The Concept of Social Form - Introduction to a Social Theory of Poetic Reason

Karolina Enquist Källgren introduce different concepts of social form, beginning with Aristotle, reflecting on Hegel, but with the mayor focus on comparing Neo-kantian and Marxist versions of the concept. The two latter are also the topic of the text for the seminar.

The text is a draft version of the introduction to Enquist Källgren’s new book, with the provisional title: "Form: a Political Critique of Poetic Reason". In the introduction, Enquist Källgren argues that the authors writing in the exile generation of WWII and the Spanish Civil War developed a notion of social form inspired by Neo-Kantianism and Marxism, and by which they could explain and analyze the way in which myth, aesthetics and the social formation of experience played a role in producing and re-producing the totalitarian state.

About the Author

Karolina Enquist Källgren is Associate professor of History of Ideas at Stockholm university. She is currently working on a research project in which the historic circumstances of WWII exile is investigated as a context to ideas of poetic reason, developed by authors like Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, María Zambrano, Eduardo Nicol and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez.

The aim of the project is to describe a larger exile intellectual milieu, as well as to develop on a social theory that can account for the organizational power of human expressive phenomenon, i.e. the poetic reason.

Recent publications are: “Scheler and Zambrano, on a transformation of the heart in Spanish philosophy”, in History of European Ideas, forthcoming 2021, “In the laboratory, forms of knowledge as a methodological concept for the study of knowledge circulation” in Forms of Knowledge (Nordic Academic Press, 2020), “Kan arbete vara frigörande? i Ord&Bild, 2020, María Zambrano’s ontology of exile, expressive subjectivity (Palgrave, 2019).