Dissonancia: Critical Theory Journal

"Preface (1922)"

Konstantin Baehrens — 2023-12-31

"What is Orthodox Marxism?"

Alexandros Minotakis — 2023-12-31

"The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg"

Ankica Čakardić — 2023-12-31

"Class consciousness"

Eden Young — 2023-12-31

"The phenomenon of reification"

Victor Strazzeri — 2023-12-31

"The antinomies of bourgeois thought"

Giovanni Zanotti — 2023-12-31

"The standpoint of the proletariat"

Mariana Teixeira — 2023-12-31

"Historical materialism's change of function"

Victor Strazzeri — 2023-12-31

"Legality and illegality"

Costas Gousis — 2023-12-31

"Critical observations on Rosa Luxemburg's 'Critique of the Russian Revolution'"

Anita Zsurzsán — 2023-12-31

"Towards a methodology of the problem of organisation"

Dimitra Alifieraki — 2023-12-31

"Preface to the new edition (1967)"

Konstantin Baehrens — 2023-12-31

Eros und Erkenntnis ou a promessa da filosofia de Theodor W. Adorno

João Paulo Andrade — 2023-09-13

Resenha de Eros und Erkenntnis – 50 Jahre “Ästhetische Theorie”, organizado por de Martin Endres, Axel Pichler e Claus Zittel (Berlim/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019)

Counterpublic and discursive public as crossing points

Diogo de Moraes Silva — 2023-10-08

Willing to deal with issues based on repudiation actions of the visual arts in Brazil, in the 2010s, this article invests in the idea of “reception acts”. In this way, it brings to the foreground the agency of detractor publics, discussing it based on a comprehensive project of the phenomenon. For this, it uses Michael Warner's theory about the “counterpublic” and the correlate “discursive public”. These are mobilized as concepts favorable to the recognition, description and analysis of performative gestures linked to public discursiveness and the public sphere. Taking as an example the cases involving the 31st Bienal de São Paulo (2014) and the exhibition “Queermuseu: Cartografias da Diferença na Arte Brasileira” (2017), this approach seeks to think about the circulation and reflexivity acquired by artistic works, curatorial statements and sociopolitical agendas privileged by these artistic events among audiences. It focuses on those who proved to be able to elaborate and disseminate abhorrent versions of these “textualities”, to the point of producing real effects in the sequence, or even in the interruption, of the exhibitions. The movement of Warnerian notions, and their approximation with the situations reported in the text, allow us to rehearse the coining of types aimed at representing the discursive fulcrum of the conducts and unseemly rhetoric publicly practiced by actors with a reactionary profile in the face of artistic productions with a progressive bias.

Limits, Perspectives and Next Steps

Felipe Gabriel Ervaz Garcia — 2023-10-08

Public space has a latent configuration of counter-discursive manifestations. Cancel culture, as this digital phenomenon is known, has gained prominence in public debates for its form of externalization linked to ostracism, suffering various criticisms not only in media arena, but also in universities. If, on the one hand, there is a pessimistic view of the phenomenon, it can also be understood as a powerful discursive tool for many groups, such as certain counterpublics. In this article, we discuss various key concepts about cancel culture and counterpublics, arguing complementary points that intend to contribute to reflections on the topics. We seek to consider the multiple perspectives regarding the cancel culture phenomenon, adding a dialectical layer to debate. Thus, we try to understand how these objects can be closely connected in the logic of discursive field and open debate, in addition to proposing a breakthrough for the debate on cancel culture, which can also support counter-public studies.

Counterpublicity and thE Racial Politics of Palmares Cultural Foundation racial politics (2019-2022)

Leandro de Paula — 2023-10-08

From 2019 to 2022, Palmares Cultural Foundation became a key topic in Brazilian public debates due to the ideas on racial issues defended by its President, the journalist Sérgio Camargo. This article examines how his mandate sought to suppress the State’s recognition of the ethnical-racial identity claimed by Brazilian black movements. In addition to the academic literature on the relationship between the Brazilian State and black movements, we investigate a research corpus that includes court decisions, government ordinances and notes, press and social media content. Our main goal is to describe the publics and counterpublics created by racial issues and the disputes on multicultural citizenship in Brazil.

Apresentação

Jonas Medeiros — 2023-10-12

Apresentação editorial do Dossiê Temático Estudos de Contrapúblicos

Uma estranha criatura

Gustavo Frota Lima e Silva — 2023-10-12

Resenha de WARNER, M. Publics and Counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002. 334 páginas.

