Patrick Eiden-Offe: Romantischer Antikapitalismus: die vierte Sache des Sozialismus nach seiner Aufhebung

Gespräch im Rahmen von »Die Vierte Sache – Diskursreihe von Alexander Karschnia & Co.« im Roten Salon der Volskbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

At the end of Hegel’s Science of Logic, he notes that dialectical thinking can never content itself with the triad, it has to aspire towards four. Instead of the “triplicity” of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, we need “quadruplicity” and acknowledge that what is experienced as a first and immediate is always already second, hence mediation.

We should keep that in mind, if we continue to hold on to a dialectical concept of history, in spite of everything. For too long, the case of socialism has been trapped in the eternal dialectical triad. Now the task is to, if not undo, then at least overcome the “evolution of socialism from utopia to academic science” in a forward movement transcending the triad by putting the sublated and suppressed of the past back on the agenda—desires, fantasies, emotions; utopian thought and romanticism.

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The germanist Patrick Eiden-Offe is research associate at the ZfL with the project Georg Lukács: An Intellectual Biography.