ABSTRACT
Thomas Mann represents a crucial point between the end of the bourgeoisie and the search for it. In line with Marx's notion of historical continuity, Georg Lukacs claims a distinct bourgeois inheritance for socialism. The prominence of particularity in Lukacs's aesthetic theory confirms his conviction that Marxist aesthetics could only be legitimized via the development of idealism. The notion of tragedy links Lukacs the Marxist literary critic to Lukacs the 'post-Hegelian' in his definition of particularity as an aesthetic category. In Marx's account of the objective relationships between individual, society, the senses and the arts, there is an open and undeniable ground for subjectivity. Reality is mediated by a subjectivity which sublates immediate particularity to a universal totality by dint of art's individuality. Immanuel Kant's philosophical project was that of Judgement, defined as 'the presentation of the unity of the consciousness of several presentations, or the presentation of their relation so far as they make up one concept'.
