Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature

Description

The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukacs more vital than ever. The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukacs, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukacs himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukacs's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukacs's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukacs from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukacs's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.

Timothy Hall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at the University of East London, UK. He is co-author of The Modern State: theories and ideologies (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

Materialist and formalist, realist and utopian, ontological and prophetic, militant and rebel, Gyoergy Lukacs remains a disturbing oxymoron to be interpreted - therefore transformed. In truly dialectical and dialogical manner, this books succeeds in doing just that, burying the verdicts of obsolescence, illuminating the ambivalences, and making again of the "principle of totality" which traverses the philosopher's writings a category for radically overturning an alienated society. -- Etienne Balibar, author (with Louis Althusser) of Reading Capital Reviewed in Radical Philosophy 171.