Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Jensen Suther. True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2025. 404 pp.

Review by Christopher Gortmaker

16 October 2025

Jensen Suther’s True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom may be the most ambitious attempt to defend Marxist literary criticism by systematically elaborating what it should be since Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981). As in Jameson’s field-shaping book and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism (2019), Suther’s Karl Marx is thoroughly Hegelian. But what distinguishes Suther’s Hegel is how embodied this most absolute of German Idealisms appears: rational and conceptual all the way down—yet thoroughly biological.

Building on a recent surge of attention to Hegel’s logical account of life, True Materialism seeks to Hegelianize Marxism’s approach to art—novel writing in particular. Thus, key interlocutors include the canon of Western Marxism from György Lukács to Theodor Adorno, Robert Pippin’s After the Beautiful (2013) and Philosophy by Other Means (2021), Karen Ng’s Hegel’s Concept of Life (2020), and Thomas Khurana’s Das Leben der Freiheit (2017). Suther builds on Pippin and Robert Brandom’s pragmatist reading of Hegel while contributing to John McDowell and J. M. Bernstein’s naturalist critique of this reading. The Hegel of True Materialism is, then, a metaphysician, but only insofar as metaphysics is logic, Geist is not God but the space of reasons through which humans self-legislate this logic, and the self-moving contradiction of Geist as such is the material form of life: the absolute “bio-logic” of organismic self-maintenance in its highest form—human spirit.

What does this naturalist recharting of Hegel, steered toward Marx, have to do with literature? The second half of True Materialism presents major readings of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (1951–53). Suther argues that these novels “bring to speech” the “latent spiritual content (the social and historical specificity) of our means of material reproduction” by showing how capitalism radicalizes and disfigures the self-legislated status of law (Kafka), life (Mann), and narrative (Beckett) (p. 22). These chapters’ sweeping and relentlessly critical engagement with interpretive traditions will be of interest to specialists in modernist studies and admirers of these modernist masterpieces. Together, they concretize the book’s first half, which rethinks Marxist criticism from the ground up. If Jameson gives us the slogan “always historicize,” Suther’s intervention in current debates about the value and practice of literary criticism might be captured in the slogan “always biologize!”[1] Like True Materialism itself, such a slogan is sure to estrange at first—suggesting bugbears of ideological naturalization and biological essentialism—but in the end prove very illuminating.

Constructed upon the nonfunctionalist and nonmechanistic concept of nature Hegel inherits from Aristotle, Suther’s naturalism is no literary Darwinism. Rather, he argues that Hegel’s philosophy of human freedom in nature “specifies the structure of agency presupposed by Marx’s critical theory of capitalist modernity and grounds an account of the work of art as an embodied, sensuous expression of our shared understanding of what counts as social reproduction—as flourishing for animals like us” (p. 20). True Materialism claims that Aristotle’s theory of form, radicalized within modernity by Hegel, can ground a unified, historical-materialist theory of literature as an integral aspect of the human species’ ecologically sustainable continuity.

Suther’s key move is to map the Hegelian “drive to self-knowledge and truth” onto what he provocatively claims is “its original antecedent . . . the primitive attempt of a plant or a unicellular organism to be ‘true to itself’ by fulfilling its function—by corresponding to its own internal standard” (p. 6). From this follows “Hegel’s original bio-aesthetic insight: we thus achieve organic integrity through the struggle to confer narrative unity on our lives in poetry and prose” (p. 7). Pace Jameson’s Spinozist account of criticism’s ultimate object—“History”—as an “absent cause,”[2] True Materialism elaborates and defends literature’s final cause, its Aristotelian ἔργον, or “for the sake of.” Suther calls this the “literary function, the innately social and political activity of self-narration characteristic of the rational kind of animal” (p. 88). It is the task of literary criticism to articulate how works embody this meta-norm by self-legislating in inextricably logical and sensuously intelligible ways. True Materialism thus defends the autonomy of art and literature not merely by analogizing it to the organic unity of the organism but by claiming it as an aspect of this unity. Partly constitutive of the human species’s freedom, the artwork’s freedom is disfigured by the capitalist law of value. In this light, the modernist novel is not a mere record of this disfiguration but an immanent confrontation with our biological failure, under capitalism, “to achieve the sort of collective narrative unity animals like us cannot do without” (p. 297).

True Materialism is a balancing act: at once highly specialized—sure to provoke debates among those versed in German Idealism and the modernist novel—and an invitation to literary studies as a whole to philosophically interrogate what literary works of art are and why we interpret, debate, and evaluate them. Readers unfamiliar with the “realm of shadows” that is Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) will find in the first half of True Materialism a primer on its essence geared toward literary critics—shorn of Hegel’s idiosyncratic terminology; reframed in terms of literary-theoretical matters of intention, meaning, affect, and medium-specificity; and brought to bear on social history as the necessary philosophical basis for Marx’s critique of political economy. Suther’s bracing immanent critiques of, for example, Marx’s critique of Hegel, Jameson’s “political unconscious,” Franco Moretti’s distant reading, Rita Felski and Toril Moi’s variations on postcritique, Nicholas Brown’s reappraisal of aesthetic autonomy, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “provincialization”[3] of Europe, and Paul de Man's deconstructive criticism present a powerfully argued case for why literary criticism—and the humanities more broadly—needs Hegel’s “bio-aesthetics” (p. 17).

[1] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), p. 9.

[2] Ibid., p. 35.

[3] See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2007).