Reification

Continuities and ruptures of the Lukácsian project

Abstract

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.