Heisenberg position of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for Patrick Eiden-Offe with the project “Georg Lukács: An Intellectual Biography”
On November 1, the Patrick Eiden-Offe will begin work on his project “Georg Lukács: An Intellectual Biography” at the ZfL. The work is funded by the Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
“Georg Lukács has become a historical figure,” the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte’s editorial of the 2014 special issue on ‘Commissar Lukács’ announced. “Astonishingly,” they continued, “there is no extensive biography on him, although his life alone reads like a novel.” Eiden-Offe will set out to write this hitherto lacking biography of the Hungarian literary theorist, philosopher and political intellectual Georg Lukács (1885–1971). Though it will not be written as a novel, the task will be to never lose sight of the novelesque within this extraordinary life – for Lukács himself never stopped meditating on the relation between the form of the novel and the form of life, or more generally: He never stopped to ask how life, how our life under modern, capitalist (but also under post-capitalist, socialist) conditions may attain a form that can be lived consciously and affirmatively.
Most recently, Patrick Eiden-Offe held deputy professorships at the Ruhr-Universität-Bochum, the University of Hamburg and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He obtained his habilitation in 2017 at the University of Duisburg-Essen with a Venia legendi for Modern German Literature and Cultural Studies. From 2017 to 2019, he worked as a research assistant in the research project The Formation of Theory and the Critique of ‘Wissenschaft’ in the Early Twentieth Century at the ZfL. His most recent publications at Matthes & Seitz Berlin are Die Poesie der Klasse. Romantischer Antikapitalismus und die Erfindung des Proletariats (2017; second edition in paperback 2020) and Hegels ‘Logik’ lesen: Ein Selbstversuch (2020).
See website of the project: