Lukacs

The concept of the subject is at the core of many social movements that attempt to empower disadvantaged groups by identifying a basic subjectivity underlying and uniting such groups. Though otherwise supportive of such movements, recent continental philosophers and social theorists such as Althusser, Derrida, and Butler have criticized such notions of subjectivity, arguing that they presuppose false and harmful ideas of unity and substantiality as the ‘true’ essence of these groups. In this paper, I propose that one possibility for resolving this debate can be found in the work of Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. I argue that they ground an authentically subjective selfhood on the distinct meaningfulness of individual consciousness. Identifying phenomenological motifs in the way they describe consciousness, I suggest that they define meaning by the way different particular experiences recall or relate to one another. By interpreting the many possible meanings of experience, subjects are able to build up an image of themselves, while collective subjectivity can be grounded on the exegesis of shared experiences. Because such meaningfulness is genuinely sui generis, emerging within consciousness, action in accordance with such images counts as autonomous; at the same time, meaning is sufficiently fluid that there can never be one single correct interpretation of it. Ultimately, the Western Marxists suggest, it is in the constant formulation and reformulation of images of oneself through reinterpretation of one’s experience that constitutes subjective selfhood.

Gillian Rose’s magnum opus was her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981).  Preceding this was The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978), a work which charted Rose’s approach to the relation of Marxism to Hegel.  Hegel provided Rose with the standard for critical thinking on social modernity, whose threshold she found nearly all others to fall below, including thinkers she otherwise respected such as Adorno and Marx.  Rose read Marx as an important disciple of Hegel who misapprehended key aspects of Hegel’s thought.  According to Rose, this left Marxism at the mercy of prevailing Kantian preoccupations such as the dichotomy of "theory and practice," etc.  Rose’s misunderstanding of Marxism limits the direction and reach of the rousing call for a "critical Marxism" with which she concluded her book.  Rose failed to note how Lukács and Adorno deeply internalized the Hegelian problematic of Marxism, how Marxism was not the (mis)application but the reconstruction of the Hegelian dialectic under the changed social-historical conditions of capital.  But Rose’s perspective remains that of Hegel -- pre-industrial capital.

The international discussion of the communist hypothesis has quickly developed into a debate regarding the adequate party-form for radical politics today. This article argues that the stakes of this development become clearer when it is related to the central debates of the earlier alternative globalization movement. The article then explores some significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink the party-form: the notion of the ‘compositional party’ of Italian operaismo, Lukács’s concepts of a ‘political subject’, and Gramsci’s ‘modern Prince.’ The modern Prince is argued to represent the type of ‘expansive’ party-form that might be able to respond productively to the challenges of contemporary political movements.

Interpretations of Georg Lukács's theory of reification and consciousness have typically assumed that Lukács relies on an essentialized notion of subjectivity that can be restored by dereification. I argue instead that he treats subjectivity as a formally-defined position within the totality of consciousness. To do this, I highlight striking similarities between Lukács and the art theorist Alois Riegl: Lukács's account of consciousness, I suggest, closely parallels Riegl's account of the spectator as a formally-defined component of works of art. Both Lukács and Riegl incorporate notions of agency and active involvement in the forms of representation into these accounts of subjectivity: what Riegl finds in the Kunstwollen of different works of art, Lukács finds in the formal structures of social reality. I use this to reinterpret reification as the formal definition of the subject as an isolated individual playing no active part in the structure of social forms. Finally, I use Riegl's suggestion that Dutch group portraits incorporate spectators as active constitutors of artistic form to offer some suggestions regarding Lukács's theory of the party.

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

Georg Lukács’s concept of reification has won many admirers for its account of how individual subjectivity is affected by capitalist society. However, even its admirers have rejected the way Lukács uses this to argue that the proletariat can develop a revolutionary class consciousness out of reification: they argue that he relies too much on flawed Romantic models of subjectivity. In contrast to this, I outline a phenomenological reading of Lukács’s theory, comparing his thought to Edmund Husserl and Emil Lask. This makes consciousness a mode of being rather than an epistemological question. Thus, categories of consciousness affect the existence of objects: the way society appears is, for Lukács, the way it exists. Ultimately, this leads to a new appreciation of the role of the revolutionary Party in Lukács’s theory: his preference for a Luxemburgian party gives a theoretical foundation for describing performed social action as “free.”

