Modernity, culture, and criticism. The Frankfurt School in Argentina (1936–1983)

This work studies the reception of the so-called Frankfurt School in Argentine intellectual history between 1936 and 1983. To this end, it intertwines three fundamental registers.  First, a discussion of the legacy of critical theory and heterodox Marxism in the 20th century. The study considers the Frankfurt School not so much as a theoretical or doctrinal corpus but rather as one of the fundamental attempts to renew the legacy of historical materialism in a century of revolutions and totalitarianism. The Frankfurt School appears through the prism of Argentine readings that break down any homogeneous image of it and instead present it as a multifaceted laboratory for experimentation in local critical thinking. In a second register, the work reflects on the cultural and methodological dilemmas that arise when addressing processes of cultural translation or the international circulation of ideas. 

To this end, a set of strategies and tools from intellectual history and reception theory are mobilized, but a long tradition of essays throughout Latin America that have addressed the problem of “misplaced ideas,” the constraints as well as the critical potentialities of intellectual production on the “periphery,” is also reviewed. The development of the work confirms the impossibility of any receptive theory of “reception” and instead confronts us with processes of active re-signification of the traditions and productions received in each case. The third part of the study is an effective analysis of the different moments in the reception of the Frankfurt School in our country. This journey, which constitutes the main body of the work, includes the following most important stages: the “operative aesthetics” of Luis Juan Guerrero, the “scientific sociology” of Gino Germani, the translations of the “Estudios Alemanes” collection by the Sur publishing house, the essays of Héctor Álvarez Murena, the “new left” of Juan José Sebreli, the Marxist philosophy of Carlos Astrada and Miguel Lombardi, the beginnings of communication studies in Jaime Rest, Enrique Luis Revol, and Heriberto Muraro, and, finally, the interventions on literature and society by Ricardo Piglia, Carlos Altamirano, and Beatriz Sarlo.

At each of these stages, the Frankfurt School reveals different aspects depending on the various ways of reading and updating it at different times, from different reading frameworks and with divergent and sometimes even contradictory interests. In this way, the work as a whole proposes a relational approach in which neither the theoretical corpus of the Frankfurt School, always modulated according to the prismatic variations of each reading and singular appropriation, nor Argentine intellectual history, which appears before one of the main legacies of 20th-century critical Marxism, remain untouched. The work proposes this unique field of forces as a possible laboratory for investigating the alternatives of a local critical theory.