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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory
Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century's most important Gillian Rose.
Her 1979 lectures on the Frankfurt School explore the lives and philosophies of a range of the school's members and affiliates, including Adorno, Luk�cs, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, and Horkheimer, and outline the way each theorist developed Marx's theory of commodity fetishism into a Marxist theory of culture.
Edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson
Her 1979 lectures on the Frankfurt School explore the lives and philosophies of a range of the school's members and affiliates, including Adorno, Luk�cs, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, and Horkheimer, and outline the way each theorist developed Marx's theory of commodity fetishism into a Marxist theory of culture.
Edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson
176 pages, Paperback
Published August 6, 2024
About the author
Gillian Rose
27 books87 followersGillian Rose (20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
September 22, 2024
To paraphrase Brian Eno: The first Gillian Rose lectures on the Frankfurt School were only attended by a small cohort of clueless British undergraduates, but everyone who showed up became a critical theorist
July 15, 2026
Explicacion cojonuda un tanto superficial si eres friki frikez como yo pero muy buena lectura. Jode a lukacs por todas partes en favor de adorno y eso siempre será mágico. Muy bueno
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August 11, 2024It is Rose's lecturing style (reminds me of Marshall Berman a bit, conversational and bounding, apt given the topic) which draws you in. Cursory, risk-taking; all the better for it.
September 7, 2024
A really clear, concise introduction to a very interesting perspective on a collection of marxist that have been extremely influential on western humanities (and to some extent social sciences) in the late 20th century. These lectures were given in 1979, after these writers were already established as touchstones for post-marxist writers in continental europe and notions of "social construction" that drew on their work were becoming more academically mainstream. This situated both the subjects of the lectures and Rose's contemporary perspective in a way that was interesting and useful for me. For example, I found her perspective on Lukacs interesting because I think it's not so often that he's presented so critically in more recent writing.
On the marxism end, what stands out is Rose' emphasis on the adaptation of Marx's notion of commodity fetishism to the appraisal of art and culture. How this is deployed by each of these thinkers, and how they reacted to its deployment by the others, is what I consider the throughline of this set of lectures. I think the way these lecture paint this development as underpinning later notions of social construction etc are very compelling (even if I think most people who deploy the concept in the latter day would not necessarily consider it an especially clean lineage). However, I think that these arguments, as presented in this volume (to be fair, its a summary aimed at undergrads), end up doing a lot of the characteristic wheel-spinning that I expect from people who make a lot of noise about the first three chapters of Capital but don't really seem up to the effort of analyzing the process in as much detail as Marx does for surplus value and its identification, extraction, and role in circulation and social reproduction. That being said, I think that the writing leaving this open mostly made me feel invigorated by the potential for analysis along those lines and excited to read more theory. So, overall, very enjoyable!
On the marxism end, what stands out is Rose' emphasis on the adaptation of Marx's notion of commodity fetishism to the appraisal of art and culture. How this is deployed by each of these thinkers, and how they reacted to its deployment by the others, is what I consider the throughline of this set of lectures. I think the way these lecture paint this development as underpinning later notions of social construction etc are very compelling (even if I think most people who deploy the concept in the latter day would not necessarily consider it an especially clean lineage). However, I think that these arguments, as presented in this volume (to be fair, its a summary aimed at undergrads), end up doing a lot of the characteristic wheel-spinning that I expect from people who make a lot of noise about the first three chapters of Capital but don't really seem up to the effort of analyzing the process in as much detail as Marx does for surplus value and its identification, extraction, and role in circulation and social reproduction. That being said, I think that the writing leaving this open mostly made me feel invigorated by the potential for analysis along those lines and excited to read more theory. So, overall, very enjoyable!
December 20, 2024
These early lectures by Gillian Rose on the Frankfurt School, actually got me excited to read Adorno. Although the afterword points out a number of minor factual errors and positions that Rose later abandoned--Rose never intended these lecture transcripts for publication--the book is still useful as an introduction. It identifies important ideas and key motivations in a field of scholarship that is all too often forbidding and unapproachable. Unlike in many introductory works, the ideas that Rose is interested in come across as genuinely insightful and useful. I would recommend this.
December 9, 2025
I thought this was an excellent introduction to the work of the Frankfurt School. I have read works by Benjamin, Adorno and Marcuse, but this helped to refresh and challenge my understanding of their work.
