Marxist Modernism:Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory

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.

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.

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.