The Specificity of the Aesthetic

How is it possible that works of art exist? How do we become receptive aesthetic subjects? <i>The Specificity of the Aesthetic</i> 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.