Aesthetics of Form as Social Philosophy: Re-reading Lukács. Introduction to the Issue
Aesthetics of Form as Social Philosophy: Re-reading Lukács. Introduction to the Issue

Summary/Abstract: This volume is dedicated to Georg Lukács’ concept of form. The concept itself is understood in the broadest sense as the result of drawing boundaries, which open a framework for communication and social mediation. Form, as Judith Butler aptly remarked with regard to the scope of the term in the work of the early Lukács, is nothing that is added to the expression, but rather it becomes a condition, a sign and the possibility of its subjective and objective truth (Butler 2011). Even more: As Form, according to Lukács, can never be understood outside of its own genesis, the concept becomes the presupposition of a practice of literary and cultural studies which sees itself as the critical reading of the genealogy of forms (Menke 2018). To such a reading, the volume shows, Lukács not only subjected the forms of literature, life and the social, but did so with a degree of lucidity unmatched in literary and cultural studies to this day. If the possibilities of the form-genealogical approach remained largely unfollowed, it was because the problem of form highlighted by Lukács was overshadowed by the dogmatism with which he later tried to solve it.

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