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Marxist Modernism:Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory
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Lectures on art, Marxism, and critical theory by the legendary philosopher, collected for the first time, with an afterword by Martin Jay
Marxist Modernism presents for the first time Gillian Rose’s 1979 lectures on the Frankfurt School, art, and politics. Delivered soon after the publication of her now classic study of Adorno, The Melancholy Science, the lecture series expands upon this work to explore the lives and philosophies of a wider range of Frankfurt School members and affiliates: from Adorno, to Lukács, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, and Horkheimer. In particular, Rose discusses their debates concerning various twentieth-century modernist art movements, and outlines the ways in which each theorist developed Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism into a Marxist theory of culture.
Marxist Modernism serves as a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School, but it also provides a new resource for one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: Gillian Rose. The volume will provide an accessible encounter with Rose’s thought for those not yet acquainted with her formidable work, while provoking a renewed engagement with the Marxist basis of her oeuvre for those who are.
An Afterword by the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay reviews the lectures and contextualises them within the wider reception of the Frankfurt School in the Anglophone world.
Reviews
A fierce vigilance of thought.
Writing wholly from within the tradition of modern European philosophy and social thought, Rose produced one of the most distinctive and original bodies of work of her generation.
To read these lectures is to watch a great mind at work. Animated by her discovery of an incisive and socially relevant left-wing intellectual tradition, Rose approaches teaching by conveying that excitement - precisely the philosophical eros she would later extol. For readers familiar with Rose's rigorous and sometimes forbidding books, these lectures reveal an unexpected, intimate pedagogical side. Alongside her unique and pioneering reception of the Frankfurt School, we can see Rose's own singular contributions to political thought - her meditations on law, violence, the relationship between aesthetic imagination and social order - begin to find their grounds in her readings of, and arguments with, her predecessors.
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This is the best starting place for a new generation of Rose-readers, a reminder of where it all began, when modernists could still be Marxists and theologians belonged to a previous age. A treat for the Roserati.
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In these early and inviting lectures, written in a high conversational style, Gillian Rose brilliantly reconstructs first generation Critical Theory as "Marxist modernism" by demonstrating how Georg Lukács's generalization of commodity fetishism from a concept belonging to the critique of political economy into dialectics of society enables the development of the critique of culture in Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht. The promise and potential of dereifying critique that Rose demonstrates, of revealing the immediacies of given social reality as the products of 'human sensuous activity, practice," seems more urgent today than ever before. To read these lectures today is a painful reminder of how much we miss and still need to engage with Gillian Rose's fierce intellect.
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"As you know, dialectics is a very slippery term…. Do you know this phrase, repressive toleration? Have you come upon it? No. Okay…." How I would have loved to have been there. These lectures are revelatory - exhilarating, passionate, brilliant, ambitious. They're everything we've always admired and loved about Gillian Rose, but show us another side of this towering intellect - her brilliance as a teacher. It's the perfect accompaniment to the classic Aesthetics and Politics and a belated gift to us all.