Oltre alla rinascita dell'interesse per l'ebraismo e per il cattolicesimo delle origini, si affermava in Germania e nella Heidelberg d'inizio secolo la ricerca di una prospettiva diversa dall'individualismo europeo, e dal neokantismo fino a quel momento imperante e rappresentato da Emil Lask, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband e altri. Il Weber-Kreis viene ricordato come uno dei centri nevralgici del cosiddetto "romanticismo anticapitalistico" d'inizio secolo. Esso si configura come un laboratorio sperimentale che unisce all'utopia romantico-rivoluzionaria la riscoperta dell'ebraismo primordiale. L'articolo si occupa inoltre della figura di Lukács, del suo spiccato interesse per la letteratura, e dell'utopismo estremo formulato da Ernst Bloch.

Chinese version of "The Reification of Consciousness: Husserl's Phenomenology in Lukács's Identical Subject-Object." I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this translation, which was made without my knowledge. (PDF image scan of original; not searchable.)

The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin and the Ideas of their Time GALIN TIHANOV Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 Reviewed by CRAIG BRANDIST The development of cultural theory within a Marxist paradigm has a long and convoluted history. Though the founders of historical materialism and their immediate successors all had valuable things to say about culture, it was not until the late 1920s, and especially the 1930s, that Marxist cultural theory really took off. In the work of Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Marxism engaged with some of the most advanced idealist philosophy and Kulturkritik and, in most cases, was able to incorporate and transform the most valuable insights of those earlier theories. This engagement was documented and analysed in the 1970s by two particularly talented intellectual historians: Martin Jay and Eugene Lunn, resulting in their respective monographs The Dialectical Imagination (1973) and Marxism and Modernism (1982). In the rst, we saw how the establishment of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt provided an institutional structure within which some of these same debates were carried out. In the second, we saw how some of the key debates within Marxist theory over the nature of realism and the status of the avant-garde among other things grew out of an engagement with German neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies, which were also shaped by the rapidly changing political situation that followed the revolutions that broke out at the end of the First World War.

The continued effects of the 2008 economic crisis and its aftershocks have contributed to the electoral collapse across the world of technocratic centrist parties that had come to dominate in the previous decades. In their place, a number of authoritarian populists such as Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte have risen, explicitly setting themselves against the logic of late capitalism. For Georg Lukács, such an opposition is integral to capitalism: he noted the conflicting tendencies in bourgeois thought towards fatalistic belief in an unalterable social system on the one hand, and an irrational faith in so-called ‘great men’ on the other. Drawing on Lukács’s analysis of the logic of the commodity structure as social form, I will explain this through the way capitalist society determines itself as rational in its abstract, quantifiable universality, and excludes all specific content as ‘irrational.’ In this way, I suggest, it symbolically defines its own antithesis – not a revolutionary proletariat, but a mystical nationalism based on a belief in a ‘spiritual’ unity.

Why read Georg Lukács today? Especially when his most famous work, History and Class Consciousness, is so clearly an expression of its specific historical moment, the aborted world revolution of 1917–19 in which he participated, attempting to follow Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Are there “philosophical” lessons to be learned or principles to be gleaned from Lukács’s work, or is there, rather, the danger, as the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Mike Macnair has put it, of “theoretical overkill,” stymieing of political possibilities, closing up the struggle for socialism in tiny authoritarian and politically sterile sects founded on “theoretical agreement?” A certain relation of theory to practice is a matter specific to the modern era, and moreover a problem specific to the era of capitalism, that is, after the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the modern proletarianized working class and its struggle for socialism, and the crisis of bourgeois social relations and thus of consciousness of society involved in this process. Critical theory recognizes that the role of theory in the attempt to transform society is not to justify or legitimate or provide normative sanction, not to rationalize what is happening anyway, but rather to critique, to explore conditions of possibility for change. The role of such critical theory is not to describe how things are, but rather how they might become, how things could and should be, but are not, yet.

Marquant à sa façon le centenaire de La Théorie du roman, cette brève étude se propose de jeter les bases d’une « homologie » des postures politique et esthétique de Lukács, à savoir, de son appréhension historique et (idéo)logique à la fois. À partir des préférences littéraires de Lukács qui bien souvent ne correspondent pas à l’esthétique stalinienne, on s’attache ici à débrouiller les liens complexes existant entre cette œuvre de jeunesse et la production lukacsienne depuis les années 1930, ce qui permet également de relever des « correspondances homologiques » entre l’évolution de la pensée de Lukács sur le plan théorique et l’involution mise en œuvre par Staline sur le plan politique.

On the occasion of the centenary of The Theory of the Novel, this brief study aims at setting the basis for a «homology» between Lukács’s political and aesthetic claims, namely considering both his historical and (ideo)logical understanding. Starting from Lukács’s literary preferences – which often do not conform to the Stalinist’s aesthetic – I try to disentangle the complex links between his early works and the post 1930 production. Along this line, I identify « homologous correspondences » between the evolution of Lukács’s theoretical thought and the involution deployed by Stalin’s political plan.

