In this special issue some of the leading Bloch scholars explore this philosophy with an eye to articulating its relevance today. Lucien Pelletier discusses the roots of Bloch?s philosophy of history in his encounter with Neo-Kantianism and the Nietzscheanism that dominated German intellectual life in Bloch?s youth. Francesca Vidal explores the philosophy of culture by reconstructing Bloch?s understanding of the nature of forgetting and placing it in the context of a discussion of cultural memory. In her article, Cat Moir argues that Bloch?s materialist metaphysics and his conception of language within it owe a significant debt to Nietzsche, even if his mature theory of language departs substantially from the Nietzschean view. Peter Thompson discusses the metaphysics of contingency and places Bloch squarely within contemporary debates on this topic as we know them from the work of Badiou and iek, among others, showing how an engaged, goal-oriented, emancipatory and critical political and cultural practice can be reconciled with an immanent ontology of contingent becoming. Johan Siebers explores the rhetorical nature of Bloch?s writings and argues that the split between philosophy and rhetoric is overcome in them.