Object and Subject in Siegfried Kracauer

Abstract

This paper aims to explicit Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of critique during the interwar period. It casts doubts on a currently widespread mode of interpretation, which claims to have found in his oeuvre significant traces of a postmodernism avant la lettre. The article examines Kracauer’s changing ideas on the subject-object relation as the founding elements for his notions of critique. First, it analyses the philosopher’s early anticapitalism within the frame of German Kulturkritik. Second, it features Kracauer’s own ideological critique of the very Kulturkritik aspects he maintained until circa 1925. Finally, it examines the form of Kracauer’s analysis of Modernity as conscious activations of categories that make up the objective structure of the historic world. Thus, it concludes that, in a way that turns out irreconcilable with postmodernist fashions, Kracauer derives his criterion of truth from the structure of the object.