This book offers a radical new interpretation of Georg Luk?css
History and Class Consciousness, showing for the first time how the philosophical framework for his analysis of society was laid in the drafts of a philosophy of art that he planned but never completed before he converted to Marxism. Reading Luk?css work through the so-called Heidelberg Aesthetics reveals for the first time a range of unsuspected influences on his thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, and Alois Riegl; it also offers a theory of subjectivity within social relations that avoids many of the problems of earlier readings of his text. At a time when Luk?css reputation is once more on the rise, this bold new reading helps revitalize his thought in ways that help it speak to contemporary concerns.
1.Introduction: the Luk?cs debate.
1. Romantic anti-capitalism.
2. The equality of subject and object.
3. Untangling the web of influence.
4. Argument
Part I: The Road to Reification
2. Reality and Representation in Art
1.Truth versus judgment: transcending psychologism.
2.The autonomy of art: Fiedler and Riegl.
3.The philosophical framework: Husserl and Lask.
4.The artwork as totality.
5.Subject and object.
6.Conclusion.
3.The History of History & Class Consciousness.
1. Revolutionary eschatology.
2. The theoretical return to Heidelberg.
3. Conscious knowledge to conscious being.
4. Conclusion.