Sentir-se à margem pelas suas ideias

Fanny Vrydagh — 2023-10-23

Tradução de artigo publicado originalmente em LOUAULT, F., De BARROS, M. e KERMOAL, K. (Orgs.) Marges et marginalités au Brésil: Espaces, pouvoir et societé. Bruxelas: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2022.

Ethics and Class Consciousness

Fernando Quintana — 2023-12-22

Disputes over (or against) “orthodoxy” in relation to Marx’s thought played a fundamental role in the theoretical and political field of the communist movement at the beginning of the 20th century. In “What is Orthodox Marxism?”, Lukács resituated the terms of the discussion by declaring his orthodoxy to Marxism as a fidelity to the method. Marx’s method, which Lukács calls revolutionary dialectics, is presented on the basis of the unity between theory and practice, as the theoretical expression of revolutionary praxis. Precisely for this reason, Lukács sustains the controversial thesis that the condition of possibility of Marxist dialectics and the overcoming of reification is the standpoint of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history. In the 100 years that have elapsed, the thesis of the standpoint of the proletariat has been the object of important criticisms. Faced with this, some authors have chosen to resignify and reinterpret this idea, while others have chosen to separate the critique of reification as an independent aspect from the political proposal of the revolutionary proletariat. The problem is that these formulations tend to distort the unity of theory and practice that is at the basis of Lukács’s formulation. After exposing Lukács’s critique of the phenomenon of reification and explaining succinctly what he understands by dialectical method, this article offers a reflection on the conditions of possibility of revolutionary dialectics, starting from a re-reading of the concept of class consciousness that emphasizes its ethical structure.

Time’s carcass

Till Hahn — 2023-12-22

This paper examines Marx’s and Lukács’s concept of time in relation to the capitalist order of appearances. It argues that Marx as well as Lukács weaponized a certain understanding of abstract time for the critique of capitalism, that can be traced back to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. It argues that time as inner sense (Kant) under capitalism becomes the inner sense of capital, understood as “automatic subject”.

Reification and idealistic reductionism in Western thought

Luis Alvarenga — 2023-12-22

In this article we propose, from the reading of some texts by Georg Lukács and the Spanish-Salvadoran theologian and philosopher Ignacio Ellacuría (1931–1989), the hypothesis that reification is a constitutive problem of Western thought. Ellacuría contributes the need for a historicized perspective of the concepts that conceal reality, as well as a profound reflection on the concrete political problems implied by the persistence of what he calls ‘idealistic reductionism’ in philosophy. This reflection is very well complemented by the Hungarian philosopher’s approach of the problem of reification in History and Class Consciousness. Both the idealist reductionism that Ellacuría denounces and reification have in common the substitution of reality by static, ahistorical concepts, which constitute an ideologized appearance that conceals the reality of exploitation in our countries. The dialogue between Lukács and Ellacuría would bring a new dimension to the analysis of the problem of the coloniality of knowledge from a Marxist perspective.

Reification

Leonardo Bruno Lopresti — 2023-12-22

In recent years, various critics of Lukács’s work have subjected the concept of reification (Verdinglichung) to revision, either to point out criticisms and propose new readings of it, or to establish a defense of this category. This indicates that it is a theorization that still is valid in multiple aspects and continues to question the way in which capitalist society and the forms of consciousness that emerge from it are analyzed. In general, these studies focus their analysis on History and class consciousness and tend to omit the relevance and resonances that reification has in Lukács’s later work. This article sets out to analyze the category of reification historically, through a comparison between its conceptualization in the 1923 work and the Ontology of Social Being, on which Lukács worked in the last years of his life. In this way it seeks, on the one hand, to identify continuities and discontinuities in the content of the concept of reification and, on the other, to establish a series of necessary conceptual articulations; namely: to investigate how the passage towards an ontological perspective, mediated by the concept of labor (Arbeit) developed in the Ontology, implies a reformulation of the category in question and, at the same time, to integrate, also in the late period, the problem of reification in the broader framework of the study of alienation (Entfremdung) in social life.

