Literary Institutions and Desire: Debates in Hungarian Literary Theory around 1900

Abstract

This paper proposes a new framework for analysing literary‑theoretical debates by examining programmatic writings in Hungarian cultural production around 1900. Methodologically, it combines Deleuze and Guattari’s central concept —productive desire that invests the social field immediately—with a Bourdieusian account of field dynamics. On this basis, the paper interprets statements by influential authors not as merely ideological pronouncements but as strategic attempts to channel libidinal investments toward particular definitions and institutional configurations of literature. The analysis shows that their arguments consistently invoke a vision of social machinery that would be more strongly consolidated and powerful through the modes of operation and institutional arrangements they endorse, or, conversely, risk disintegration under alternative practices and competing institutions. Pál Gyulai framed supervised cultivation as the precondition for real community; Jenő Rákosi treated market‑based freedom as the engine of national expansion; Zsolt Beöthy advocated a strict canon to preserve cultural coherence; Ignotus envisioned radical tolerance as the basis of solidarity; and the young György Lukács argued that only architectonic art—or revolution—could counteract forces threatening the very possibility of human relations. Ultimately, their efforts to attract and fix libidinal energies to divergent institutional arrangements through promises of consolidation appear to have intensified antagonisms rather than resolving them. The paper thus demonstrates how deploying desire as a resource, paradoxically, generated new forms of fragmentation within a modernizing cultural field, even as it disseminated reterritorializing definitions and practices of art that reduced its compatibility with the possibility of a libidinal revolution.