Like Bloch said, this stench is entrenched.
If I had a dime for every “Coffee Party: Incite Civility and Reason” bumper sticker I’ve sighted in the college town where I teach, and never at any of the anti-deportation rallies - well, suffice it to say that the resistance to fascism goes nowhere if its main arena is the echo chamber of the Whole Foods parking lot, where a tidy “progressive” domesticity is carried out without active care for those being torn apart. Why would Bloch - why should we? - care about the unsurrender of hell? An unstated presumption saturating much public discourse is that we are meant to cling to “reasonableness” at moments of manifest insanity. “Both hell and heaven,” Bloch moaned, “have been surrendered without a fight.”
“Old grotesque faces eerily arise the Nazi dances all night.”
For Bloch, the appearance of fascism in Europe was not the irruption of an unprecedented evil, but the expression of a deep-rooted structure in contemporary form it unearths “a piece of fossilized moon,” shining down “a path which one strangely recalls.” Against the characterization of fascism as a unique horror, Bloch saw its orgies of cruelty as an uncanny return. “ THE STENCH OF THIS SCENE is age-old,” wrote the German philosopher Ernst Bloch in 1935.
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