Adorno and the Failures of Realism

The article offers a reconstruction of the main moments of the relationship between Th. W. Adorno and G. Lukacs in the period after the Second World War. The first part focuses on the challenge provoked by Lukacs’s book “The Young Hegel” and on the interpretation of it by Adorno in the spirit of idealism and as a project comparable to Heidegger’s. For Adorno, these are forms of totalizing thinking through which the subject suppresses and muffles the originality of objects. The second part focuses on the effect of Lukacs’s book “The Destruction of Reason” and the accusation of German Classical Philosophy in irrationalism. For Adorno, there is room for irrationalism in true dialectics. But far more frightening to him are the variants of one-sided rationality, as well as its incarnations in the power structures that crush all dissent. This is where the specific problem that led to the enmity between Adorno and Lukacs comes to light – the so-called “partisanship” of art or the ideology – art relationship. The third and fourth parts deal with the relationship between avant-garde art and realism, in which Lukacs sees a subjective-antisocial escape from reality, and Adorno – an expression of heterogeneity of the socially-objective world itself.