Freedom from tragedy: remarks on the early Lukács

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores some of the ways in which, between 1907 and 1911, the young Lukács articulated a conception of life as that which could not be formed or transformed under the fallen and inauthentic conditions of a modernity profoundly if contradictorily shaped by capitalism. This baleful social ontology made it so any self that could serve as the pivot for true change was beset by dissonance and fragmentation. In what his diary entries and letters reveal to be a profoundly personal and gendered conception of life’s impasses, the transformability of everyday life appeared as the nemesis of the formability of true life. At the heart of this vision of a blocked or formless transformation and of a waning selfhood, we encounter Lukács’s effort to think the historical, ethical and metaphysical prerequisites for modern drama, and whether that drama can indeed take the form of a modern tragedy. The essay’s conclusion touches on the young Lukács’s fleeting effort to look not in tragedy but in non-tragic drama for the possibility of a self-transformative life.