True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in both Marxism and German Idealism across the humanities, but the discourse around the two traditions has grown stagnant and is still defined by the same century-old debates-materialism versus idealism, history versus logic, revolution versus reform. With this exciting new work, Jensen Suther endeavors to transform this discourse by presenting an unprecedented systematic vision of the possibility of a Hegelian Marxism, grounded in Aristotle’s logic of living form. Through engagement with three titans of literary modernism-Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett-Suther pursues not only an account of Hegel’s materialism but also a new critique of capitalist modernity. Breaking with the received view of Marx’s relation to German Idealism, the book argues that the materialist critique of capitalist production is inseparable from Hegel’s idea that the demand for freedom is a demand for mutual recognition. The implication for Marxist criticism is that literary works cannot be understood apart from the political struggle for both recognition and new forms of social production. Anyone invested in socialist politics, the future of literary theory, the history of philosophy, and the study of modernism will want to contend with the way Suther rethinks Marxist theory and literary criticism from the ground up, starting with their foundations in Hegelian thought.

Jensen Suther received his PhD from Yale University and is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.