True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom

by Jensen Suther

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in both Marxism and German Idealism across the humanities, but the discourse around the two traditions has grown stagnant and is still defined by the same century-old debates—materialism versus idealism, history versus logic, revolution versus reform. With this exciting new work, Jensen Suther endeavors to transform this discourse by presenting an unprecedented systematic vision of the possibility of a Hegelian Marxism, grounded in Aristotle's logic of living form. Through engagement with three titans of literary modernism—Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett—Suther pursues not only an account of Hegel's materialism but also a new critique of capitalist modernity. Breaking with the received view of Marx's relation to German Idealism, the book argues that the materialist critique of capitalist production is inseparable from Hegel's idea that the demand for freedom is a demand for mutual recognition. The implication for Marxist criticism is that literary works cannot be understood apart from the political struggle for both recognition and new forms of social production. Anyone invested in socialist politics, the future of literary theory, the history of philosophy, and the study of modernism will want to contend with the way Suther rethinks Marxist theory and literary criticism from the ground up, starting with their foundations in Hegelian thought.

Genres: Philosophy

404 pages, Hardcover

Published September 16, 2025

Reviews

[Foley Stocks]

Fantastic. For starters, the exegetical portion toward the beginning, outlining the philosophy of Hegel and Marx with relation to freedom and aesthetics, is quite nicely, intuitively put (something not necessarily common with the material).
Suther wants to stress this term of bio-aesthetics, this idea that art emerges organically as an element of the type of rational animal that we are. It serves a specific rational function - self-formative, self-narrativizing, a means by which we can grasp ourselves tangibly and relate to our historical, social situation.
The "literary function," as he calls it, is thus the expression of such a self-narrativizing (a condition of the unified rational experience peculiar to our species). And this of course manifests in modern literature in its characteristically fragmented, self-questioning way. Naturally there is plenty more than what there's space for here. But it is with this in mind that he conducts an analysis of modernist literature - specifically Kafka, Mann, and Beckett.
But what is really convincing is that he doesn't just paste some lens onto the texts, but examines them closely to find what actually arises intrinsically. There is no worry about anything palliative, no thinker is dogmatically left untouched, unexamined; he asserts his points alongside the textual evidence. It's for this reason that Suther provides a reading that demands to be taken seriously.
I found the Kafka chapter to be particularly informative, though perhaps due to my own comparative ignorance with Mann and Beckett. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in contemporary Marxism and critical theory.