprache).  Language becomes broken and fragmented
into a multiplicity of impure languages.  An allegorist interprets the
multiplicity of meanings of language. The task of the translator is through
translation to reunite language with itself- to restore the Ursprache.  Here
too, the new is the restoration of the old- which exists in an ideal past.

What I am particularly interested in is Lukacs attack on Bloch's support of
expressionism?  Do you know in which writings he does this?

Sincerely,

Warren Goldstein