Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács's Thought in Late Capitalism

339 Pages·2020·4.853 MB·English

by  Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker (editor)

Confronting Reification
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Studies in
Critical Social Sciences
Series Editor
David Fasenfest (soas University of London)
Editorial Board
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University)
Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside)
William Carroll (University of Victoria)
Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney)
Kimberle W. Crenshaw (University of California, LA,
and Columbia University)
Raju Das (York University)
Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University)
Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen)
Alfredo Saad-Filho (King’s College London)
Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo)
Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)
volume 166
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss
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Confronting Reification
Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought
in Late Capitalism
Edited by
Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker
leiden | boston
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Cover illustration: “The Last Man: Imitator,” Leonid Lerman, 2004. Plaster, pigment. 32.5" × 32.5" × 3.5".
Courtesy: McKee Gallery.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020025958
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ISSN 1573-4234
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Contents
Acknowledgments  VII
Notes on Contributors  VIII
Introduction  1
Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker
Part 1
Interpreting Reification: the Meaning and Origins of a Concept
1 Lukács’s Theory of Reification: an Introduction  13
Andrew Feenberg
2 Categorial Forms as Intelligibility of Social Objects: Reification and
Objectivity in Lukács  25
Christian Lotz
3 Reification in History and Class Consciousness  48
Csaba Olay
Part 2
Philosophical Interventions in the Concept of Reification:
Applications, Critiques, and Connections
4 Reification, Values and Norms: toward a Critical Theory of
Consciousness  67
Michael J. Thompson
5 Reification and the Mechanistic World-Picture: Lukács and Grossmann
on Mechanistic Philosophy  91
Sean Winkler
6 “The Nature of Humanity, or Rather the Nature of Things” – Reification
in the Works of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin  116
Andraž Jež
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vi Contents
7 Lukács on Reification and Epistemic Constructivism  144
Tom Rockmore
Part 3
Reification and the Idea of Socialism: Lukács’s Contributions to
the Renewal of Radical Politics and Their Limitations
8 The Project of Renewing the Idea of Socialism and the Theory of
Reification  159
Rüdiger Dannemann
9 Georg Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism  186
Joseph Grim Feinberg
10 Lukács’s Idea of Communism and Its Blind Spot: Money  203
Frank Engster
Part 4
Social and Political Interventions in the Idea of Reification:
Gender, Race, Neoliberalism, and Populism
11 The Revolutionary Subject in Lukács and Feminist Standpoint Theory:
Dilaceration and Emancipatory Interest  227
Mariana Teixeira
12 Linking Racism and Reification in the Thought of Georg Lukács  252
Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker
13 Reification and Neoliberalism: Is There an Alternative?  271
Tivadar Vervoort
14 Populism and the Logic of Commodity Fetishism: Lukács’s Theory of
Reification and Authoritarian Leaders  289
Richard Westerman
Index  323
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Acknowledgments
Many of the essays in this volume originated as presentations at “The Legacy of
Georg Lukács” Conference held in Budapest in 2017. In the midst of the Hun-
garian government’s assault on Lukács’s legacy, a remarkable team came to-
gether in an effort to assert Lukács’s significance as a philosopher, social theo-
rist, and literary critic. Lukács scholars everywhere owe a debt to the main
organizers, János Kelemen and Michael J. Thompson, for planning and realiz-
ing the conference. Cody Inglis, Ágnes Kelemen, and Jordan Skinner did the
remarkable work of securing space and promoting the conference in Hungary.
The late Ágnes Heller, who gave a wonderful talk on the closing night of the
conference, played an indispensible role as a supporter of the event. The staff
and faculty of Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University
guaranteed the success of the conference.
My thanks to Michael J. Thompson for suggesting I edit this volume based
on talks related to the theme of reification. In his capacity as editor of the Stud-
ies in Critical Social Sciences series, David Fasenfest helped turn this idea into
a book. He has been an incredibly supportive and patient series editor. Though
they were unable to attend the conference, I thank Tom Rockmore and Chris-
tian Lotz for turning the talks they would have presented into essays for this
book. I am grateful to all the contributors for their participation in the confer-
ence and commitment to this book. Finally, I thank Leonid Lerman for gener-
