Dialèctica de l'irracionalisme. Contribució a la historització de La destrucció de la raó de György Lukács

Why reread Lukács' The Destruction of Reason today? Here is the question that Traverso asks in these analytical and brilliant pages, which explain the logic and the absurdity of one of the great intellectual documents of the 20th century, a fierce diatribe against irrationalism in German philosophy and culture and Europeans that culminated in Nazism, and at the same time a work located in the mental and political orbit of Stalinism. A nuanced and complex vision of the aporias of reason, of the dialectic of the Enlightenment, in a catastrophic and contradictory context.

ENZO TRAVERSO, one of the most prominent historians on the current scene, is a professor at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York). His work has focused on the intellectual and political history of the 20th century and is characterized by the will to understand what seems incomprehensible: the self-destructive drive of Europe, totalitarianism, world wars, anti-Semitism, the 'Holocaust. On the other hand, he has reflected on the way history is made, the political use of the past, the new extreme right and the melancholy of the left. He has published El totalitarianisme in Catalan. History of a debate (2002), The uses of the past. History, memory and politics (2006), The new faces of fascism (2018) and Pasts singulars. The "I" in the writing of history (Afers, 2021).