Extract
Editorial
Siegfried Kracauer's contribution to twentieth century thought is undeniable. Yet he is difficult to define in relation to any particular tradition or discipline of knowledge. Kracauer was a colleague and friend of some of the key Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, amongst others. Suspicious of economism, he also challenged the Hegelian-Marxist position of Georg Lukács for its transcendental and metaphysical flights away from the material conditions of existence. His fascination with the reality of the everyday and his determination to dig deep into reality, rather than fly over it, was the context for his reading of Georg Simmel's phenomenological sociology. In Simmel, Kracauer recognised something of himself, a nomad and a wanderer between objects and phenomena. And yet, he was also critical of Simmel for his lack of engagement with what he called the soul, for being too lost in the external world, and for overlooking the passion, belief and ideas that inspire individuals and connect them with the life force and flow of life. Kracauer was mindful of how people were alienated from themselves in the social functions available to them.
David Frisby suggests that Kracauer 'radicalized Simmel's theory of cultural alienation by infusing it with quasi-religious existentialism'.' But his philosophical outlook might equally be understood as a radical social humanism, refusing universals and preoccupied with the longing for fulfilment and insistency that lies within the soul or psyche. Kracauer never loses sight of the person within the philosophy, the feelings that accompany the idea, the lived life without which knowledge and meaning are rendered abstract and obsolete. His refusal to form an allegiance to either the truth of the philosophical idea or the empirical fact demonstrates an insistence on the importance of how ideas, science and the progress of capitalism connect within the lived existence of the individual. How, in lif...See the full content of this document
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