Lukács after Communism: Interviews with Contemporary Intellectuals by Eva L. Corredor

Author:Eva L. Corredor [Eva L. Corredor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991). Chapter 6 of the book is called “The Hegelian Marxist Position: Lukács’s Ontological Quest.” All references to the book can be found within the present text as EDMT, followed by the page number. Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 103.

INTERVIEW WITH ETIENNE BALIBAR

14 November 1992, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

ELC Let me tell you about this project. It will consist of a series of interviews on “Lukács after Glasnost.” I am talking to scholars who at the beginning of their career may have been influenced by Lukács’s work or thinking and took him, so to speak, as a point of departure for their own work and theories.

EB What I can tell you is that I represent almost the exact opposite pattern. I might therefore have a very marginal place in your inquiry, but maybe that is interesting nevertheless. As I said, I am almost an opposite pattern in the sense that at the beginning of my career was my collaboration with Louis Althusser in the sixties. I was then a young student, a member of the communist youth organization, and very quickly also a member of the communist party, which I joined in 1961, as did other young intellectuals of my generation. Of course, we were all on the left, which was a result of the memories of the Résistance and the colonial war, and there were also cultural and intellectual reasons. Of course, we were divided as it is often the case in life, we were split in different groups and had different ways of understanding Marxism. I myself was studying under Louis Althusser who at that time was beginning his public career. He was starting to publish his first essays and very quickly associated some of us with his work. He had a very collective conception of intellectual and political work, which of course for us was very interesting and exciting. I mention this only to say that Althusser himself was not very Lukácsean, as you know, to say the least.

ELC I was wondering whether at the same time you also encountered Lucien Goldmann?

EB Yes, that is a very good question. Lucien Goldmann was a very prominent figure at that time in the French discussion, and not only on the left, because a few years earlier he had published his most famous Le Dieu caché, in which he proposed a very innovative interpretation of Racine’s tragedies and Pascal’s thought. This had made him enormously influential among the young generation and also the target of very violent attacks from the conservative, traditional critics. I personally had read and had a great interest in Le Dieu caché when I was preparing my exams at the Ecole Normale. I had admired it very much. But I must confess that I adopted very quickly Althusser’s view that the Lukácsean tradition belonged to the humanist interpretation of Marxism, and we were favoring the structuralist interpretation of Marxism.

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