Lukács’s critique of irrationalism

Matthew Sharpe — 2023-12-22

Challenging claims of a complete intellectual and political reorientation, this paper argues that Gyorgy Lukács’s post-war critique of the forms of irrationalism characterising reactionary and proto-fascist thinking in Destruction of Reason carries forward a critique of bourgeois philosophy looking back to Lukács’s critique of “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” in History and Class Consciousness. Part 1 examines Lukács’s claims in History and Class Consciousness that Kantian philosophy and the oppositions it sets up – between theoretical and practical reason, science and morality, triumphant understanding and the unavailability of the totality and opacity of the “thing-in-itself” – reflect in the contemplative sphere the concrete contradictions of bourgeois-capitalist society. Part 2 shows how Lukács’s account of the genesis of modern philosophical “irrationalism” in Schelling directly situates this as arising out of the “problem of the irrational” reflected in the antinomies of Kantian critical philosophy, by positing an intellectual intuition putatively capable of transcending the limits of finite understanding and granting access (for an elite few) to an “abyssal” suprarational Ground of experience. In the concluding Part 3, we contend that, as Destruction of Reason tracks the devolution of philosophical irrationalism into far-Right ideology in the 20^th century, the 1933 essay “Grand Hotel Abyss” critiques the recurrent gesture of radical intellectuals to funnel their dissatisfaction at capitalist reification into exotic invocations of “spiritual crisis” which leave the political-economic dimensions of capitalist societies unexamined, because they lean on the same irrationalist premises established in Schelling’s irrationalist response to the antinomies of bourgeois thought. In the contemporary situation, as the far Right reemerges, and academic social critique continues to draw on premises drawn from irrationalism, Lukács’s position assumes new pertinence.

“Du musst dein Leben ändern”

Spyros Potamias — 2023-12-22

Nowadays, there is a prevalent opinion, although not well-supported, that the late Marxist Lukács’s work is essentially different from his early Marxist writings. This article claims precisely the opposite. Namely, that there is a categorical continuity between History and Class Consciousness and The Specificity of the Aesthetic, despite the changes in Lukács’s theoretical thought and political stance during the almost half-century period between the two works. More specifically, this article attempts to designate how the central categories of History and Class Consciousness (e.g. totality, reification, rationalization, imputed consciousness) appear in The Specificity of the Aesthetic and how these categories intertwine organically with Lukács’s main aesthetic categories (e.g. the particular, poetic choice, catharsis, evocation).

The question of organisation

Costas Gousis — 2023-12-22

One hundred years after its publication, History and Class Consciousness remains an indispensable guide to social change. Contributing to the broader discussion about Lukács and critical theory today, this article explores aspects of Lukács’s contribution to a philosophy of the party, his distinctive approach to political practice and his defence of the alternative. Drawing from contemporary re-readings of his work, the concepts of reification, totality, and mediation are explored highlighting the importance of the book’s often-overlooked final essay towards a methodology of the problem of organisation. Further, it draws attention to Tailism and the Dialectic and the concept of Augenblick (“moment”), shedding light on Lukács’s understanding of the complex relation between objective and subjective factors in the course of historic development. The above discussion is situated within the atmosphere of the early 1920s and the dilemmas and new challenges posed by the 1917 October revolution. At the same time, throughout his vast and often contradictory work Lukács offers concepts, methodologies, and tools to address the crucial theoretical and political challenges of the 21^st century. Until the end of his life Lukács devoted all his efforts to the renaissance of Marxism and remained committed to the cause even in the most unfavourable conditions. Thus, this article concludes with some reflections on Lukács’s potential revival and its significance for emancipatory perspectives arguing that in an era of political defeat and seemingly insurmountable strategic dead-ends, there is a lot to learn from his legacy.

Lukács after Adorno

Martin Platais — 2023-12-22

Review of Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia, by Tyrus Miller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Georg Lukács and Critical Theory

Furio Cerutti — 2023-12-31

Portuguese translation of:

CERUTTI, Furio. “Georg Lukács und die Kritische Theorie”. In: G. Flego; W. Schmied-Kowarzik (eds.). Georg Lukács – Ersehnte Totalität. Band I des Bloch-Lukács- Symposiums 1985 in Dubrovnik. Bochum: Germinal, 1986, p. 113–119.

A word by the author, forty years later

Furio Cerutti — 2023-12-31

Commentary for the Portuguese translation of “Georg Lukács und die Kritische Theorie” published in this volume (Dissonancia: Critical Theory Journal, v. 7, 2023, e2023030). The original text appeared in the vol. 1 of the proceedings of the 1985 Bloch- Lukács-Symposium in Dubrovnik.

Testimonies

Anita Chari — 2023-12-31

Presentation of the dossier

Mariana Teixeira — 2023-12-31