ously granting permission to use an image of one of his magnificent sculptures
for the cover of the Brill edition of this book.
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Notes on Contributors
Rüdiger Dannemann
is President of the International Georg Lukács Society. He studied philosophy,
German and history in Bochum and Frankfurt/Main. He received his doctorate
in Rotterdam for Das Prinzip Verdinglichung. His numerous publications cover
social philosophy and political philosophy, especially on Lukács, Western
Marxism and Critical Theory, as well as on literary studies and music aesthet-
ics. He is editor of the Lukács Yearbook (since 2012) and the Lukács selection of
works in individual volumes (at Aisthesis). Selected Publications include Georg
Lukács – Jenseits der Polemiken (ed., Sendler Verlag, 1986); Das Prinzip Verdingli-
chung (Sendler Verlag, 1987); Georg Lukács zur Einführung (Panorama Verlag,
2005; Junius Verlag, 1997); Lukács-Schule (in HKWM 8/II (2015) (with Michael
Löwy); Lukács and 1968. Eine Spurensuche (ed., Aisthesis Verlag, 2009); Zur Ak-
tualität von Georg Lukács (forthcoming in 2020); and Staat und Politik bei Georg
Lukács (ed., together with H.E. Schiller, forthcoming).
Frank Engster
wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the subject of time, money and measure and was
subsequently a junior fellow at the Post-Wachstumskolleg (Degrow-College) in
Jena. He works for several political institutions and foundations and is active in
political groups in Berlin. His areas of interest lie in the different readings of
Marx’s critique of political economy and especially money as a technic and its
connection with measurement, quantification, time and (natural) science.
Some publications are available on academia.edu.
Andrew Feenberg
served as Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of
Communication, Simon Fraser University, where he continues to direct the Ap-
plied Communication and Technology Lab. His books include The Philosophy of
Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, (Verso Press, 2014), Technosystem:
The Social Life of Reason (Harvard University Press, 2017), and Technology, Mo-
dernity, and Democracy, co-edited with Eduardo Beira (Rowman and Littlefield,
2018) Critical Theory and the Thought of Andrew Feenberg, edited by D. Arnold
and A. Michel, appeared with Palgrave Macmillan (2017).
Joseph Grim Feinberg
is a research fellow at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sci-
ences. His current research involves the history of critical social thought in
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Notes on Contributors ix
East-Central Europe, the problem of citizenship and non-citizens, and the no-
tion of internationalism. His book The Paradox of Authenticity, on problems of
performance and the reconceptualization of “the people” in post-Communist
Slovak folklore, was released in 2018 (University of Wisconsin Press).
Andraž Jež
is a Ljubljana-based literary historian. He received his Ph.D. (2015) from the
Postgraduate School of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sci-
ences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), his thesis dealing with questions of dissemination
of (proto)nationalism in Vörmarz Habsburg Monarchy by analyzing work of
Slovenian-Croatian poet Stanko Vraz (1810–1851) on whom he also wrote a
book published by the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts (ZRC SAZU). Jež works as a Research Fellow of the ZRC SAZU’s Insti-
tute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies and as a Teaching Assistant of
the Department of Slovenian Studies at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of
Arts (FF UL). His articles have appeared in numerous academic publications
such as the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (ed. Joep Leerssen,
Amsterdam University Press, 2018). He is currently researching social, political
and economic history of the 19th and 20th century literature and arts. He is
also an experimental jazz musician.
Christian Lotz
is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, working in critical the-
ory and Post-Kantian continental philosophy. He is the author of, among other
books, The Capitalist Schema. Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (Lex-
ington Books, 2014); Karl Marx: Das Maschinenfragment (Laika, 2014); and
From Affectivity to Subjectivity. Revisiting Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). In addition, he co-edited a volume on critical the-
ory, reification, and Heidegger entitled Ding und Verdinglichung. Technik- und
Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der Kritischen Theorie (Fink, 2012). His
current research interests are in contemporary European political philosophy,
Marx’s critique of political economy, phenomenology, and philosophical
anthropology.
Csaba Olay
studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics at Eötvös Loránd University Bu-
dapest. He obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy at Freiburg University (Germany).
He has been teaching at Eötvös Loránd University since 2001 and is currently
Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, where he
was appointed as full professor in 2015. His main research areas are 19th–20th
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