This document is the sixth chapter of my book-length project, Reification Revalued: Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism. The book as a whole offers a new reading of Lukács through the lens of his earlier attempts to write a philosophy of art while studying in Heidelberg between 1912 and 1918. Rediscovered and published after his death, these drafts reveal the young Lukács’s explicit engagement with a series of thinkers whose influence on his thought has been underexplored for too long – particularly Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, Konrad Fiedler, and Alois Riegl.

I argue that his most important work of Marxist thought, History and Class Consciousness, drew heavily on the model of meaning that he developed in his earlier work. Lukács presents social being as a sphere in which objects are constituted as meaningful through a set of intentional practices that may be analysed phenomenologically. Earlier chapters in the book re-examine some of the central arguments of History and Class Consciousness through this lens – with a particular focus on his account of subjectivity. In this chapter, I try to apply this re-reading of Lukács to an area he paid relatively little explicit attention to – that of nature, and the relation between the social and the natural. To do so, I draw on two significant criticisms of HCC – that of Lukács himself in his final years, and that made more recently by Andrew Feenberg. While conceding that Lukács’s account is deficient in many regards, I suggest that there is more to his view than is normally allowed.

For more information on the book as a whole, please see the prospectus at http://goo.gl/bBhQyK

E' possibile la convivenza umana senza gesti di bontà, di solidarietà, di apertura agli altri? com'è potuto accadere che gesti di tolleranza, di ascolto reciproco, di rispetto delle differenze di opinioni, di accoglienza, vengano qualificati con il termine  denigratorio "buonismo"? Nella ricerca vengono messi a confronto in un ideale dialogo filosofi e scrittori come Heller, Lukacs, Levinas, Saramago; Dostoevskij, Arendt.

For European literati of the early twentieth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky represented a mythically-Russian spirituality in contrast to a soulless, rationalized West. One such enthusiast was Georg Lukács, who in 1915 began a never-completed book about Dostoevsky's work a model of spiritual community that could redeem a fallen world. Though framing his analysis in the language and themes of broader Dostoevsky reception, Lukács used this idiom innovatively to go beyond the reactionary implications this model might connote. Highlighting similarities with Max Weber's account of political ethics, I argue that Lukács developed an ethic derived from his reading of Dostoevsky, which focused on the idea of a hero defined by an ability to resolve the specific ethical dilemma of adherence to duty and moral law on the one hand, and the need to restore spontaneous human community at a time when the social institutions embodying such laws had fallen into decay on the other. Crucially, he deployed the same framework after his conversion to Marxism to justify revolutionary terror. However different his position from Dostoevsky's, it was through engagement with these novels that Lukács not only clarified his thought but also came to identify Lenin as a Dostoevskyan hero figure.

Le prolétariat et la richesse sont des contraires. Comme tels, ils constituent une totalité. Marx Évoquer la totalité, c'est immanquablement convoquer la part maudite du XX e siècle, copieusement figurée par le totalitarisme. Elle actualiserait ce fantasme majeur, prométhéen, de se poser en surplomb du réel. On l'a d'abord tenu pour la projection philosophique du totalitarisme politique, dont la responsabilité serait largement imputable à Hegel, et à son turbulent rejeton : Marx 1 . Cette idée, qui eut son heure de gloire, a désormais cédé le pas à la critique, plus massive encore, des grandes métaphysiques systématiques, fussent-elles laïques, dont la totalité est l'exigence maîtresse mais démesurée. L'accepter serait toutefois se méprendre, et surtout céder aux vaguelettes post-modernes dont les écumes livresques finissent, bizarrement, par faire système 2 . À l'encontre de ces grotesques assimilations, il faut restaurer dans ses droits la catégorie de totalité, supposant, de ne pas régresser à une conception strictement spéculative (Kant) ou archéo-pessimiste (Adorno). Pertinente, cette restauration ne nous paraît l'être que dans le champ théorico-pratique du marxisme, au sein duquel une place éminente revient à Lukács.

