Abstract

How is it possible that works of art exist? How do we become receptive aesthetic subjects? The Specificity of the Aesthetic extends these fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions around which Georg Lukács's theory of art was organised. This late work of aesthetics seeks to solve a puzzle that neither philosophy nor socialist politics was able to: the fundamental ethical question of what individuals and humanity as a whole ought to do. Art offers Lukács the already-existing means through which the damaged edifice of Marxism might be reconstructed on a durable basis on which to rest the philosophy, politics, and ethics of a non-Soviet-style Marxism. Erik M. Bachman, Ph.D. (2011), University of California at Santa Cruz, is a Lecturer at that university. Author of Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism (2018), he has also published numerous essays on modernism, film, and Lukács. Tyrus Miller, Ph.D. (1994), Stanford University, is the Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. He has published and edited many notable monographs and essays on modernism, critical theory, and the avant-garde.