If it all came down to one piece of music, what would you choose? How would you justify your choice? On live radio? These are the questions Julius Nil asked every other Sunday for a year on London's Resonance FM, before going to work at Yale under his given name, Seth Kim-Cohen. Includes 12 conversations with influential figures from classical, jazz, rock, pop, cultural theory, philosophy and the burgeoning field of sound art.

One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music with Julius Nil

Arts & Photography

Steven Connor

Esther Leslie

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Errant Bodies Press

Georg Lukács was dubbed “the philosopher of the October Revolution” and his masterpiece History and Class Consciousness (1923) is commonly held to be the foundational text for the tradition known as “Western Marxism” which includes the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. As the liberating energies of the Russian Revolution were sapped by Stalinism, Lukács was subjected to ferocious attack for “deviations” from the “party line” in History and Class Consciousness. In the mid-1920s, he wrote Talism and the Dialectic, a sustained and passionate response to this onslaught. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now, for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English, in an accomplished translation by Esther Leslie and published here with an introduction from John Rees and a postface by Slavoj iek. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács’s oeuvre. “Some critiques of my book History and Class Consciousness have appeared (written by Comrades Rudas and Deborin) which I simply cannot let pass without a response ... It is certainly not my intention to defend the book itself. I would be only too glad if I could regard it as completely redundant, if I could see that its purpose had been full accomplished. What is this purpose? To demonstrate methodologically that the organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism; to prove that, of necessity, the problems of Bolshevism follow logically—that is to say logically in a dialectical sense—from the method of materialist dialectics as implemented by its founders. But my critics move instead in the opposite direction. They use their polemics to smuggle Menshevik elements into Marxism and Leninism. I have to retaliate. I am not defending my book. I am attacking the poen Menshevism of Deborin and the tail-ending of Rudas.”

A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic

Politics & Social Sciences

Georg Lukács

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

John Rees

Philosophy

Verso

Electric Brine

Dionne Brand

Lisa Robertson

Sophie Lewis

Barbara Orland

Hannah Landecker

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Books by Esther Leslie