New Left Review I/107, January-February 1978

Terry Eagleton

‘Aesthetics and Politics’

The historic debates of the 1930s between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have now been assembled into a single volume, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson. [1] Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, with a conclusion by Fredric Jameson, London 1978. Readers of nlr have already had a foretaste of its contents: Brecht’s sardonic deflation of Lukács, for example, published in nlr 84, has been absorbed with significant rapidity to swell the slim corpus of a Western Marxist aesthetics in dire need of nourishment. But it is only with the coherent ordering of these complex interchanges that we can pose to them some fundamental questions. Why does this pivotal debate take the recurrent form of a quarrel over ‘realism’? What is the political secret of these varied contentions over painting, theatre, fiction? And how are we to receive and appropriate these polemics today?

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