György Lukács a voué les dernières années de sa vie à rédiger l'Ontologie de l'être social. Cette œuvre
monumentale devait servir de fondement à l’articulation d’une théorie éthique achevée. Notre propos sera
donc de tenter de dégager, à partir des prémisses ontologiques, une conception de la responsabilité
introduite en contrebande. La difficulté et l’originalité de György Lukács est de nous présenter une théorie
ontologique où l’homme construit le monde qui le construit, où le devenir de l’individu est inhérent au
devenir de l’être social et où la responsabilité à laquelle l'engage la conscience devient le ressort de la
liberté. Nous verrons ainsi que la responsabilité, dans la mesure où elle met en rapport les modalités du
« devenir-homme de l’homme » et s'appuie sur une conception unitaire de l'homme et de l'être social,
franchit le cadre juridique et moral pour devenir un impératif lié à l'être et au devenir de l'individu.
Abstract
György Lukács dedicated the last years of his life to the writing of The Ontology of Social Being. This
monumental work was aimed to fundamentally developed a complete ethical theory. The object of our study
lies in an attempt to find, from the ontological assumptions, a conception of responsibility introduced on
the side. György Lukacs's difficulty and originality is to introduce us an ontological theory where man
constructs the world that constructs him, where the individual becoming is inherent to the social being
becoming and where responsibility engaged by the conscience becomes the question of liberty. We will see
that responsibility, as far as it links the modalities of the « becoming-man of man » and relies on a unitary
conception of man and social being, crosses the juridical and moral boundaries to become an imperative
associated to the being and the becoming of the individual.

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

Ces deux elaborations theoriques majeures (la "Critique de la Raison dialectique" de Sartre et l'"Ontologie de l'etre social de Lukacs") ont la particularite d'etre meconnues et negligees, alors qu'elles partagent une commune ambition de renovation du " marxisme occidental " encombre par sa vulgate, et quoiqu'elles procedent selon des perspectives differentes et contradictoires, qui constituent le ferment et l'interet de leur opposition. Nous voulons montrer que, au-dela de ces contradictions qui les lie, ces deux œuvres sont toutes deux complementaires. Nous esquissons cette demonstration sur la question du travail et de la dialectique de la nature

Quoique la totalite constitue le pivot de l'œuvre theorique de Lukacs, cette categorie a connu des evolutions et des transformations, depuis "La theorie du roman" (1916) jusqu'a l'"Ontologie de l'etre social" (1971). Nous voudrions plus particulierement tenter, en partant d'"Histoire et conscience de classe", de montrer que la problematicite de la totalite lukacsienne reside en sa dimension fortement organique et teleologiquement stricte, pour ensuite examiner la critique " interne " de Lukacs, et ses consequences sur la categorie de totalite, critique qui trouvera un aboutissement dans l'"Ontologie". On envisagera egalement quelques unes des critiques " externes ", notamment celle d'Ernst Bloch dans "Actualite et utopie" (recension d'"Histoire et conscience de classe").

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács is known for his reintroduction of Hegelian thought to Marxist philosophy—but I argue that his account of the subjectivity of the proletariat owes just as much to the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. Despite strong differences in their outlook, their accounts of subjectivity have strong structural similarities. For both, a division of the self against itself produces suffering that leads in turn to a growing consciousness of the roots of the problem; in the end, the self is restored through a relation to itself grounded in the absolute, and thereby becomes capable of freedom. Lukács’s theory of subjectivity is, thus, predicated on changing the orientation of the proletariat towards itself—in ways that are deeply indebted to the peculiar theology of Kierkegaard.

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács is known for his reintroduction of Hegelian thought to Marxist philosophy—but I argue that his account of the subjectivity of the proletariat owes just as much to the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. Despite strong differences in their outlook, their accounts of subjectivity have strong structural similarities. For both, a division of the self against itself produces suffering that leads in turn to a growing consciousness of the roots of the problem; in the end, the self is restored through a relation to itself grounded in the absolute, and thereby becomes capable of freedom. Lukács’s theory of subjectivity is, thus, predicated on changing the orientation of the proletariat towards itself—in ways that are deeply indebted to the peculiar theology of Kierkegaard.

György Lukács dedicou os últimos anos de sua vida a escrever Para uma Ontologia do Ser Social. Esta obra monumental
serviria de fundamento para a articulação de uma teoria ética completa. Nosso propósito será o de tentar extrair, a
partir das premissas ontológicas, uma concepção da responsabilidade introduzida de forma indireta. A dificuldade
e a originalidade de György Lukács se dão na apresentação de uma teoria ontológica em que o homem constrói o
mundo que o constrói, em que o devir do indivíduo é inerente ao devir do ser social e em que a responsabilidade
na qual a consciência o engaja vem a ser a fonte da liberdade. Veremos, assim, que a responsabilidade, na medida
em que relaciona as modalidades do “tornar-se homem do homem”, e que se apoia numa concepção unitária do
homem e do ser social, atravessa os âmbitos jurídico e moral para se tornar um imperativo ligado ao ser e ao vir a
ser do indivíduo.