How the Frankfurt School Used Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

This is an extract from Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory by Gillian Rose, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott, available now from Verso Books.

It is often remarked that Gillian Rose (1947–1995) is a difficult thinker. She certainly makes few concessions to her reader. Not only do her major works often engage with a prodigious range of disciplines and traditions — from philosophy to theology, legal theory, Judaica, literary modernism, political theory, sociology, even architecture — her style of writing is also variously esoteric, ironic, poetic, and characterized by an almost paradoxical tone of both levity and severity.

This commitment to difficulty is perhaps a major reason why her writing remains comparatively understudied by wider audiences. A new volume titled Marxist Modernism, however, comprises a series of introductory lectures that Rose delivered to undergraduates at the University of Sussex in 1979 on Frankfurt School critical theory. While they exhibit her commitment to the aporia of political and ethical life, they do so in a conversational and accessible pedagogic style.

Deftly explaining the positions of Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, Rose provides a way into the difficulties they present. It is at once an introduction to Frankfurt School critical theory and also an introduction to the questions and concerns that would go on to animate her whole oeuvre.

When Rose delivered these lectures, this was cutting-edge material for an Anglophone audience. Now Frankfurt School critical theory is commonly studied in sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, and…