February 9, 2026
very introductory, to a point that it can be hard to draw anything substantial from the writers refrenced.rose is a great lecturer, and id recommend this for people trying to get into marxist aesthetics.
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March 11, 2026A fine book where most of the juice is in the afterword. You do get a sense of where rose stands tho and it is helpful to get a broader picture esp from a benevolent hater who really only wants to talk about Adorno. Will carry this into any future readings of the Frankfurt school (let’s pray I have the juice)
June 15, 2025
should've read this before "aesthetics and politics" (1977) beefings between adorno, benjamin, bloch, brecht, and lukács.
September 30, 2024
Lukacs takes a real beating
December 23, 2025
I kept coming back during this reading to a college class in modernism, one that would have benefited greatly from the perspectives presented in this volume. We covered Freud, Benjamin, and Brecht, as well as the Futurists, Fauves, and Surrealists, but didn’t look at Marx.
Reportedly very unlike her written work, in the lectures presented here Rose seems very concerned with having the listeners follow her arguments. And for someone lacking the Marxist / critical theory background it is a gem of an introduction.
Publication note: the lectures are printed pretty much as delivered, warts and all. A reader might prefer some interventionist editing. With that, might have been a five-star read.
Reportedly very unlike her written work, in the lectures presented here Rose seems very concerned with having the listeners follow her arguments. And for someone lacking the Marxist / critical theory background it is a gem of an introduction.
Publication note: the lectures are printed pretty much as delivered, warts and all. A reader might prefer some interventionist editing. With that, might have been a five-star read.
January 4, 2025
only read a slim majority of this, but it's a nice intro to critical theory. being a transcription of lectures, it feels clear and accessible, but incomplete and unrigorous. some of the paraphrased marx political economy didn't seem very accurate but it probably didn't affect much else.
December 27, 2024
a dense and thorough but accessible series of lectures on the development of marxist modernism. a good start for ppl interested in the dynamic between aesthetics and revolutionary theory :)
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April 22, 2025Never have I felt such a stronger kinship than to Theodor Adorno, who will always have the last word.
June 17, 2025
very approachable, loved the book
November 15, 2025
I knew nothing about the subject of these “introductory lectures” when I bought this book. I still know nothing.
June 11, 2026
Although I’ve read a few books by members of the Frankfurt School, I’ve stopped reading even more as I got quite lost. I’m not an expert, but I think if I’d read this book first it might have helped when I was reading those books. This review isn’t going to be much of a review of the book as much as what reading it made me think about. The lectures themselves are clearly written and don’t really assume any previous knowledge – and so, my restating her arguments seems hardly worthwhile. I am going to have to start with a brief overview of a key idea she uses to structure the lectures. And that is Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism.
Marx starts Capital with a chapter on the commodity. He sees the commodity as the key knot that needs to be untied if you are going to understand what makes capitalist production unlike other forms of production. A commodity has two sides for Marx – a use value and an exchange value. The use value is fairly obvious – a coat keeps you warm, a car gets you between places. Exchange value is something particular to capitalism and so is the thing that most needs to be explained. Use values are clearly directly linked to the commodity itself – a coat that doesn’t keep you warm isn’t a particularly useful coat. But exchange values appear to us to also belong to the commodity in the same way. That is, they seem to be real properties of the commodity itself. This is what Marx calls the fetish nature of the commodity. Marx is using an older meaning of the word fetish. He doesn’t mean the exchange value is sexually stimulating, but rather he means this in the religious meaning of the word. A religious fetish is an object, like a cross or an icon, that stands in the place of god, but becomes so closely associated with god that, to the believer, it is indistinguishable from god. In this sense, the fetish is a misunderstanding of the object, with us providing it with qualities it otherwise doesn’t possess. For Marx, our belief that the exchange value of a commodity is intrinsic to the commodity itself works in the same way. While the religious object acquires its godlike qualities by it mediating our relationship with god – the fetish nature of the commodity hides the fact that exchange value is created by social relations between people – rather than being intrinsic to the commodity itself. This belief that exchange value is a property of the commodity, rather than a property of social relations of production of the commodity, acts like a fetish and hides from people the true nature of exchange and the production of commodities.
Okay, that’s all quite hard – and Marx himself even said that the first chapter of Capital was the hardest part of the book. The key thing to take away from this is that capitalism depends on exchanging commodities, but our fetish (our belief) that commodities contain exchange values as an objectively real property of the commodity itself misdirects us away from understanding the real nature of the commodity and of the social relations that make the commodity the key feature of capitalist production and of capitalist exploitation. That is, Marx’s main point in writing Capital in the first place.
The Frankfurt School wanted to extend this idea of Marx’s beyond production to culture more generally. For them, the fetish nature of culture was that it also helped to hide the true nature of capitalism and so, just as Marx had tried to do in Capital, to make these real relations transparent, they sought to show how cultural relations could also be made to be equally transparent and show how these also helped normalise capitalism.
As she says in the first lecture, to do this they moved beyond Marx to also incorporate the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud. That said, she has much more to say about Nietzsche than of Freud – but if you are interested in how Freud and Marx can be integrated, McGowan’s Pure Excess is as good a place to start as any. The linking of Marx with Nietzsche is quite a large step away from what could be considered straight Marxism. Nietzsche’s ideas are an attack on Hegel, but in quite a different way to Marx’s criticism of Hegel. For Nietzsche, Hegel was wrong in proposing a developmental vision of history, with an internal logic driving that development. A quick aside – when Nietzsche says ‘god is dead’ it is important to remember that this is different from saying ‘god does not exist’ – even if ultimately they look very much like the same thing. Nietzsche is trying to reclaim a place for morality after the enlightenment. The enlightenment sought to replace the absolute certainty in moral questions that came from religion with morality instead being based on reason. Nietzsche believes that this shift effectively killed god and that we are responsible for his murder. The problem is that he didn’t think reason was enough to base morality on – and so we need now, after murdering god, to revalue all values, to give morality a new basis.
These ideas, that history doesn’t have a direction and that values can be created anew to help liberate humanity, seems to be the main idea that the Frankfurt School took from Nietzsche. Like I said, I don’t think Marx would have been particularly delighted with this – but since he’d been dead for quite some time, he didn’t get much say in the matter. I’d always been confused by the title of Adorno’s book, Negative Dialectics. The dialectic is a complicated idea in itself, but at bottom it means progress through negation. So, putting ‘negative’ in front of dialectics hardly ever made sense to me. But this too comes out of Nietzsche – in the end, Hegel’s dialectics can be seen as being positive, since they provide a positive direction when seeking to understand history – and that is something Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School were seeking to avoid. For Nietzsche, the history of the world can best be understood as expressions of the will to power by particular, all too human people. This will to power has many manifestations – from political power or power through knowledge (like science) but for Nietzsche, the highest form of the will to power is through art.
Now, in the Phenomenology, Hegel spends a large part of the end of the book discussing religion – and in part, discussing religion in relation to the Enlightenment. But he doesn’t do this in a way that you might expect. Rather, much of his discussion of religion is through religious artifacts – that is, everything from sunrises, to stones, to objects proper (like crosses or statues of the Buddha) to paintings and then to dramas. Hegel sees the development of religion as being explained by our relationship to these various artifacts. In our earliest stages of development god is equated with the sun. Later with statues and paintings that we worship, but that cannot speak back to us, and so on. I might have thought that this would be something that Marxists would have pursued, rather than crossbreeding Marxism with Nietzsche. And perhaps this is something that Walter Benjamin did – I’ll need to think about that some more.
Something else I’ll need to think more about is what she has to say about what Brecht was seeking to do with his new attitude to theatre. Basically, that he was trying to show the contradictions of capitalism and therefore provide his audience with a way out of the fetish nature of culture and therefore preparing the way for social transformation. As she says at one point, this didn’t quite work out the way he had anticipated or hoped. She mentions that the people he was most wanting to point to as the problem were often the main people attending his plays. So that, the audience to his Threepenny Opera was just as likely to be just the people he was criticising and that they didn’t leave the play feeling at all criticised.
The realist novel is perhaps as good an example of capitalist culture as anything else – but it isn’t clear to me that any of the avant-garde works described here (the modernism in the title) are quite as clearly associated with socialism as the novel is to capitalism. And I’m not sure what form of art might be. As someone says somewhere, the thing about capitalism is that it appropriates images that criticise it and makes them its own. Think of people buying Che Guevara t-shirts and more importantly, the capitalists who sell these as a commodity. As Deleuze would say, every line of flight ends up being captured.
This is a useful introduction to the Frankfurt School. I’m not sure how much members of that school would necessarily agree with everything she says, but what she does say has the benefit of being clear and often terribly interesting. Two of my favourite things.
Marx starts Capital with a chapter on the commodity. He sees the commodity as the key knot that needs to be untied if you are going to understand what makes capitalist production unlike other forms of production. A commodity has two sides for Marx – a use value and an exchange value. The use value is fairly obvious – a coat keeps you warm, a car gets you between places. Exchange value is something particular to capitalism and so is the thing that most needs to be explained. Use values are clearly directly linked to the commodity itself – a coat that doesn’t keep you warm isn’t a particularly useful coat. But exchange values appear to us to also belong to the commodity in the same way. That is, they seem to be real properties of the commodity itself. This is what Marx calls the fetish nature of the commodity. Marx is using an older meaning of the word fetish. He doesn’t mean the exchange value is sexually stimulating, but rather he means this in the religious meaning of the word. A religious fetish is an object, like a cross or an icon, that stands in the place of god, but becomes so closely associated with god that, to the believer, it is indistinguishable from god. In this sense, the fetish is a misunderstanding of the object, with us providing it with qualities it otherwise doesn’t possess. For Marx, our belief that the exchange value of a commodity is intrinsic to the commodity itself works in the same way. While the religious object acquires its godlike qualities by it mediating our relationship with god – the fetish nature of the commodity hides the fact that exchange value is created by social relations between people – rather than being intrinsic to the commodity itself. This belief that exchange value is a property of the commodity, rather than a property of social relations of production of the commodity, acts like a fetish and hides from people the true nature of exchange and the production of commodities.
Okay, that’s all quite hard – and Marx himself even said that the first chapter of Capital was the hardest part of the book. The key thing to take away from this is that capitalism depends on exchanging commodities, but our fetish (our belief) that commodities contain exchange values as an objectively real property of the commodity itself misdirects us away from understanding the real nature of the commodity and of the social relations that make the commodity the key feature of capitalist production and of capitalist exploitation. That is, Marx’s main point in writing Capital in the first place.
The Frankfurt School wanted to extend this idea of Marx’s beyond production to culture more generally. For them, the fetish nature of culture was that it also helped to hide the true nature of capitalism and so, just as Marx had tried to do in Capital, to make these real relations transparent, they sought to show how cultural relations could also be made to be equally transparent and show how these also helped normalise capitalism.
As she says in the first lecture, to do this they moved beyond Marx to also incorporate the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud. That said, she has much more to say about Nietzsche than of Freud – but if you are interested in how Freud and Marx can be integrated, McGowan’s Pure Excess is as good a place to start as any. The linking of Marx with Nietzsche is quite a large step away from what could be considered straight Marxism. Nietzsche’s ideas are an attack on Hegel, but in quite a different way to Marx’s criticism of Hegel. For Nietzsche, Hegel was wrong in proposing a developmental vision of history, with an internal logic driving that development. A quick aside – when Nietzsche says ‘god is dead’ it is important to remember that this is different from saying ‘god does not exist’ – even if ultimately they look very much like the same thing. Nietzsche is trying to reclaim a place for morality after the enlightenment. The enlightenment sought to replace the absolute certainty in moral questions that came from religion with morality instead being based on reason. Nietzsche believes that this shift effectively killed god and that we are responsible for his murder. The problem is that he didn’t think reason was enough to base morality on – and so we need now, after murdering god, to revalue all values, to give morality a new basis.
These ideas, that history doesn’t have a direction and that values can be created anew to help liberate humanity, seems to be the main idea that the Frankfurt School took from Nietzsche. Like I said, I don’t think Marx would have been particularly delighted with this – but since he’d been dead for quite some time, he didn’t get much say in the matter. I’d always been confused by the title of Adorno’s book, Negative Dialectics. The dialectic is a complicated idea in itself, but at bottom it means progress through negation. So, putting ‘negative’ in front of dialectics hardly ever made sense to me. But this too comes out of Nietzsche – in the end, Hegel’s dialectics can be seen as being positive, since they provide a positive direction when seeking to understand history – and that is something Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School were seeking to avoid. For Nietzsche, the history of the world can best be understood as expressions of the will to power by particular, all too human people. This will to power has many manifestations – from political power or power through knowledge (like science) but for Nietzsche, the highest form of the will to power is through art.
