Archetype and the Not-Yet: Jung, Bloch, and the Politics of the Golden Flower

Abstract

Richard Wilhelm’s 1929 German translation of the Taiyi jinhua zongzhi 太乙金華宗旨, accompanied by C. G. Jung’s psychological commentary, became one of the most influential mediations of Daoist inner alchemy in Europe. This article interprets Jung’s commentary as a productive but restrictive hermeneutic translation rather than either a faithful exposition of Daoism or a simple act of distortion. Drawing on current specialist scholarship, it reconstructs the Qing spirit-writing and redactional history of the text; examines Jung’s relocation of its images —light, the Golden Flower, hun and po, the spirit-body— within analytical psychology; and brings Ernst Bloch’s distinction between the No-Longer-Conscious and the Not-Yet-Conscious to bear on the temporality and politics of that relocation. Bloch’s polemic against Jung is reconstructed together with his own theory of utopian archetypes and his reading of Laozi: both thinkers received Daoism through Richard Wilhelm, yet drew sharply divergent temporal conclusions. A final comparative reading asks under what conditions the imagery of reversed light and transformed embodiment may carry a utopian surplus —subjecting the Blochian refunctioning itself to the critique of appropriation directed at Jung...