Chapter Eight

The Self-Exorcism of Georg Lukács

Above all my messianic utopianism lost (and

was even seen to lose) its real grip on me.1
Things now face us in a clear, sharp light
which to many may seem cold and hard; a light
shed on them by the teachings of Marx.2

Georg Lukács spent a lifetime trying to exorcise the

last traces of romantic, idealist and religious catego-
ries from his thought. While I admire the ascetic and
militant discipline of the later Lukács, especially
since he was most critical of his own earlier work, it
seems to me that his premise is mistaken. For, in the
act of self-exorcism, he assumes that these themes
function as an original source that must be overcome
and excised. So, he sought to dispense with his earlier
‘romantic anti-capitalism’, ‘messianic utopianism’,
the sense of a ‘world abandoned by God’ or an ‘age
of absolute sinfulness’. I do not argue that Lukács is
trying to overcome some earlier moment of religious
commitment or faith – unlike Louis Althusser, Henri
Lefebvre or Terry Eagleton. Rather, his affectation of
religious themes seems to be something he picked
up in the various circles he frequented and types of
thought that appealed to him at the time, such as
Jewish mysticism via Martin Buber, Kierkegaard’s

1
Lukács 1988, p. xxvii; 1968, p. 30.
2
Lukács 1972b, p. 1.
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Christian introspection, or Bloch’s messianic Marxism.3 Rather, the argument

of this chapter is that, despite Lukács’s own perception, such themes are not
necessarily religious, or indeed romantic or idealist, but that the time of their
religious occupation is but a passing moment, however delayed it might be.
In this respect, my treatment of Lukács fills out some of the comments that
appeared in the closing section of my discussion of Agamben.
In what follows, I trace Lukacs’s attempts at self-exorcism along two over-
lapping paths, the one critical and the other autobiographical. As for the first,
we find a curious relationship between The Theory of the Novel and The Young
Hegel. In the former, Lukács argues that the novel could arise only in a world
abandoned by God, but his solution is to search for a revival of the lost and
integrated classical world, and he finds that in Dostoevsky. In The Young
Hegel, he takes Hegel to task for making largely the same argument, except
that now, for Hegel, the alienating ‘positivity’ of Christianity must be over-
come in favour of the recovered republican freedom of ancient Greece and
Rome. In dispensing too readily with Hegel’s idealism, I wonder not only at
the need to exorcise his own past, but also whether he has not missed some-
thing in the form of the youthful thought of both Hegel and himself: rather
than some original idealistic-cum-theological core that needs to be cut out, the
effort to leap back to a pre-Christian moment suggests that the theological fill-
ing is not necessarily original or determining. On the autobiographical path,
we have become accustomed to the lengthy prefaces – often written much
later for reprints, or translations, or, in some cases, first editions – that seek to
assess the limits and insights of the text in question. But what interests me in
a select number of prefaces – particularly those of The Theory of the Novel and
History and Class Consciousness – is the continuing autobiographical narrative,
especially where that narrative touches on questions of religion. For, here too,
we find a more intimate effort at exorcising the spirits from his thought and
life. However, there is a difference between the two prefaces: while that in The
Theory of the Novel categorically discards his sense of ‘an age of absolute sin-
fulness’, and thereby his romantic and idealist pretences which underlie that
text, the preface to History and Class Consciousness gives voice to a nostalgia for

3
Löwy 1979, pp. 93–6; Kadarky 1991, pp. 58–9, 62–4, 115–16. For this reason I
do not find it particularly interesting to try to uncover the theological corpse in
Lukács’s basement, as Maier tries to do (Maier 1989), or, for that matter, Kadarky in
his overblown and painfully written biography (Kadarky 1991).