Now, in the Phenomenology, Hegel spends a large part of the end of the book discussing religion – and in part, discussing religion in relation to the Enlightenment. But he doesn’t do this in a way that you might expect. Rather, much of his discussion of religion is through religious artifacts – that is, everything from sunrises, to stones, to objects proper (like crosses or statues of the Buddha) to paintings and then to dramas. Hegel sees the development of religion as being explained by our relationship to these various artifacts. In our earliest stages of development god is equated with the sun. Later with statues and paintings that we worship, but that cannot speak back to us, and so on. I might have thought that this would be something that Marxists would have pursued, rather than crossbreeding Marxism with Nietzsche. And perhaps this is something that Walter Benjamin did – I’ll need to think about that some more.
Something else I’ll need to think more about is what she has to say about what Brecht was seeking to do with his new attitude to theatre. Basically, that he was trying to show the contradictions of capitalism and therefore provide his audience with a way out of the fetish nature of culture and therefore preparing the way for social transformation. As she says at one point, this didn’t quite work out the way he had anticipated or hoped. She mentions that the people he was most wanting to point to as the problem were often the main people attending his plays. So that, the audience to his Threepenny Opera was just as likely to be just the people he was criticising and that they didn’t leave the play feeling at all criticised.
The realist novel is perhaps as good an example of capitalist culture as anything else – but it isn’t clear to me that any of the avant-garde works described here (the modernism in the title) are quite as clearly associated with socialism as the novel is to capitalism. And I’m not sure what form of art might be. As someone says somewhere, the thing about capitalism is that it appropriates images that criticise it and makes them its own. Think of people buying Che Guevara t-shirts and more importantly, the capitalists who sell these as a commodity. As Deleuze would say, every line of flight ends up being captured.
This is a useful introduction to the Frankfurt School. I’m not sure how much members of that school would necessarily agree with everything she says, but what she does say has the benefit of being clear and often terribly interesting. Two of my favourite things.
August 4, 2025
Maybe I don’t need grad school maybe I just needed recorded lectures in book form!!
Would give it 6 stars if I could. Grateful for the editors who decided to publish this. I found this to be a more coherent and incisive introduction to the Frankfurt School than the Grand Abyss Hotel. The introduction and afterword equally stood out to me. I love it when you read books that humbles you and make you hungry to think and learn more. This is one of those books!
I’m glad I invested in the hard copy instead of loaning from the TPL… this one is gonna sit on my shelf and I know I’ll turn back to every once a while.
Would give it 6 stars if I could. Grateful for the editors who decided to publish this. I found this to be a more coherent and incisive introduction to the Frankfurt School than the Grand Abyss Hotel. The introduction and afterword equally stood out to me. I love it when you read books that humbles you and make you hungry to think and learn more. This is one of those books!
I’m glad I invested in the hard copy instead of loaning from the TPL… this one is gonna sit on my shelf and I know I’ll turn back to every once a while.
July 7, 2025
The lectures provide a very readable introduction to the Frankfurt School's debates on modernist aesthetics and art as a site of resistance to capitalism. Though I'm in no position to say how good it is of a place to start, it did provide me with my formal introduction to this set of thinkers (despite having read some Lukács and Benjamin before). The introduction and the afterward provide some helpful context and correctives. I'm interested in Rose's writing on Hegel and have recently begun her memoir Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life but also have become more interested in finally tackling Adorno--and getting a bit deeper with Benjamin--so this seemed like an appropriate book choice. I had recently read some Jameson and found resonances of his ideas throughout these pages, particularly Bloch's thinking on utopia. Next stop may have to be Aesthetics and Politics.
February 15, 2026
Quite a beginner friendly (undergraduate level) entry into the intersection of German Neo-marxist thought and art theory. It gives us insight into the mind of a young radical Gillian Rose who was keen on passing her euphoria about critical theory on to her students, which she did in a nicely structured way by giving one lecture per author (except Adorno who gets more cuz she was a big fan of his thought at the time xd). Her opinion and preferences do shine though a lot, sometimes a bit too much but thats okay its a lecture transcript after all haha But her focus on commodity fetishism and reification is a good choice imo.
A perfect basis for a reading course where you supplement each chapter with primary literature from the discussed author or just a great read for anyone interested in discussions about the political role of art ^-^
P.S: It was very sad to hear in the afterword that the older Gillian Rose was way less radical and instead concerned with her "secular faith"... Why does this always happen to the thinkers that I read, Hmm.. this makes the experience of reading it a bit unsettling but even more with imo!
