ABSTRACT
Georg Lukacs considers the historic character in art and the notion of realism as the two major issues of aesthetics. Reading Lukacs means re-assessing the methods, narratives, acts and intentions in men's and women's teleological projects where their cultural, aesthetic, ontological and ethical ambitions take stock of their historicity. The notion of a distance between author and text plays an important role in Lukacs's investigation of the uses of literature as a depiction of reality. Lukacs lived with his dilemma as a thinker who invested his life in a continuous — sometimes desperate — battle against history. The presence of Lukacs the Communist is also strong in his aesthetics. As a cultural theory, Lukacs's aesthetic follows its logic of totality, where the dialectical interchangeability of subject and object is an exchange between form and essence. The totality of existent atomic facts also determines which atomic facts do not exist.
