Miller, David. (2013). A Marxist poetics: Allegory and reading in The Principle of Hope. in Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek (eds.) The privatization of hope: Ernst Bloch and the future of utopia. Durham: Duke University Press, 203-218.

Summary:

Miller takes on critiques of Bloch’s “idiosyncratic style” and argues that his use of allegory as almost a kind of anachronism show that the form of the book utilizes and critiques modernity.

Keywords: theory, utopianism

Quotations:

“What the form of the book offers, then, is a different system of reality that exists as the shadowy and veiled counterpart to the everyday world of habitual experience…. Under this pattern of thought, the ‘real,’ including all the intellectual and theological disciplines that purport to define and explain it, is the index and degraded pattern of the better world that exists beyond its surface textures. In other words, the form of the book encompasses both social critique and utopian projection” (p. 206).