A perfect basis for a reading course where you supplement each chapter with primary literature from the discussed author or just a great read for anyone interested in discussions about the political role of art ^-^
P.S: It was very sad to hear in the afterword that the older Gillian Rose was way less radical and instead concerned with her "secular faith"... Why does this always happen to the thinkers that I read, Hmm.. this makes the experience of reading it a bit unsettling but even more with imo!
December 28, 2024
ah this is so good.
7 lectures introducing the key figures of the Frankfurt School and a couple of the most important adjuncts. v readable, comprehensive summaries but also great insight and synthesis, such as the step by step explanation of what Lukács and Bloch thought, the ways in which they disagreed with each other, who was right and who was wrong why and in what ways, or how Lukács and Benjamin are inverted images of one another. I appreciate this all the more coming away from reading a lot of Jameson (RIP) whose book on Adorno offers everything except an honest inventory of what he wrote and thought. unlike Rose the objective for him it seems is to stretch the texts in order to riff out as many Adornos as possible
to reach for a criticism: her reading of Marx is off, and to do I think with a reading (to which her subjects here are also given) that excludes vols. 2, 3 and everything after chapter 3 of vol. i from view
7 lectures introducing the key figures of the Frankfurt School and a couple of the most important adjuncts. v readable, comprehensive summaries but also great insight and synthesis, such as the step by step explanation of what Lukács and Bloch thought, the ways in which they disagreed with each other, who was right and who was wrong why and in what ways, or how Lukács and Benjamin are inverted images of one another. I appreciate this all the more coming away from reading a lot of Jameson (RIP) whose book on Adorno offers everything except an honest inventory of what he wrote and thought. unlike Rose the objective for him it seems is to stretch the texts in order to riff out as many Adornos as possible
to reach for a criticism: her reading of Marx is off, and to do I think with a reading (to which her subjects here are also given) that excludes vols. 2, 3 and everything after chapter 3 of vol. i from view
August 15, 2024
This was my first Gillian Rose, and my already-high expectations have been surpassed. These are indeed 'Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory'—in that they are in fact clear and inviting and presuppose little—yet surely they manage simultaneously to attain deeper insights than many, even most other 'non-introductory' commentaries. This is all the more impressive given their early date for the English-speaking world (1979); in Rose's own words, 'I was one of the first people who did doctoral research on this subject, and when I did it... I was the only person in the country working on this stuff. I was completely and utterly isolated' [introduction p.ix]. If you've been searching for clear and coherent through-lines to thread together the Frankfurt School and its associates—Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Brecht—look no further.
March 11, 2025
gillian rose’s lectures on the frankfurt school (and adjacent) collected and published for the first time! some recordings are available online, but i think the website for it is down atm :( anyways, they are extremely readable and could be easily followed with just some basic undergrad marxist understanding. rose only focuses on their aesthetic theories though, except for lukacs’s reification, but given the limited setting of a lecture is totally understandable. as with her early stuff, her words on adorno is very clarifying. would def recommend as a primer on critical theory in general and especially aesthetic theories of famous critical theorists
June 28, 2025
Sweet and insightful little series of lectures on the thought of some first generation Frankfurt School (and associated!) thinkers. Pretty informal, sometimes inaccurate, more focused on art and culture than I had initially anticipated - probably a 'me being stupid' thing rather than any deeper internal deficiency of the book itself. Overall, a fun but quite flawed read. I'd like to read more Gillian Rose, although my understanding is that most of her work is pretty radically different to this, at least in form and style...
April 21, 2025
Published after her death and less recondite reading than the books she wrote as an academic philosopher. The book is based on a series of lectures she gave in 1979 on various theorists associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research in regard to Marxist theory and the arts. The writing is less difficult than her usual writing, possibly due the fact these are lectures.
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July 10, 2025I might be too dumb for aesthetics. I found quite revealing that a great deal of the ideas which I myself labelled as marxist are actually Adorno's critique of Marx. Overall it was a nice, conversational book (which was to be expected).
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October 9, 2024Kind of like "Melancholy Science" (1978) on easy mode.
October 21, 2024
her lecturing style is so engaging, thoroughly enjoyed this
January 5, 2025
Frankfurt School is impenetrable, this helped but I wish I got more out of it.
January 20, 2025
she’s my new girl crush
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews