From: gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 01:38:26 +0200
Subject: Re: ADORNO VIZ. LUKACS?




Adorno papers dealing explicitly with Lukacs:

1) "Erpresste Versoehnung"  in GS vol. 11, *Noten zur Literatur*.  If 
this is not translated in *Notes on Literature* I or II (Columbia UP), it 
is perhaps the same as "Reconciliation under Duress" in Frederic 
Jameson's *Aesthetics and Politics*. (NLB 1977)

2) "Ad Lukacs" in GS vol. 20a. Written in 1949. [No translation that I 
know of]

3) "Die Aktualitaet der Philosophie", GS 1. ("The relevance of 
Philosophy") Adorno's inaugural lecture of 1931. [No translation that 
I know of]

4) Many references to Lukacs in the *Aesthetic Theory*.

5) "Der Begriff der Philosophie" [The concept of Philosophy] - 
Adorno's lectures of 1951/1952. A transcript has been published in 
the *Frankfurter Adorno Blaetter* (the publication of the Adorno 
Archive in Frankfurt) II, 1993,  [Not translated.]

At a recent discussion on this topic at the Institut fuer 
Sozialforschung it was clear that a central point of difference 
between Adorno and Lukacs is the question of Psychoanalysis, 
which the former held to be central to a notion of *subjective* (if not 
of course *objective*) liberation, and the latter dismissed as 
bourgeois ideology. Helmut Dahmer's *Libido und Gesellschaft* 
and his *Pseudonatur und Kritik - Freud, Marx und die Gegenwart* 
probes the relationship of Marx and Freud in depth. In English much 
of this debate is covered by Christopher Lasch and Russell Jacoby. 
The Sydney philosopher George Markus (who was a student of 
Lukacs?) has published on Adorno/Lukacs somewhere. Then 
there's Baldacchino's 1996 *Post-Marxist Marxism: questioning the 
answer: difference and realism after Lukacs and Adorno*, which I 
have'nt read. In German there have been several very good authors 
on the relationship Marxism/Psychoanalysis: Wolfgang Bonss, 
Alfred Lorenzer, Paul Parin.  

I have no doubt that much of this will start to be discussed again as 
soon as the *Negative Dialectics* is available in an adequate 
English translation, and the lecture course which Adorno devoted to 
this topic in 1965/66 is published. 




> I know I've asked this before, with meager results,

perhaps the meager results have something to do with your attitude 
that everyone except Ralph Dumain is a bourgeois capitalist pig?

 but it's a
> question important enough to ask again.  Does anyone know of good
> comparative studies that compare Lukacs and Adorno point for point in
> a number of areas, but especially philosophy?  I am aware of the
> dispute between Lukacs and Adorno on literary modernism and have
> several of the relavant texts.  I also have the essay in which Adorno
> accuses Lukacs of self-destruction in Lukacs' THE DESTRUCTION OF
> REASON.  But this is not enough for my purposes.
>  I am not quite as interested in the aesthetic debates as I am in
> philosophy proper.  For example, I would love to see a comparison of
> Lukacs' THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON and EXISTENTIALISME OU MARXISME and
> maybe even his books on ontology with Adorno's KIERKEGAARD, THE JARGON
> OF AUTHENTICITY, AGAINST EPISTEMOLOGY, AND NEGATIVE DIALECTICS.
> 
> 
>