THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

– 11 –
„Gnosis is not rational knowledge, but like poetic knowledge
(I suspect ‘like’ to be my evasion) Gnosis is more-thanrational
knowledge.“ 9
But Bloom’s Gnostic witnesses, Blake, Emerson, Walt
Whitman, and Wallace Stevens are primarily good Freudians;
consequently, their Gnosis „affirms that fantasy must be
primary in our belated condition, where every agon has been
internalized, as it was by Urizen, and where the drive for
freedom becomes also the death drive, where creativity and
catastrophe become indistinguishable“ 10 . The Freudian notion
of the origins of consciousness as a catastrophe results in a
„theory of the imagination-as-catastrophe, and of art as an
achieved anxiety in the agonistic struggle both to repeat and to
defer the repetition of the catastrophe of creative origins“. 11
Bloom is the representative of a Gnostic-Kabbalistic theory of
creativity that sees itself in a continuous line from the Gnostic
Valentinus to the Kabbalist Isaac Luria and to the English
romantic William Blake. The reason why Bloom is presently
capturing the imagination of all those who do not have the
stomach for Derridaean deconstruction is to be sought in his
rather personal Gnosticism. What is at the heart of Bloom’s
reading of literature he has stated unequivocally in Chapter I
of Agon, entitled „Agon: Revisionism and Critical
Personality“:
„Reading seems to me now not so much Nietzsche’s Will to
Power over texts, as Schopenhauer’s power to will texts of
the Sublime, which is to say, of the Abyss. Emerson, in his
final phase, defined that Abyss: ‘There may be two or three or
9 Bloom, Agon, 4 f.
10 Bloom, Agon, 89.
11 Bloom, Agon, 97.